How FDD provides value to GitcoinDAO
How does FDD provide value to Gitcoin?
The primary concern of the FDD workstream is defending Gitcoin. The quadratic funding mechanism is susceptible to sybil attack. Defending Gitcoin Grants from sybil attack is our primary focus.
Defense
During GR9, the fraud tax was 2.1%. We brought this number down to 0.61% for GR11. This means the measurable amount our fraud detection & defense efforts saved the community is around $55,000.
This doesn’t include the amount that was deterred, the attackers who gave up, and the attacks made no longer possible by our increase of the cost of attack, minimum bound on donations, and better screening of grants to weed out bad actors.
Unmitigated it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think the amount FDD saves for the community is most likely in the range of $100k to $250k or per quarter (napkin math). And that number grows every round.
Additionally, through the grant approval and disputes processes, we now have community oversight of all content moderation decisions. This manifests itself in the community being able to establish norms like Tornado Cash and MatrixETF being flagged for having raised funding and voluntarily giving up their match eligibility.
This simple act returned over $50,000 to the community.
The FDD Defense budget for Q3 was $150,000 meaning that the direct mandate functions most likely provided more value to the community that they cost.
DAO Support
Many of the DAO Support functions fall into one of two categories.
The first are functions needed for multiple streams being made available to others. A couple examples include the DevOps needed for Anti-Sybil microservices and the squad payment management needed by all structured streams.
The second are created in response to urgent issues needing immediate attention. User Support and Onboarding both fall into this category.
These functions are difficult to put a number on as they are the types of functions which are only noticed when they aren’t working. As a DAO, the need to efficiently and effectively connect contributors and facilitate their participation is one of our highest priorities. During Q4, we will work to find metrics which will help showcase the health of these streams.
What does FDD care about?
Our Vision
Our vision is a world where resources are perfectly allocated across society to provide the happiest & healthiest future possible for our species. A world where open and permissionless systems allow for anyone to show what they are worth rather than being told. Where individuals can exit a system that no longer matches their values without sacrificing their wellbeing. A world where the martyrs no longer exist because our collective and individual interests are aligned. We call this the Quadratic Lands.
GitcoinDAO is the vessel that will take us to the Quadratic Lands. Until we arrive, GitcoinDAO will be the catalyst allowing anyone to transform their time or capital into impact.
A DAO is truly a DAO when its members are fully autonomous in a sustainable economic system.
Autonomy is about the freedom of individuals to approach chaos, where learning and discovery happen. A sustainable social-economic system is one where the majority of the interactions are positive-sum.
Fully autonomous means:
- Governance via curation
- Curation via mutual consent
- Consent signaled by stake
- Stake weighted governance
Norms over policy. Roles over rules. Education or exit over enforcement
The problem we face in society arises when one person or group's autonomy is extractive from another’s. In the past, society has created policies and rules which are difficult to enforce. Many of these social systems depend on a monopoly on violence (nation-states) or a monopoly on power (fiat currency). These systems have become corrupt, pathological, and parasitic.
FDD will progressively decentralize to ensure these problems are solved internally in the stream, however, our primary goal is to ensure that the entire DAO gets off to a healthy start. The irony is that the coordination tools needed to fully decentralize the FDD workstream are exactly what GitcoinDAO is building.
Our decision to progressively decentralize is not made lightly. We face an existential problem. If someone were to game these new systems before they prove their utility, the system might lose its legitimacy before ever having a chance to reach a critical mass.
We must protect the legitimacy of the systems and tools which Gitcoin provides. To do this we must come from a place of credible neutrality. And to continue doing it, we must find a sustainable model.
Our Mission
Our mission is to increase the pace at which we move humanity towards a paradigm of collaboration.
GitcoinDAO is the ship taking us to the Quadratic Lands. Gitcoin is all of us willing to hold a stake in the idea that there is a better way to allocate resources. GTC is that stake.
The north star for FDD is to advance GitcoinDAO to a point where extracting value is always less profitable than collaborating. Where the concept of a martyr no longer exists because our heroes are rewarded, not cut down. We call this the Quadratic Lands.
Participants will only hold a stake in this endeavor if they believe it is legitimate.
