Earlier this week, clr.fund round 9 went live for contributions!

There are over 40 public goods projects registered for the round already, but it’s not too late to sign up. Registrations close July 5th.

Dive in and contribute to your favourite public goods at clr.fund!

What now?

If you would like to support your favourite public goods, head over to clr.fund make your contributions before the round closes.

If you're a project building public goods for the Ethereum ecosystem, register for the round!

If you would like to contribute funds to the matching pool, reach out to us on Telegram or Discord.

And finally, if you want help build the future of public goods funding at clr.fund, reach out on our Discord, forum, Telegram, or Twitter, or make a PR on GitHub.

Wow, time flies!

It’s been more than a year since the last canonical clr.fund round, in the meantime we’ve been heads down building along with helping to run several other rounds using the clrf.und stack, one for the LatAm community around Devcon in Colombia last year, one for the Ethereum Staking community, and a handful of other smaller rounds for other communities.

But, it’s about time we got back to our roots and started running canonical clr.fund rounds again to support the Ethereum ecosystem’s public goods.

So with that in mind, we’re excited to announce that clr.fund round 9 will go live on June 26th with a ~$50k matching pool! 🎉

Recipient registration is open now at clr.fund/#/join. Get your registrations in ASAP to ensure that your project is live before the round begins.

Who is eligible?

This round is open to any and all Ethereum public goods, as defined in the clr.fund constitution.
Additionally, projects must be:

• 🤲 Free and open source
  Your project must be free to use and any code associated with your project should be available to anyone under an open source license.
• 👯‍♀️ Not clones
  If you've forked code, you must provide additional, unique value to the ecosystem.
• 🙋‍♀️ Legitimate
  The project you submit must be yours or you must have permission from the project owner.
• 👺 Not scams
  Obviously, your project must not put anyone's funds or information at risk.
• 🛡️ Humanbound
  As a compliance measure, each project's receiving address must hold a humanbound SBT.
  

What are the dates?

Registration is live right now and will close July 5th.
The round will run June 26th to July 17th.

Matching pool contributions are open any time between now and when the funds are distributed (shortly after July 17th).

What now?

If you're a project building public goods for the Ethereum ecosystem, register for the round!

If you would like to contribute funds to the matching pool, reach out to us on Telegram or Discord.

If you'd like to support your favourite public goods, make sure they are registered and then sit tight and wait for the round to start.

And finally, if you want help build the future of public goods funding at clr.fund, reach out on our Discord, forum, Telegram, or Twitter, or make a PR on GitHub.

Clr.fund is proud to announce a funding round to help boost important projects that contribute towards funding and further benefiting Public Goods.  This funding round utilizes Constrained Liberal Radicalism, (CLR), often referred to as Quadratic Funding (QF), to allocate a large pool of funds ($250,000!) to relevant projects. QF ensures the amount of funds matched to a project is not just a function of dollars allocated, but also the number of unique individuals that allocate to a given project. This means that you can make a significant impact through participating with even just one DAI!

QF utilizes MACI to avoid collusion and vote buying -- a critical technology in the path to move more high-value coordination mechanisms on-chain.

⏳Here are some important timelines to take note of⌛:

September 22 - October 7: Sign ups are open for projects to apply for grants
October 11-21: Contributors' vote
October 31: Funds allocated accordingly to projects based on results

Project applicants, here is how you can submit your application to be a part of this QF round:

First, confirm that you meet the following criteria:
🇨🇴🇦🇷Project focused on, and benefits LatAm public goods
🤲 Free and open source
Your project must be free to use and any code associated with your project should be available to anyone under an open source license.
👯‍♀️No clones
If you've forked code, you must provide additional, unique value to the ecosystem.
🙋‍♀Project ownership
The project you submit must be yours or you must have permission from the project owner. It must be submitted by someone in a leadership role.
👺No scams or projects with tokens
Obviously, your project must not put anyone's funds or information at risk.
🤑Must have raised under $1M in funding
😎 Eth savvy (will be able to off ramp)

After you've confirmed that your project meets the criteria above, ensure you have sufficient Arbitrum ETH (AETH) in your wallet. Otherwise, add the Arbitrum network to your wallet. After which, bridge your ETH / Dai to AETH here.

Once done, head over to the join page and click "Add project." You'd have to fill out forms that ask for more information about your project.

With the forms finished, you can finish your submission. A deposit of 0.001 AETH would be required for this submission.

Your AETH will be returned once your application has been either accepted or denied. Note that metadata pointing to all your project information (but not contact information) will be stored publicly on-chain.

💰Claim your funds💰

After a clr.fund round is finished, it's simple to claim your project's share of the funding. Return to your project's page: you will see a "claim funds" button if your project received contributions during the round. Submit the claim transaction to receive your funds.

Contributors (aka legends😎), here's how you can vote for projects:

Step 1: Ensure you have downloaded BrightID and have been connected.
Step 2: Connect your BrightID to your wallet here and get registered.
Step 3: Ensure you have sufficient Arbitrum ETH (AETH) in your wallet. Otherwise, add the Arbitrum network to your wallet. After which, bridge your ETH / Dai to AETH here.
Step 4: Vote away for your favourite project(s)! Voting runs from October 11-21.

The results would be announced on October 24, and funds would be allocated on October 31.

Let's come together in building the future of Ethereum 🤝🚀

Recently, in the lead-up to the much anticipated Ethereum merge, Ethstaker and Clrfund coordinated the largest Clrfund round to-date. 4,704 legends contributed a total of 64.57K Dai to allocate a 375.7K Dai matching pool, for a total of 440.3K Dai allocated to public goods for the Ethereum staking ecosystem.

For the uninitiated, Quadratic Funding (often abbreviated to QF and also know as Capital-Constrained Liberal Radicalism or CLR) is a mechanism for allocating a pool of funds (for example, a large philanthropic contribution to some category of public goods) to a group of recipients. Why use QF over more traditional grant giving mechanisms? The answer, in short, is because it’s better -- it’s more efficient and more impactful -- for everyone involved. Quadratic Funding is a grant-giving flywheel that is the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community.

