Gitcoin Grants 18 Giving Guide (With Ten Featured Items)

On the evening of August 15th, Gitcoin launched a new round of donations “Gitcoin Grants 18”. This round of donations will last until August 29th, and plans to use the second matching mechanism for all core rounds (Core Rounds). $1 million matching funding provided.

This round of Gitcoin donations covers a total of four core rounds, all of which are voted by the community, including “Web3 Open Source Software”, “Web3 Community and Education”, “Climate Solutions”, “Ethereum Fundamentals” Facilities" and other four categories.

In addition, this Beta round donation also provides a number of Featured Rounds such as “Web3 Social” and “Token Engineering”. These rounds cover partner projects that are consistent with Gitcoin’s vision, but all The matching funds are much smaller than the core rounds.

Next, I will screen some projects that I personally like in this round, and take you through the entire donation process.

Core Round: Web3 Open Source Software

• Project 1: EVM Diff

The number of EVM-compatible chains is growing, but since they are not completely equivalent, there are still various subtle differences in the development environments of each chain, and developers need to pay attention to these differences to prevent accidental program failures (zkSync Era There have been projects on the Internet that accidentally locked funds).

At present, the path to find this information is quite cumbersome. Developers may consult the technical documents of each chain, but these documents often have timeliness issues. op-geth may be an available code comparison website, but for developers In terms of this comparison method is too low-level, it is not easy to understand.

EVM Diff hopes to solve this current development pain point by providing an easy-to-read way to compare the differences in execution level specifications of various EVM-compatible chains. According to the disclosure on the donation interface, EVM Diff plans to cover metadata, pre-deployment, opcodes, transaction/signature types, etc. of Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism and other chains, including ABIs and logical contract addresses pre-deployed behind the proxy .

• Project 2: FundPG

FundPG aims to provide a more sustainable public goods funding mechanism. This project allows individuals to use the Gitcoin matching pool to separate part of the income from their on-chain income farming and use it for public goods donations (sounds a bit like gtcETH) .

In addition to this, FundPG is building open-source analytics tools to track the on-chain flow of funds used for public goods.

• Project 3: Sybil-scorer

Sybil-scorer is an open source Python toolkit that provides developers with a series of tools for address analysis to help project parties find and filter Sybil addresses.

Sybil-scorer is mainly divided into three main tools: sbdata, sblegos and sbutils.

sbdata allows developers to quickly retrieve a large amount of data from the flipside API, including address transaction data; sblegos is the core of Sybil-scorer, providing a series of analysis logic for Sybil behavior monitoring, including transaction similarity analysis, etc.; sbutils provides An easy way to use sbdata to extract data for use in sblegos.

In the future, Sybil-scorer will focus on adding new analysis logic and planning to incorporate temporal features into the algorithm. In addition, Sybil-scorer will also study the use of tags in the flipside API to filter similar wallet addresses in the future.

Core Round: Web3 Community and Education

• Project 1: ZachXBT (probably shouldn’t be called a project)

Friends who often use Twitter may not be unfamiliar with this name. ZachXBT is an anonymous Twitter account dedicated to revealing all kinds of chaos in the industry. Many netizens call it “the detective on the chain”.

The well-known investigation cases of ZachXBT include: accusing Huang Licheng of a series of fraudulent acts, the latter tried to sue ZachXBT, but finally chose to withdraw the lawsuit voluntarily; The attack, which may have been linked to Twitter user @MichaelRazum, returned the stolen money to JPEG’d shortly after the investigation was published.

In this donation, ZachXBT stated that all funds received will be used for equipment upgrades, future legal fees, and what readers feel is worth their time.

• Project 2: JobStash

JobStash is a data aggregation platform for recruitment information, providing job recruitment information for major organizations, protocols, and open source ecosystems.

JobStash currently indexes over 200 organizations and tracks data for thousands of jobs. JobStash is completely independent and has no charging mechanism. For security reasons, the platform temporarily only aggregates job opportunities provided by organizations with a certain reputation in the community, so as to avoid potential malicious fraud.

