Hi!
I’m Ben, I lead product at Octant. Thank you all so much for your passion, and sincere efforts to improve Octant as a whole. We would not be where we are today without your inputs, feedback, and active participation.
As an update on our Proof-of-Uniqueness / Anti-Sybil work, I’d like to quickly post what I wrote yesterday on the topic and below that I will give you all a short update on what we are doing for the upcoming epoch(s)
Over the past months we have heard a lot of feedback from the Octant community relating to our use of Gitcoin Passport. Anti-sybil is extremely important to us - it protects the sanctity and validity of our epochs. We do not take this lightly. We also want you to know that we hear you, and we agree. We need a better system, one that provides a high level of anti-sybil while providing the best user experience we can. This is a complex issue, and one that will not be solved easily. We are exploring different options, consulting various anti-sybil experts, and seeking to optimize our products based on your feedback.
Unfortunately at this point in time, none of the options we have explored provide us with a high enough degree of security or provide you with an easy user experience. Many of these options are not yet mature enough to meet our needs, or yours. Others put a high $$ cost on your shoulders, and that is not something we ever want to do. For now, we will be continuing with Gitcoin Passport for Epoch 5 (potentially with a lower PoU score, snapshot vote pending), while we ramp up our research and exploration of alternative solutions. Please continue to send us feedback, ideas, and new solutions about this topic - we want our community to be involved, and moving forward we want to ensure that our design decisions to reflect your needs.
So, what else are we doing for Epoch 5 and beyond? Following our anti-sybil analysis, we will be implementing a “timeout” zone for suspected sybils in order to protect trust in our matching system, and ensure the best outcomes for all our grantees. This is not a permanent ban or blacklisting and all suspected addresses will be alerted to this status during the Allocation Flow, and prompted to dispute it. Accounts who are suspected as sybils will still be able to donate their rewards to projects, but will not be eligible for any Matching Reward donations. We will never stop wallets from donating their rewards as that negatively affects our grantees.
To be completely transparent, suspected Sybils will not be able to be removed from timeout before the allocation window for Epoch 5 ends. We know this is not the best solution, and we will be exploring a dispute window that enables suspected Sybils to be notified of their status prior to the allocation window of Epoch 6, and enable successful disputes to receive full Matching Rewards during that epoch.
For Epoch 5, we know there might be false positives. I am truly sorry if this affects you. Please know that this was my call, and I knowingly chose to balance the sanctity & trust of matching donations over the risk of false positives affecting users, in order to best benefit the Epoch 5 Grantees. I will re-iterate that we do not want these false positives to be punished moving forward. If you are affected by this, please reach out to me - I would love to talk to you and understand your pain points with this system, and how we can work together to make it better.
Again, thank you so much for your active participation here on the governance forum, and continued Public Goods support through Octant.
Best,
Ben