You can learn more about the mechanism in the original CLR paper, at WTFisQF.com, or the Clrfund app. For this post, the important part to understand is that QF weighs matching pool allocations by both the amount of funds contributed to each recipient (plutocracy) along with the number of contributors to each recipient (democracy). QF is an elegant compromise between plutocracy and democracy, that lets contributors signal both their preferences and the relative strengths of their preferences.

It is in the relative weighting between these two (plutocracy and democracy) that a Clrfund contributor noticed an error in clrfund's implementation of QF. The learning process that went into implementing a fix was quite illuminating, so we thought it was worth writing up a blog post to share what we learned. It's worth noting that the error was identified before the ETHStaker x Clrfund round was finalized, but we ultimately decided to proceed with the allocation as computed by the incorrect implementation due to the uncertainty of if and when the implementation could be fixed and because of the coordination challenges inherent in cancelling a Clrfund round.

Quadratic Funding is derived from Quadratic Voting (QV), whereby one's vote weight towards a given vote option is the square root of the number of "voice credits" one allocates to that option. For example, four voice credits equals two votes, nine voice credits equals three votes, sixteen voice credits equals four votes, and so on and so forth.  What is used for voice credits differs between QV implementations, in some cases each voter is granted an equal amount of voice credits to allocate however they like between a set of options, while in others voters may be granted different amounts of voice credits based on some criteria. One such example of the latter is using money for voice credits. In which case, QV exhibits the quality mentioned above, striking a happy balance between plutocracy and democracy.

Clrfund's original implementation allocated funds to recipients applying the ratio of quadratic votes for a given recipient to the matching pool, to determine the amount of matching funds to be received on top of the direct contributions to that recipient, or (total votes for recipient) / (total votes to all recipients)* (total tokens in the matching poo) + (total tokens contributed to recipient). This seemed to be the intuitive way to apply QV to the allocation of the matching pool (our naive understanding of how QF worked). With this implementation, the top recipient received a total of 40,387.69 Dai, while the bottom received 4,381.11 Dai.

However, as we discovered, the results turn out to be quite different from QF.

While similar, it turns out that QF is not simply QV ratios applied to a matching pool. The original CLR paper describes Liberal Radicalism (LR) as a mechanism by which one uses individual contributions towards public goods as quadratic votes towards subsidizing those public goods. Individuals contribute the public goods they value and LR suggests how much additional funding should be given to those public goods, presumably via inflation (or some other potentially limitless pool of funding). The allocation for a given recipient is the square of the sum of quadratic votes for that recipient, or (total votes for recipient)^2.

Using the ETHStaker x Clrfund round as an example, 5,782.06 Dai was contributed to the top recipient, from which the LR mechanism suggested an allocation of 10,991,404.63 Dai. A little over budget, to say the least. The bottom recipient received 576.37 Dai in contributions, from which LR suggested an allocation of 132,864.81 Dai.

Capital-Constrained Liberal Radicalism (CLR, otherwise known as QF) scales the LR mechanism to account for the reality that matching pools will almost always be finite. It does so by introducing "alpha", a value between zero and one, to scale back the LR allocation while ensuring recipients always receive at least the amount that was directly contributed to them, or `alpha * (total votes for recipient)^2 + (1 - alpha) * (total tokens contributed to recipient)`. Alpha should be set at the value which results in the entire budget for the round being consumed (matching pool plus direct contributions).

Again using the ETHStaker x Clrfund round as an example, 5,782.05 Dai was contributed to the top recipient, resulting in a total allocation of 56,136.50 Dai. While 576.37 Dai was contributed to the lowest recipient, resulting in a total allocation of 1,182.73 Dai.

In other words, under the correct QF implementation, the top recipients would have received significantly more than they did under our naive implementation, while the bottom recipients would have received significantly less.

Our knee-jerk reaction to this was to assume that the more top-heavy distribution under QF (as compared to our original more naive implementation) meant that QF was more plutocratic that what we had originally implemented. The projects that received larger sums of contributions would receive a relatively larger portion of the matching pool, sounds plutocratic, right? This led us to start questioning whether we would in-fact prefer to keep our incorrect, albeit apparently less plutocratic, implementation. As it turns out, though, this assumption was incorrect. Here's why.

Thanks to MACI (the Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) that Clrfund is built on, we have limited insight into how contributors allocated their funds. We can see how much a contributor contributed to the round as a whole, but not how much they allocated to each recipient, and we can see how many votes each recipient received, along with how much each recipient received in direct contributions.

Looking at the final tally for the ETHStaker x Clrfund round, we see that the top recipient received roughly ten times more votes and Dai contributions, compared to the bottom recipient. In the original Clrfund implementation, the top recipient, similarly, received roughly ten times the allocation of the bottom recipient. While with correctly implemented QF, the top recipient would have received roughly forty-seven times the allocation of the bottom recipient.

At first glance, it appears that QF would have disproportionately rewarded the recipients that received a greater amount of Dai in contributions. It turns out that this is not the case.

Remember, we can't know who or how many contributors contributed to a given recipient. But given the votes received and the amount spent on a given recipient, we can make rough guesses at it. It turns out that for 5,782 Dai in contributions to have resulted in 1,048,399 votes in MACI, roughly 2,000 contributors must have contributed roughly 3 Dai each to the top recipient. While for 576 Dai to have resulted in 115,267 votes, roughly 225 contributors must have contributed roughly 3 Dai each to the bottom recipient.

For those wondering about the math in this table, the Dai values presented must be multiplied by 10^5 to reach the same level of precision as the MACI tally output. To arrive at the estimated number of contributors, x, we find a value for x where votes received ≈ ( √(( contributions * 10^5 ) / x )) * x.

