An Introduction to Trust Bonus Trust Bonus is a grants mechanism that gives funders increased weight to their grants donations. By connecting your various internet identities to Gitcoin Passport (Facebook, Twitter, ENS, etc), you can receive up to a 150% matching bonus!
Trust Bonus is a grants mechanism that gives funders increased weight to their grants donations. By connecting your various internet identities to Gitcoin Passport (Facebook, Twitter, ENS, etc), you can receive up to a 150% matching bonus!
Your Trust Bonus score operates in conjunction with other grants funding mechanisms, such as Quadratic Funding(QF). This means that a small amount such as $10, $25, or $50 can have much further reach when your donation is enhanced by Trust Bonus, QF, and other funding mechanisms.
When donations are enhanced by funding mechanisms like these, your small donation can make all the difference in the success of a GR15 grantee’s project.
Some updates and key points to note:
In this article, we’ll give a brief summary of why Trust Bonus was created, and howto receive your Trust Bonus score, so you can ensure your GR15 donations have maximum impact!
Sybil attacks are no fun.
Essentially, they are a kind of fraud.
When bad actors game democratic systems (GR15, for instance), it compromises the validity and effectiveness of the system. For instance, we’ve seen Sybil attackers attempt to manipulate different grants mechanisms to artificially increase the matching amounts of their own projects.
Also, when Sybil attackers game grants funding mechanisms, it steals funding from honest projects with engaged communities.
Gitcoin’s Fraud and Detection Defense workstream has been working on this problem for years. Gitcoin FDD’s very own Disruption Joe wrote this excellent forum post that details how FDD is working to solve the Sybil defense problem.
The ELI5 here is that the Sybil defense problem is two-sided: proactive and reactive.
On one side, you have a Passport, of which Trust Bonus is a feature. As stated above, Passport verifies the identities of grants round participants. A certain amount of Stamps essentially guarantees that a participant has a good reputation in the Gitcoin Grants ecosystem.
Said another way, Trust Bonus was built to prevent Sybil attacks by incentivizing identity verification.
This is the proactiveside.
On the other hand, you have Sybil Account Detection, which uses machine learning to remove bad actors from grants rounds.
This is retroactive.
Since the topic of this post is about Trust Bonus, that’s all we’ll say about Sybil defense for now. Check out this Gitcoin Support article to learn more about sybil defense at Gitcoin.
Next, we’ll explain how to activate your Trust Bonus!
Let’s circle back to the topic of this article: how to get your Trust Bonus!
In GR14, we’ve verified 8 stamps as part of the Passport alpha release. In the upcoming round, this list will increase to 19 stamps in total.
In the future, we expect stamps to be issued based on the contributions of participants in the Gitcoin ecosystem.
For now, you simply need to connect your various online identities to your smart wallet, and then sync your Passport account with your public Gitcoin Grants profile.
Here are the steps to get your Trust Bonus score:
These steps may be adequate for you to complete the process of receiving your Trust Bonus Score.
But what is going to happen to your data, anon?
The Gitcoin Passport application stores all the stamps that Passport holders maintain on the Ceramic Network. When Passport holders submit their stamps to the Gitcoin Grants application, we keep a log of the submitted Passports and stamps mapped to Gitcoin users to determine the Trust Bonus scores for the round contributor.
For readers that need it, we’ve created additional sections below that go step-by-step, with screenshots.
First, you’ll need to connect your smart wallet to Passport.
The author of this post used Metamask.
At the Passport home page, click “Connect Wallet”.
Next, sign the transaction via your wallet. You will see this screen below.
Once you’ve connected your wallet, you’ll see a screen like the screenshot below.
You’ll need to go one-by-one to connect each account to Passport. You will likely need to log in to any accounts for which you are not already logged in.
The process is simple and you will be prompted by Passport and the various online platforms along the way.
When you navigate to your Gitcoin Grants account page, you’ll see a page like this:
Scroll down and you’ll find the section where you can connect your Passport account to your Gitcoin Grants page.
The third and final step is to click the button, “Submit Passport” and receive your Trust Bonus Score!
Note:Make sure to “Refresh Passport” if you add any additional stamps to your Passport.
To get 150% of 150%, simply go back to Passport and connect all of your accounts. You may need to create accounts for platforms on which you do not already have one.
Once you’ve activated your Trust Bonus, we invite you to check out the hundreds of grants in GR15.
There are grants for Climate Solutions; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Crypto Advocacy, and DeSci!
GR15 launches on September 9th, at 3pm UTC.
See you there!
– Team Gitcoin
Thank you to Alex and MathildaDV for co-creating this piece.