On the evening of August 15, Gitcoin launched a new round of donations "Gitcoin Grants 18", which will last until August 29, and plans to provide $1 million in matching funds for all core rounds (Core Rounds) through a secondary matching mechanism.

This round of Gitcoin donations covers four core rounds, all of which are selected by community voting, including four major categories: "Web3 open source software", "Web3 community and education", "climate solutions", and "Ethereum infrastructure".

In addition, this Beta donation also provides several featured rounds such as "Web3 Social" and "Token Engineering". These rounds cover partner projects that are consistent with Gitcoin's vision, but the amount of funds matched is much less than the core rounds.

Next, I will select 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 complete equivalence has not been achieved, there are still various subtle differences in the development environment of each chain. Developers need to pay attention to these differences to prevent unexpected program failures (there have been projects on zkSync Era that accidentally locked funds because of this).

Currently, the path to finding this information is quite cumbersome. Developers may be able to consult the technical documentation of each chain, but these documents often have timeliness issues. Op-geth may be a usable code comparison website, but for developers, this comparison method is too low-level and difficult 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 the metadata, pre-deployment, opcodes, and transaction/signature types of various chains such as Ethereum Mainnet, Arbitrum, and Optimism, including ABIs and logical contract addresses pre-deployed behind the proxy.

  • Project 2: FundPG

FundPG aims to provide a more sustainable mechanism for funding public goods by allowing individuals to divest part of their on-chain yield farming proceeds through the Gitcoin matching pool and use them for public goods donations (sounds a bit like gtcETH).

In addition, FundPG is building open source analytical tools to track the on-chain flow of funds 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 divided into three main tools: sbdata, sblegos, and sbutils.

sbdata allows developers to quickly retrieve large amounts 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 a simple way to extract data using sbdata for use in sblegos.

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

Core Round: Web3 Community and Education

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

Friends who often browse Twitter may be familiar with this name. ZachXBT is an anonymous Twitter account that specializes in exposing various industry chaos. Many netizens call it the "chain detective."

ZachXBT's more well-known investigation cases include: accusing Huang Licheng of a series of frauds. The latter tried to sue ZachXBT, but eventually chose to withdraw the lawsuit; in addition, more than 6,000 ETH was stolen from JPEG'd some time ago. ZachXBT later found out that the attack might be related to Twitter user @MichaelRazum. Shortly after the investigation was released, the hacker returned the stolen money to JPEG'd.

In this donation, ZachXBT stated that all funds received will be used for equipment upgrades, future legal fees, and the value of readers' time spent.

  • Project 2: JobStash

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

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

  • Project 3: EIPsInsight

EIPsInsight is a tool for Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). It provides detailed information on all past EIPs and presents the dynamic changes of various categories of EIPs in the form of data and charts, allowing developers and users to more clearly capture and understand the upgrade trends of Ethereum.

Core Round: Climate Solutions

  • Project 1: Litter Token

Litter Token is simply a "pick up trash to earn" project. Users pick up trash and upload proof in discord, and the community will pay you LTK tokens (which can be cashed).

Currently, Litter Token has been promoted 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 each act of picking up garbage has open source photo proof.

Core Round: Ethereum Infrastructure

  • Project 1: Ethscriptions

Ethscriptions is a new protocol designed to enable 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 compute state, Ethscriptions allows users to share information and perform computations on the Ethereum mainnet at a significantly reduced cost.

Ethscriptions went live on June 17th, and as of today, over 1 million ethscriptions have been created, with transaction volume exceeding $2 million.

  • Project 2: Stereum

Stereum is a tool for installing, setting up, and managing Ethereum nodes.

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

Stereum hopes to remove barriers for users who are willing to run Ethereum nodes but lack the relevant knowledge. Stereum provides an intuitive GUI that simplifies the node installation process with just a few clicks, thereby reducing the entry barrier 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 project literally translates to “a self-adjustable dynamic optimization algorithm for token economic models.”

Currently, most token economic models are either statically coded or rely 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 hacker attacks.

The project proposes a new dynamic adjustment model, which aims to allow the token economic model to self-adjust according to specific circumstances based on two key parameters (staking rate and destruction rate).

Judging from the donation homepage, the developer of the project should be a Chinese student studying at the University of Chicago. This project is also the topic of his master's thesis. He estimates that the project will take 4-5 months, no more than 8 months at most. At that time, he will open source the thesis content and related codes on Github.

How do I make a donation?

First, before donating, everyone needs to check the status of Gitcoin Passport, an on-chain identity credential that is scored based on the address's historical activity, in order to prevent the increasing prevalence of Sybil attacks.

The Gitcoin Passport status will be reset every 90 days. Only when the status is in the latest version and the score is over 20 will the secondary matching mechanism be triggered in this round of donations. In simple terms, if you donate money, Gitcoin will also donate money at the same time (you can still donate if you don’t reach the score, but the match will not be triggered).

Next, we can make donations by clicking the "shopping cart" icon at the bottom right of each specific project in each round to add it to the "pending donation" list.

Next, it’s time to donate. 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 operations for 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, which requires additional bridging operations. However, compared to the previous Beta round (which only supports the Ethereum mainnet), the user experience has been optimized to a certain extent.

After the transaction is confirmed, the Gitcoin interface will jump and a thank you message will pop up.

The entire donation process is now complete. Thank you for your contribution to the development of the chain ecosystem.