According to this very rough estimation, roughly ten times as many people contributed a total of roughly ten times as much Dai to the top recipient compared to the bottom recipient. So a purely democratic allocation might give the top recipient roughly ten times as much as the bottom recipient, while a purely plutocratic allocation might give the top recipient ten times as much as the bottom recipient. The allocation suggested by Liberal Radicalism essentially splits the difference, suggesting an allocation where the top recipient would receive roughly one hundred times the bottom recipient. Roughly equal weight given to both individual preference (the recipients one contributes to) and strength of preference (the amount one contributes to each recipient).

But, as we mentioned earlier, the allocations suggested by LR go way over budget. CLR/QF attempts to solve for this by scaling the total budget in a way that both:

1. ensures each recipient gets at least the amount that was directly contributed to them
2. minimally distorts the shape of the distribution suggested by LR
   

All this is to say that the top heavy distribution suggested by CLR/QF, that we erroneously attributed to plutocracy's influence, was more than likely a result of an overwhelming number of contributors making relatively small contributions to the top projects, compared to relatively few contributors making larger contributions to the bottom few recipients.

The unfortunate reality of this is that all previous Clrfund rounds have been more plutocratic than intended, disproportionately weighting the amount contributed compared to the amount of contributors. However, the good news is that we've updated our smart contracts to correctly implement CLR/QF. 🎉

TL;DR - Backed by the Ethereum Foundation, clr.fund and ETHStaker have teamed up to run a Quadratic Funding (QF) round with a 350,000 DAI matching pool dedicated to funding open source public goods for the Ethereum staking ecosystem. Recipient applications are open now, so if you’d like to join the round, head over to qf.ethstaker.cc to register. If you know a project that should receive support, tell them to join!

We are excited to announce that, with the support of the Ethereum Foundation, we have teamed up with ETHStaker to run a Quadratic Funding round with a 350,000 DAI matching pool, dedicated to funding open source public goods for the Ethereum staking ecosystem.

This round marks a huge milestone for clr.fund, being by far the largest initial matching pool for a Quadratic Funding round run using clr.fund protocol, along with being a critical supporting step toward one of Ethereum’s largest milestones to date; the merge. This will also be our first round to happen on L2 - the Staking Round will run on Arbitrum with contributions opening on May 6th.

With this round, we hope to give some of the public goods infrastructure for the Ethereum staking ecosystem the additional and critical support they need as we all collectively push toward the merge and beyond.

Wait… What is Quadratic Funding?

Clr.fund is an implementation of Quadratic Funding (QF), also called CLR (Capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism). In short, QF allocates a pool of matching funds to a group of eligible recipients using a novel version of Quadratic Voting (QV) to decide the allocation, wherein individuals contribute funds directly to projects they value.This fundraiser rewards projects with the most unique demand, not just those with the wealthiest backers.

QF is the mathematically optimal way to allocate funds to public goods and finds a happy medium between 1-dollar-1-vote and 1-person-1-vote, where contributors are able to express the strength of their preference – where a passionate minority can overcome a dispassionate majority – but a passionate majority should always have the strongest influence.

Learn more about Quadratic Funding at qf.ethstaker.cc/#/about/quadratic-funding.

Why this round?

One of the ways the Ethereum Foundation has historically supported important parts of the ecosystem, like the staking community, is through rounds of grants. The Staking Round we announce today represents an experiment in sharing decision-making over ecosystem support within the Ethereum community, as well as the public goods we all rely on. Through the course of this round we do expect surprises (this will be the largest clr.fund round to date, after all) but we are also excited and proud to participate.

How can I get involved?

If you run an open source public good staking project - whether that’s a technical tool, documentation or guide resources, or you work hard to build a community that supports staking, you can join to receive funding! These are the criteria your project must meet to join the round:

• Related to Ethereum staking or the consensus layer. Your project must support staking on Ethereum.
• Free and open source. Your project must be free to use and any code associated with your project should be available to anyone under an open source license.
• Project ownership. The project you submit must be yours or you must have permission from the project owner.
• Satisfy KYC. Projects eligible to join the round will need to provide basic KYC information - ID and proof of address for individuals, plus corporate documents for corporations - to participate in the round
• No scams. Your project must not put anyone’s funds or personal information at risk.

Due to technical constraints, there will be a limit of 124 projects that can join the round, and it’s first-come first-served! So don’t wait to get involved. You can find more information on how to join the round or to get started at https://qf.ethstaker.cc/#/join.

If you use open source public goods for staking or you want a say in how funds are distributed - you should contribute to those projects! The more individuals who donate to a project, the larger the share of the matching pool they can claim at the end of the round! So give generously, and get your friends involved.

You’ll need to make your contribution in DAI, and the round will take place on Arbitrum. You can find out how to participate as a contributor here: https://qf.ethstaker.cc/#/about/how-it-works/contributors

You’ll also need to be verified as an individual (and not a bot!) by BrightID. You can get started through the round at qf.ethstaker.cc/#/verify.

What dates should I know about?

• The round is open for projects to join now!
• May 16th is the last day to register projects for the round.
• May 6th – Our amazing partners at EthStaker will be hosting a call to kickoff this round – mark your calendars!
• May 6th through May 24th – Projects will be able to receive contributions.

We are incredibly excited to support the staking ecosystem and Ethereum’s bright future. The clr.fund team will see you there.

If you’ve got any questions about this or future rounds, if you’ve found a bug in our code, or you’re simply looking for other ways to get involved, hit us up in our Discord.

Where the mountains of Central California meet the rolling sand dunes of the Pacific, ETHland is a growing city founded by the Web3 community; an experiment in decentralized living. Incorporated in 2030, the town's settlers brought their families and friends, raising money to build their own houses on the beach. The beginnings saw great peace, as there was little to argue over; farmable land was plentiful, resources were bountiful, and collaboration and cooperation flowed.

By 2040, the city had grown to 500, bringing with it a growing set of problems; land became scarce. And with scarcity of land came scarcity of tolerance. Abraham complained that Vivian’s house blocked his view of the sea. Naphtali’s pet Fox would roam through Rosa’s backyard, attacking her chickens. Ron’s igloo was broken into by his nemesis Gustavo, who stole his dog sled; even though the whole town saw Gustavo roaming the dunes on the sled the next morning, there was no system in place to get it back.