• Project 3: EIPsInsight

EIPsInsight is a tool for Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), which provides detailed information on all past EIPs, and presents the dynamic changes of various types of EIPs in the form of data and charts, allowing developers and Users can more clearly capture and understand the upgrade trend of Ethereum.

Core Round: Climate Solutions

• Project 1: Litter Token

Litter Token is simply a “garbage to Earn” project. Users pick up trash and upload proofs in discord, and the community will pay you LTK tokens (which can be cashed out).

At present, Litter Token has been extended to 10 countries including Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Colombia, the United States, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Community members have collected 76,000 pieces of garbage, and every act of picking up garbage is Have open source image proofs.

Core Round: Ethereum Infrastructure

• Project 1: Ethions

Ethions is a new protocol designed to allow ordinary users to perform decentralized computing at a reasonable price, by bypassing the storage and execution of all smart contracts, and applying deterministic protocol rules to “simple” Ethereum calldata to calculate state, Ethions allows users to share information and perform computations on the Ethereum mainnet at a dramatically reduced cost.

Ethions was launched on June 17th, and as of today, more than 1 million ethions have been created, with a transaction volume of more than 2 million US dollars.

• Project 2: Stereum

Stereum is an Ethereum node installation, setup and management tool.

Setting up an Ethereum node is technically demanding and requires a lot of research and preparation. Faced with this challenge, many people have chosen to use various staking services. This choice is understandable, but it inevitably exacerbates the centralization of Ethereum.

Stereum hopes to remove barriers for users who are willing to run an Ethereum node but lack the relevant knowledge. Stereum It provides an intuitive GUI that simplifies the node installation process with just a few clicks, thereby reducing the barrier to entry and complexity. Stereum hopes to attract more users to deploy nodes and promote the decentralization of Ethereum.

Featured Round: Token Engineering

• Project 1: Dynamic Optimization Algorithm for Self-regulating Tokenomics

The literal translation of the project is “a self-adjustable token economic model dynamic optimization algorithm”.

Currently, the design of most token economic models is either statically coded or depends on DAO governance for adjustments. This approach ensures decentralization, but the lack of a real-time response mechanism makes the model vulnerable to external shocks, such as large price fluctuations and hacking attacks.

This project proposes a brand-new dynamic adjustment model, which aims to allow the token economic model to self-adjust according to specific conditions based on two key parameters (pledge rate and burn rate).

Judging from the donation homepage, the developer of this project should be a Chinese student studying at the University of Chicago. This project is also the topic of his master’s thesis. It is estimated that the project will take 4-5 months, at most More than 8 months, at that time, it will open source the content of the paper and related code on Github.

How to make a donation?

First of all, before donating, you need to check the status of Gitcoin Passport, which is an on-chain identity certificate that will be scored based on the historical activity of the address, and its purpose is to prevent the increasing prevalence of Sybil attacks.

The status of Gitcoin Passport will be reset every 90 days. Only when the status is in the latest version and the score exceeds 20 will the second matching mechanism be triggered in this round of donations—in simple terms, if you donate a sum of money, Gitcoin will also be synchronized Donate a sum (you can donate if you don’t reach the score, but you can’t trigger a match).

Next, we can make donations. By clicking the “shopping cart” icon at the bottom right of each specific item in each round, it can be added to the ranks of “to be donated”.

Next, it’s time to make money. We can choose to donate in DAI or ETH, and the amount can be customized. After confirming the specific amount, click Submit your donation on the right to submit the transaction. I personally recommend that you choose ETH for donation, because using DAI will have an additional authorization transaction, which requires more gas fees.

Most of the operations of this round of Gitcoin donations can be completed on the OP Mainnet, but the core round of “Ethereum Infrastructure” needs to be completed on the PGN network, requiring additional bridging operations, but compared to the previous Beta round (only supports Ethereum Fangzhu.com) still optimizes the user experience to a certain extent.

After the transaction is confirmed, the Gitcoin interface will jump, and a word of thanks pops up.

So far the whole donation process is over, thank you for your contribution to the ecological development of the chain.