Prior to the launch of the decentralized "Alpha" Grant Round, the Gitcoin team was experimenting with a tool called "Trust Bonus". This tool gave users the ability to multiply their donations by verifying their identity. However, it was built using an inaccurate aggregate model with no true data-science to back it up. Users would connect their email or social media accounts using Auth0 and “the system” would quadratically match a percentage of the donation (50% to 150%) the more accounts users verified.

I worked closely with the data team to conduct a cross-analysis to identify patterns, trends, and correlations between different verification variables, and understand how each verification affected matching results and funds distributed. The most alarming insight was the number of fake/shell accounts, revealing a massive security risk an ease to manipulate QF results and thus, the distribution of capital. Any bad actor could create fake projects, fake emails, and fake social media accounts to ask for donations. Some of the more elaborate schemes we uncovered utilized bots and click farms to multiply the donations made by their own sybil networks.

My focus shifted to evolve Trust Bonus, by transforming it into a decentralized attestations aggregator web-app that enabled a plurality of sybil prevention mechanisms.

The Gitcoin Passport allowed users to verify Stamps which consisted of KYC, asset ownership, purchase statements, reputation badges, community votes, financial status, credentials, or provenance. We then experimented with different ways to display progress and incentivize user to verify more Stamps through gamification. We landed on the idea of a unique humanity score which could be used to allow passing users into a specific DAO or community.

This gamified reframing brought massive engagement with thousands of new and existing users creating Passports to collect Stamps to fund their favorite projects.