So the residents of the city decided to elect a council of five representatives to oversee Ethland’s operations. Of course, Ethland isn’t a traditional city; it’s full of innovators eager to try out new forms of governance. Instead of collecting taxes, the residents can donate their money towards public goods; instead of taxpayers, Ethland has tax-donors.

Around that time, the new city began to attract a lot of press. Big donors like the World Cities Foundation and UN Habitat were eager to contribute money to this experiment in urban city living. But with big money came big problems. The council was too busy to read proposals; they realized they would have to hire an entire other team, which would cost hundreds of ETH in city resources. What’s more, ETHland’s population worried that the council would be subject to bias. The local paper leaked a discussion by the council suggesting they allocate most of the funding to laser drone robots to clean the roof of City Hall, and laughing at a proposal to use the money to provide counseling to the city’s growing population of mentally ill manatees. The residents were outraged.

ETHland’s issues speak to a larger problem in funding public goods. Providing counseling services to mentally ill manatees may not be in the interest of large donor organizations, who prefer to donate to projects that make headlines; the city councilmembers might think that roof-cleaning drone robots will portray ETHland as an innovative smart city, while neglecting the real problems the area faces; after all, the manatees don’t donate taxes so why should they receive those services. But the majority of Ethland’s residents strongly believe in the importance of looking after wildlife, seeing it as vital to building a sustainable city. And then there’s also the free rider problem; public goods which are non-excludable will receive less funding by government authorities, even if their benefits extend to the broader population. Without quadratic funding, large donors get the final say, and human bias bows to the powerful.

This parable highlights the underlying ethos behind clr.fund, and the power of quadratic funding more generally. In quadratic funding, donations from UN Habitat and the World Cities Foundation would be put into a matching pool, and paired with the proposals which receive the most small donations, creating a flywheel which amplifies the power of small donors. Designed by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and E. Glen Wey, and inspired by principles of Liberal Radicalism, Quadratic funding applies principles from quadratic voting to charitable donations. In the case of the Ethereum network, clr.Fund ensures that donations towards the Ethereum network match the interests of the Ethereum community.

The foundational paper of Quadratic Funding states that the model “as applied to urban public funding decisions, could allow communities…to fund projects that would struggle to get funding under centralized systems”. Of course, such a system is not without its flaws; questions remain about potential collusion and the system relies on a large funding pool. But when it comes to public governance and providing centralized services to decentralized networks, projects like clr.fund are applying this powerful model with far-reaching applications. The mentally-ill manatees can rest assured.

Round Review

Calling this round a rollercoaster is almost an understatement. So much went down this round that we hardly know where to start.

Here goes...

In the lead up to Round 8, we set a new record for the number of participants in a trusted setup ceremony at 1,183. Narrowly edging out Tornado Cash’s previous record of 1,114.

Within a few hours of launching round 8, the clr.fund app was unusable because hundreds of you crazy kids contributing caused us to almost immediately hit the rate limits on our RPC node providers. Luckily, the folks from pocket.network and the xDai team hooked us up with access to some RPC nodes with much higher capacity, so the app sailed smoothly from there.

We smashed our previous record for the number of contributors in the first day, ultimately finishing the round with 6,137 contributors, casting ~50k votes, contributing 33,562.00 wxDai, to allocate a matching pool of 33,594.45 wxDai. New records on literally every metric.

However, after the round concluded, we ran into a comedy of issues.

Generating the Proofs

We started running our first attempts to generate proofs on a modest consumer laptop, desktop, and bare metal server in parallel (yay for redundancy). For some reason the server kept giving us a core dump error. After numerous fresh distro install and several days of collectively banging our heads on the walls, we realized that Iden3’s ZKP libraries make use some intel assembly language, and while the server uses intel chips, it is a few generations behind and evidently does not have the full instruction set that the libraries use.

Generating proofs of message processing...
Progress: 1 / 6216; batch index: 49720
Illegal instruction (core dumped)

Nevertheless, it was running fine on the laptop and desktop, with one little caveat. After letting it run for a few hours, we estimated it was going to take more than 110 days to generate the proofs.

The first bottleneck we identified was that the MACI scripts make use of a single processor thread. We couldn’t change this for this round, but we could find the absolute fastest single-thread VPS we could get our hands on (an Amazon Z1d, just in case you were wondering). This gave us a modest improvement, but we were still over 100 days.

Generating proofs of message processing...
[2021-11-01 16:43:58] 
[2021-11-01 16:43:58] Progress: 1 / 6216; batch index: 49720
[2021-11-01 17:08:54] Up to loadJson 0.01805599999999999913
[2021-11-01 17:08:54] Items : 21
[2021-11-01 17:08:54] Total 0.40599899999999999878
[2021-11-01 17:08:56] Loading circuit from /mnt/nvme1n1p1/maci/circuits/params/batchUst32.r1cs...
[2021-11-01 17:08:58] Proving...
[2021-11-01 17:09:16] Saved /mnt/nvme1n1p1/maci/circuits/params/1635786534498.proof.json and /mnt/nvme1n1p1/maci/circuits/params/1635786534498.publicSignals.json
[2021-11-01 17:09:17] Proof is correct
[2021-11-01 17:09:17] 
[2021-11-01 17:09:17] Progress: 2 / 6216; batch index: 49712

~25 minutes per batch
~57.6 batches per day
~107.92 days to generate proofs for this round

Then Wei Jie came to our rescue with a series of on-the-fly incremental improvements to MACI’s proving scripts. First reducing the proving time to about thirty days; still long, but much more manageable. And then later improving again down to about three days.

Three days later, proofs in-hand (and backed up multiple times) we were ready to prove on chain. But the rollercoaster doesn’t stop there.

(Not) Proving On-Chain

After generating the proofs, the next step is to prove them on-chain. The CLRFund smart contracts then use those proofs to validate how much each recipient should receive from the round.

With the proofs finally generated, we were expecting smooth sailing from here on out. Then this happened.

