Red Team vs Blue Team
Quadratic Funding is amazing in how it amplifies the contributions of small donors, but it also comes with some open research problems to solve: namely how to prevent sybil attacks and collusion attacks. To learn more about Sybil and Collusion, please watch these short videos.
We have partnered with BlockScience and the Token Engineering Commons to create an open community-data-review process so we can begin solving these problems to deter adversarial behaviour at scale on Gitcoin Grants.
While Gitcoin Grants is known primarily as a public goods funding mechanism, there is another way of looking at it. Grants Rounds are battlegrounds for pushing forward research in adversarial behaviour in digital identity-based funding mechanisms. If you look at it from a certain angle, Grants Rounds are giant red team / blue team exercises for battle-testing Quadratic Funding in the real world, with real value on the line.
Our approach is iterative. Every round our goal is to build blue team’s fortitude by identifying and categorizing attacks from the red team, so that moving forward our community has defense against them. That way we can scale up the positive impact of QF.
Grants Round 9 saw a marked uptick in attacks, both in number as well as approach — which makes sense given more participation and more funds on the line. There is simply greater and greater incentive to try to game QF as the matching pool grows. So in GR10, we adjusted our approach to defending QF, which we’ll discuss in more detail below.
We view grant round integrity as a public good in itself, and so articulating what we’ve witnessed is an important priority for us.
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