The GitcoinDAO represents an opportunity for the community to own the decisions on the subjective policy and enforcement which guide the Gitcoin Grants mechanism. As Gitcoin builds more coordination tools including the DAO itself, the FDD will work to defend its legitimacy.
The mission of the FDD is to defend Gitcoin from all threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability. This includes Gitcoin Grants, GitcoinDAO, and any future decentralized products Gitcoin creates. A decentralized product can be regulated, but only in a decentralized way, and with the consent of its participants.
Our Values
Mission-driven Metrics
GitcoinDAO will have a purpose until we have a world where resources are allocated as efficiently as possible to promote the health, happiness, and survival of our species.
When an entity no longer serves a purpose it should dissipate rather than extracting resources simply to exist. The perverse incentives that created this cancerous model of societal organization came from an era where one worked at the same job for most of their lives. We now have multiple paradigm shifts within a generation.
Modularity / Composability
To solve this problem, we must consider the barriers which currently exist.
- High cost to employer and employee of switching jobs
- Training costs
- Job search time
- Administrative costs
- Time learning tools & software
- Ability to stay current
- Education while working is difficult
- Pace of change
- Evaluation of employees is slow-paced
A modular & composable framework for signaling, training, processing, and compensating work is needed to keep up with today’s pace.
Open & Permissionless Systems
The fundamental invention of open blockchains is their ability to mitigate asymmetric power accrual in a consensus-based system within the limitations of physics. A message sent around the world on the internet can only move as fast as the speed of light. This creates a situation where those with more resources can get closer to the “information hub” to gain an asymmetric advantage.
One example of this is the price of real estate high-frequency trading markets. This high price of geographically optimal real-estate institutionalized asymmetric information access to the ultra-wealthy.
Another is Google’s spanner system which is used to synchronize data centers. When you collaborate on docs, it can determine who typed which word first. This system incentivizes using closed source code and data systems, thus creating asymmetric access to information.
Open & permissionless systems are critical in our efforts to provide equal access to opportunity for all of humanity.
Progressive Decentralization
Understanding the role decentralization plays is a part of Gitcoin’s history. While we are currently paying down centralization debt, we realize that this would not have been possible without taking it one step at a time.
Centralization and decentralization are tools we can use to help us achieve our mission.
Mutual Consent
GitcoinDAO participants should have the ability to ask to participate in any workstream. The workstream should have the ability to determine yes or no. Two yes answers are mutual consent.
The current “lead” based system gives the yes or no power to a trusted individual. This is being replaced by collective self-governance where participation in streams & squads will be based on a yes or no derived from a governance mechanism.
Autonomy
Our goal is to give sovereign participation rights to all contributors. They will either choose to participate as equals, or choose not to participate. By ensuring that the majority of interactions are positive sum, more contributors will mean more resources to bring on even more contributors.
The ability of a community to give equal access or to recognize individual, class, and other hardships will provide opportunities for both sides of society's economic minds to be at peace.
Autonomy combined with modular design will allow incentivized communism & compassionate capitalism to compete via consensual participation.
Our Strategy
The FDD workstream sees the greatest threat to the DAO being the possibility of exhausting it’s resources before finding enough positive-sum interaction models to achieve sustainability.
Likewise, this is the greatest threat to mankind.
To defend Gitcoin, FDD will need to be sustainable itself. Our chosen model of progressive decentralization of the workstream will allow for the optimal balance between executing mission-critical functions while finding the sustainability mechanisms needed long term.
We are using a “walled-garden” model of progressive decentralization allowing creative chaos in the squads of FDD. This experimentation will be fertile ground for research and discovery.
We will maximize governance experimentation by offering our squads autonomy in how to make collective decisions such as how to split funds between participants and how to accept a new contributor and even the software used to facilitate these decisions.
By maximizing experimentation without subjecting the entire FDD to the potential failure of any single governance mechanism, which might have detrimental second or third-order effects, we will also maximize the opportunity for successful governance experiments to thrive.
The walled garden strategy also allows us to allocate resources to mission-critical functions we have today, while setting reinforcement learning goals to successful models of self-governance. Unsupervised learning provided by squad’s self-governance autonomy will create a larger variety of experiments with high-value potential insights to find these successful models.