Submitting proofs of message processing...
Progress: 1/6216
(node:13838) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Error: transaction failed

You can see the transaction returns ERROR_INVALID_BATCH_UST_PROOF = "E02"

After another few days of collectively banging our heads against the wall, and then a really productive debugging session, we realized that there was an error in the deployment of our MACI instance due to a change in the tooling we used to deploy the round.

The MACI repo contains Poseidon.sol, with two libraries, PoseidonT3 and PoseidonT6, both without any implementation. The Poseidon libraries are part of the Circom library, a suite of tooling for zero knowledge proofs.

When MACI is compiled using their compileSol script, these two empty libraries are cleverly replaced with their real counterparts.

Unintentionally, the tooling we used to deploy this round, a frontend we’ve been working on to make it easier for anyone to spin up their own instance of CLRFund, deployed the empty implementations of the Poseidon libraries.

Normally, each time a contributor casts their votes, a new leaf is added to a merkle tree and the message root is updated.

But in our case, because of our empty Poseidon libraries, the function to update the state root failed silently and the state root remained unchanged for the entire round.

The mismatch between this empty state root and the roots expected in our proofs meant that we were unable to prove the results on chain.

So what does this mean?

Round 8 Cancelled

After exhausting all other options, we have ultimately had to cancel round 8.

All contributions to recipients (33,562.00 wxDai) can be claimed by the contributors (claim yours here).

Unfortunately, roughly half of the 33,594.45 wxDai matching pool is stuck in the funding round factory contract forever. We’ll cover that out of our reserves, and the total that should have been allocated to recipients from the matching pool will be manually distributed to recipient according to the generated results of the round, even though we were unable to prove the results on-chain.

While this is not the outcome we were hoping for in round 8, it definitely validates our choice to scale CLRFund slowly, since we’re dealing with a combination of several brand new technologies. We’ve learned a lot this round, made improvements to our node infrastructure, the MACI contracts, the proving scripts, our deployment processes, the CLRFund contracts, and as a result feel much more comfortable scaling up future rounds.

Thanks to some incredible code contributions from the Ethereum.org team, our next rounds will also feature a totally revamped application and will be deployed to Arbitrum. We plan to run one last round this year and then follow up with a much larger round early next year.

More on that soon.

Pool Party NFTs

In the meantime, as with past rounds, everyone who contributed to a project in Round 8 round will receive a POAP. Claim yours now!

We've also been working on a super secret mission with the awesome crew over at Props Supply to create Public Goods Pool Party themed POAPs and NFTs for our matching pool contributors.

Any address that contributed at least 1 wxDai to the matching pool will receive a Pool Noodle POAP. You can claim yours now and you can see all of the eligible addresses with this Dune query.

The coveted Golden Pool Noodle NFT will be given to one lucky matching pool contributor via a raffle. Each 1 wxDai contributed to the matching pool earned the contributor one ticket. You can see the list of tickets on this Dune query or this CSV on IPFS.

To select the winner, we used the first (leftmost) two bytes of the random number generated by drand.love round 1,444,000 (announced in advance on Twitter) as input to the following JS function.

Math.floor((drand_randomness / 0xffff) * 8491) + 1

The first two bytes of randomness for round 1,444,000 were 0x8251.

So, The golden pool noodle goes to... drum roll... ticket number 4323. Congratulations bykur.eth.

Lastly, the top 4 contributors to the matching pool have each received a unique inflatable pool floaty NFT, inspired by some of Ethereum’s spirit animals.

1. The Golden Unicorn - 0xigor.eth - 10k xwDai
2. The Flipping Dolphin - bitpush.eth - 200 wxDai
3. Doge - 0xd63d28282eeeace4d4d2c67ebb798f3a2ca782b1 - 200 wxDai
4. Moloch - 0xa6a0111f3401b9ede35aca7734436e26549a9a55 - 166 wxDai

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in and contributed to this round.

Can’t wait to dive into round 9 in a few weeks.

Join Us!

Want to help build or contribute to future CLRFund rounds? You can find us on Twitter, Discord, GitHub, our forum, and Telegram.

I’m often asked why Quadratic Funding (QF)? What makes it special? Why use QF over more traditional grant giving mechanisms / organisations? The answer, in short, is because it’s better -- it’s more efficient and more impactful -- for everyone involved. Quadratic Funding is a grant-giving flywheel, where:

1. The desired outcome, well allocated funding to public goods, is achieved more efficiently than the alternatives.
2. Each participant incentivises further participation from their counterparts; where my contribution makes your contribution worth more, and vice versa.

In typical grant giving scenarios there are three primary participants: cause contributors, recipient contributors, and recipients.

Cause contributors are people and organisations who provide financial support to a cause or category of recipients to address a problem area that they want to solve. This could be entities like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Ethereum Foundation, or the Cancer Research Foundation, solving for poverty, Ethereum public goods, and cancer research, respectively. Typically these people and organisations have a large amount of capital to deploy across a broad selection of potential recipients in hopes of impacting their mandate. A significant part of their function is filtering potential recipients, determining their eligibility and determining if and how much funding to be grant recipients, and in most cases this process is carried out by some grants committee or board. Essentially, a group of people who collectively decide who to fund and how much they get.

Recipient contributors are people and organisations who provide financial support to specific recipients that they value. This could be individuals like you or me that make small contributions to recipients we care about, or organisations that contribute to specific charities, projects, etc. for various reasons.

Recipients are people and organisations that receive grant funding and/or charitable contributions in order to advance their mission. This could include organisations like the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Rotki, or the ASPCA.

Let’s start by thinking about this from the point of view of a cause contributor. Say a large philanthropic donor who wants to contribute to cancer research. In order to effectively deploy their capital, they need to take in and review grant applications / eligible projects, decide which projects they would like to fund, and how to split the available funding between the chosen recipients. This can be an incredibly high-bandwidth and time-consuming task, usually involving a grant committee or board to make the decision.

In QF, by contrast, the cause contributor replaces the grants committee with the QF mechanism. Rather than having a grants committee decide how to allocate funds between recipients, the funds are contributed to a QF matching pool and allocated based on inputs from recipient contributors; people contributing to the projects they value (learn more about the specifics in this recent Gitcoin post). So the first major benefit for cause contributors is the elimination of overhead for deciding how to allocate a given pool of funds between eligible recipients. This is significant for any grant giving effort, but could be huge amounts of time, effort, and money saved in the case of larger grant giving organisations.

The second major benefit is that their contribution to the matching pool incentivises the recipient contributors. Because of the matching pool, someone wishing to contribute to a recipient will always have more impact on the recipient if they contribute to them via a QF round rather than directly. More concretely, let’s say you want to contribute $10 to a charity you love. If you give them $10 directly, they receive $10. But if you give them $10 via a QF round, they receive your $10 contribution plus some share of the matching pool. So the cause contributor’s capital is more efficient because it directly incentivises additional contributions and the recipient contributor's capital is more efficient because it helps to direct the matching pool. Knowing this, the recipient is incentivised to encourage their contributors to donate via the matching pool, rather than directly, because it results in more funding.

This is where the QF flywheel kicks into gear. The more people that contribute to projects they value via a QF round, the better the mechanism becomes at allocating the matching pool. The better the round is at allocating funding, the more cause contributors will trust it to allocate their funds. The more funds that are entrusted to the matching pool, the greater the additional impact for people contributing to the projects they value, so the more they contribute. The more they contribute, the greater the impact of the contributions to the matching pool and the better the mechanism becomes at allocating the capital… and on and on the flywheel spins.

In short, QF is more efficient and more impactful for everyone involved. Once the flywheel starts, everyone is mutually incentivised to keep it spinning.

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Want to help build or contribute to clr.fund’s flywheel? You can find us on Twitter, Discord, GitHub, our forum, and Telegram.

Sup nerds!

It’s been a few months since our PB setting round seven, but round eight is finally here, and with some big changes too!

Head straight over to clr.fund to experience the changes for yourself, or keep reading to learn about what we’ve been up to.

A few weeks back we, along with ~1,100 of our closest friends, ran a record setting trusted setup round for the new x32 MACI circuits. Which means that we can say goodbye to the 512 contributor cap from the previous rounds. From here on out we can accommodate several orders of magnitude more users. There’s practically no way you can hit the new cap, so climb aboard!

We’ve also doubled the matching pool again, up to 16,000 wxDai. Obviously is still small-fry stuff compared to the frankly ludicrous amount of money being thrown around in the DeFi ecosystem, but we’re sticking to our guns on scaling up slowly (at least until we get the contracts audited). We do have plans to ramp things up pretty aggressively over the next quarter as we expand the team. We’ll be aiming for at least one similar scale test on Arbitrum shortly after round eight ends, assuming all goes well we’ll look to start scaling the matching pool for the subsequent rounds.

We’d also like to give a huge shoutout to the GitcoinDAO community for their very generous grant of 40k GTC to fund ongoing development of CLRFund. This is a truly amazing gesture that really exemplifies the cooperative and collaborative qualities of the Ethereum ecosystem. Gitcoin and CLRFund have often been misconstrued as competitors, but when the ultimate goal of both is to fund public goods, the benefits of collaboration are definitely greater than competition. With this capital infusion, CLRFund now joins the ranks of just about every other web3 project and is hiring. Specifically, we’re looking to fill these key roles:

1. Product designer
2. Product / project manager
3. Solidity developer / devops
4. Frontend / subgraph developer

If you want to help build the future of public goods funding, reach out on our Discord, forum, or Telegram.

That’s all for this update.

Now head over to clr.fund and support your favourite Ethereum public goods.

In this week's Spotlight series we chat with Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of Rotki, an open source portfolio tracker, accounting and analytics tool that protects your privacy.

Background: how did you get into web3?

I first started working in crypto in Mid 2014 working for the foundation before the Ethereum launch. Contributed to various projects, mostly the Solidity language and the C++ Ethereum client. Then moved on to work with slockit and the DAO. Was involved in the whitehat cleanup afterwards. Subsequently moved to work in L2, the Raiden network and at the same time started rotki as a side-project. The side project became bigger and bigger until I decided to focus on it full time.

Tell us about your project ...What was the inspiration behind Rotki?

Taxes. Plain and simple. The reason I started rotki was to be able to do my taxes in Germany. All other solutions at the time (and unfortunately also today) were centralized web apps that need you to submit all your financial data to them. Sending your most sensitive financial data to a centralized website is against the web3 ethos, against decentralization, against privacy and its outright dangerous.

The need for a real solution is how Rotki was born.

Why does portfolio management matter so much to the ecosystem?

Not just portfolio management, but also accounting matter. The crypto system, especially with DeFi has gotten complicated. Really, really complicated. Multiple exchanges, multiple accounts, multiple l2, multiple blockchains, multiple protocols.

Keeping track of what you have and where and how much profit or loss you have accrued is paramount yet it's really difficult. People have used rotki and thanked us after finding out about airdrops they could claim that they had no idea about.

Having clarity about your holdings and your portfolio performance gives you confidence in how to deal with authorities (tax reporting) and also confidence in planning for the future. No need to worry about whether you approach is profitable or not, or how much you need to keep for taxes. We help you answer those questions.

What are the core alternatives to Rotki?

There is nothing like Rotki out there. No application that is local-first keeping all data in your system and thus protecting your privacy. No application that is doing the same thing we do and is open source, thus providing transparency, auditability and the ability to run the app even if the creators disappear.

All other applications are the same. Centralized, closed source web applications. Putting your data at risk, they can be hacked, leaked or sold to the highest bidder.

They are closed source because they don't believe in openness and collaboration that fosters this space and has made web3 what it is today. Additionally they are closed source since they believe this is their way of capturing value. But once they are gone and their projects run out of money, users won't be able to access them anymore. All the carefully prepared data and reports you have there will be gone in an instant. While with rotki even if we are gone you will always be able to use the last available version of rotki. And perhaps someone else can also come and pick it up and continue work on it.

From portfolio tracking tools: zerion, zapper, debank

From accounting tools: cointracking.io, koinly, accointing, tokentax

There is more ... way too many to count. Especially for accounting. All essentially a copy of the other. Centralized web app tools.

What are your thoughts about the state of the Ethereum ecosystem as it stands in 2021?

It's way too complicated 😵

I remember thinking back in 2017 that there is so many things popping up that it's hard to follow. Now ... oh boy. We have reached escape velocity. There is too much information for any single person to be able to consume.

I am generally excited for the future. I am really into and excited about DeFi and can't wait to see how the different L2s will end up working so that we can finally scale Ethereum outside of its current limitations.

Also looking forward to see how ETH2 will evolve and when the merge will happen.

In short, I'm excited.

How do you really feel about the state of DeFi?

Optimistic. I think it's a revolution in the way finance works. We are really creating a new and improved financial system here. It's amazing to see it unfold.

Naturally there is lots of dangers, in the form of exploits or protocols claiming to be DeFi while in truth they are totally centralized. But in the end this is all part of the process and will be overcome.

What triggered you to become a clr round recipient ?

We are a very active and loved gitcoin grant and Auryn pushed us to also participate in clr. So in short I think it's Auryn the person that triggered us.

Why do you think clr.fund represents such an opportunity in the ETH ecosystem ?

Much like Gitcoin I think it's an amazing way to fund open source projects. True open source software is hard to fund and I think ETH and generally crypto need to find ways to fund and incentivize the building of dapps that follow the ethos of the field and are open source, local and decentralized.

How do you feel about the future of quadratic voting? - What use cases beyond the current ETH ecosystem fundraising do you see QF being super helpful for?

I am really focused on funding open source so personally this is the use case I am most interested in. It's a very hard and as of yet unsolved problem so I think we still have a lot to improve there.

Another use case, but one I have no experience with, would probably be charity as it may be an improvement over registered charity organization which I hear (again — not an expert) waste a lot of their funding in administrative expenses.

If you could change one thing about the space right now, what would it be? aka What keeps you up at night about the Ethereum world?

The hypocrisy. There is a lot of hypocrisy around the crypto ecosystem and especially Ethereum. People larping about decentralization and opensource yet building or investing in closed sourced centralized applications.

If you talk the talk, then you should also walk the walk.

Thanks so much for chatting with us Lefteris 🐦

tl;dr: Clr.fund has completed a trusted setup with a record breaking number of participants. Here’s how you can verify your contribution.

Overview

We just concluded our first trusted setup ceremony for the brand new MACI circuits that will let us scale the number of contributors by several orders of magnitude!

Some background: MACI allows clr.fund to make collusion among participants difficult, while retaining censorship resistance and correct-execution benefits. MACI requires a “trusted setup,” like a cryptographic launch ceremony, because it relies on SNARKs (a type of zero knowledge proof).

The setup is performed in such a way that, to fake a proof, an attacker must compromise every single participant of the ceremony. Therefore, the security goes up with the number of participants. Our trusted setup is done in 2 steps:

1. The first step is called Perpetual Powers of Tau. It’s an ongoing effort led by Wei Jie of the Ethereum Foundation that can be reused by everyone regardless of their circuits. We took the output of Iden3’s selection process based on the 54th Perpetual Powers of Tau contribution.
2. The second step is called Phase 2 and is circuit-specific, so has to be done separately for each different SNARK. This second step is what we are talking about in this post. Participation was very simple, you could just visit our website, press a button and wait until it's done. The ceremony ran from Sep-2-2021 to Sep-14-2021. The process was based on the Hermez trusted setup and used Geoff Lamperd’s setup-mpc-ui tools.

Stats

The trusted setup was an overwhelming success with a total of 1,183 individual contributors which, to our knowledge, is a new record for trusted setups. 🎉

The chart below shows you stats about the ceremony for MACI’s two circuits. The blue bars show the number of contributors who attempted to contribute and the orange bars show the number of contributors who succeeded in contributing (values on the left hand side). As you can see, the number of contributions was heavily clustered around 2pm Sept 3rd; this is when we started blasting Tweeting about it. What an incredible response from our community!

Unsuccessful participants mostly interrupted their contributions due to long waiting times. The yellow bars show waiting times based on participants waiting in the queue with values on the right hand side. As you can see, the large number of participants caused significant projected waiting times of 3,000+ minutes.

Outputs and Verification

If you participated successfully, we encourage you to head to this website to find your contribution files and instructions on how to verify them.

Here are the final output files of the ceremony:

• The final zkey file, qvt32_final.zkey, can be found here
• The verification key file, qvt32_verification_key.json, can be found here
• The final zkey key file, batchUst32_final.zkey, can be found here
• The verification key file, batchUst32_verification_key.json, can be found here
  

Finalisation logs have been timestamped with this transaction (scroll down to input data and view output as UTF-8).

After all contributions were done, we sealed the ceremony using a random number generated by https://drand.love. This  'randomness' was an output of drand’s round 1,204,000 as announced in advance on the ceremony landing page. Round 1,204,000 happened on Monday 13 Sep 2021, 16:37 UTC.

Want to do your own trusted setup?

If you want to run your own trusted setup, or if you are generally excited about ZKPs, reach out to the folks at Privacy and Scaling Solutions who have put together a super convenient UI for running trusted setup ceremonies.

What next?

We're itching to use the ceremony output in the next round of clr.fund. The new circuits will allow for several orders of magnitude more participants so stay tuned for announcements. If you have any questions, you can find us on Discord, forum, and Telegram.

This week we dive in with another round 7 recipient, Vasa, founder of Vyper, the fun, interactive way to learn Vyper lang. So fun that you can literally learn Vyper by building a Pokémon game.

Why does Vyper matter to the ecosystem?

It's an alternative programming language for EVM-based applications which has security as its design goal.It practically makes it hard to devs to write un-secure code due to its design choices.

Background: how did you get into web3?

I started programming in 2017 and was exploring different fields like Android/Web dev, ML/AI, etc. While exploring I came across the blockchain. I ignored it at first, but soon after that my friends started investing in Bitcoin and other assets so I got into it too. Soon I realized that this (blockchain) is something groundbreaking so I started diving more. I left my college for a few semesters to start a startup around blockchains and AI. Meanwhile, I also worked on a lot of side-projects (I always have some side-projects) mainly around Protocol Labs projects (IPFS, IPLD, Libp2p, Multiformats, Filecoin, etc).

I came back to college in mid-2019 for a break, still working on a few ideas (Dappkit, Simpleaswater). In mid-2020, I started exploring Defi while working on Dappkit (firebase for web3) to understand what kind of apps people want to build on web3.

I soon got interested in Defi so much so that I kept dappkit on standby and started learning more about the Defi space. I was exploring Curve finance when I realized that there is no resource for Vyper as we have Cryptozombies for solidity. So, I started working on vyper.fun and from there I met Vyper maintainers, doggie (from yearn), Ben (from Curve). This is how I got into the core groups of Defi projects and started working with many of them.

Tell us about your project ...What was the inspiration behind it?

Mainly while I was exploring different Defi projects, I came across Curve which is written in Vyper. So, I was looking for any good resources on Vyper but the only thing that I found was the language documentation. While it was good enough for an experienced developer, it's not an ideal resource for someone who is just starting as a developer. I wanted something fun as Cryptozombies, but for Vyper. So, as I learned more about Vyper from the documentation and the Vyper maintainers, I started building a fun resource so that it's easier for other people to learn Vyper.

Why does Vyper matter so much to the ecosystem?

What I really like about Vyper is that it focuses on security and treats it as a core design goal. Hence, the language has features that support that design goal, which makes it harder for the devs to write insecure code in Vyper. You can find more about Vyper's principles and goals here.

What are the core competitors/alternatives to Vyper?

There are 2 more languages that you could use to write contracts: Solidity and Fe.

What security factors are you most concerned about?

As I have been working in the Defi space for more than 6 months now, there are a lot of hacks that we see today. Most of them are caused due to mistakes that could not be mitigated by using a specific language. The composability of Defi makes it much harder to keep your projects safe, as even if your project is safe from any attacks, other projects that your project uses (or any project that uses your project) can get exploited, which might end up damaging your project too. So, the best we can do is to learn from mistakes that others have made, try to re-use tried and tested code/practices, and follow a "do not trust, verify" approach.

What triggered you to become a clr round recipient ?

CLR fund is an interesting way to fund your open-source work in a cheap way (as it's on xDai). I have been using Gitcoin for a while and clr.fund provided similar functionalities on xDai.

What key use cases beyond the current ETH ecosystem fundraising do you see Quadratic Funding being super helpful for?

I like how Quadratic voting is a very neat mechanism. It not only captures your opinion about a specific topic but also how strongly you feel about it. If you take an example from Vitalik's "Quadratic Payments: A Primer", where your company is conducting a vote to decide the location of the new office. Let’s suppose there are 2 options for the new location. If we conduct a vote where each voter just votes which location he/she wants to be the location for the new office, then it might miss some important details about how far is the new office location from where you live (which will decide how strongly you feel about an option). Hence, using quadratic voting (and related mechanisms like quadratic funding) might bring out important details in the final verdict that are usually missed using traditional voting mechanisms.

What would you change about the Ethereum world right now?

TBH, I wouldn’t change anything about the ecosystem, even if there are many things that keep me awake at night (I like having some big challenges and I love the journey to overcome those challenges).

In saying that, a few things that keep me awake at night are building capital efficient financial infrastructures, improving UX for users (I’m eagerly waiting for EIP-3074 to go live), and just working on different interesting ideas/public-goods.

TYSM for joining us in conversation, Vasa!

This week we dive in with Eyal from DeepDAO, that offers DAO insights into the decentralized world. DeepDAO lists, ranks and analyzes top DAOs across multiple metrics and has Governance + People feeds in the current beta.

How did you get into crypto?

A friend told me he's about to sell his apartment for Bitcoin and I said no! Are you crazy? What is this Bitcoin anyway? A few weeks and hours of reading and watching youtube videos later I was so deep down the rabbit hole I didn't see my friends anymore. That was 2017 and it was clear to me that I was going to find a way to get involved.

Tell us about your project ...What was the inspiration behind DeepDAO?

Later in 2017 I ran into the DAOstack and Aragon white papers and fell in love. I believe, and I still do, that DAOs have a potential to solve fundamental problems in how people coordinate. I joined a DAO, Genesis DAO by DAOstack and started hanging out in the chat rooms, and voting on proposals. As I became more and more involved I wanted to see a DAO explorer, that will show trends and analytics in how people participate in proposing, getting rewards, voting, and creating voting coalitions with each other. When such an explorer wasn't being built by others I decided to build one myself. As you do in DAOs I created a proposal and asked for a little bit of money, the community approved and a few weeks later I created the first version of DeepDAO.

Why do DAO analytics matter so much to the ecosystem?

One of the most important aspects of governance is transparency. I think this is an area in which blockchain DAOs can solve a real problem. Our core mission in DeepDAO is to show the raw data, and analyze it so that people can understand what's going on inside the DAO. In other words, let's teach ourselves to figure things out based on data, not hype.

On DeepDAO you can see a list of many of the top DAOs in the ecosystem, and dig deeper into their proposals, members, and their trends; on our Governance Feed you see all the proposals and discussions in the ecosystem, and a list of the top active communities and organizations, and on our People dashboard you get a leaderboard of the top active people in governance. Overall I believe we provide the fullest picture of the current governance ecosystem, which is managing in access of 10 Billion USD.

What are the alternatives to DeepDAO?

If we're talking about the Ethereum ecosystem, there are a couple of DAO directories with lists of DAOs. Products like Tally or Boardroom provide lists of projects, and voting capabilities into some of the DAO platforms. The Substrate /  Polkadot ecosystem has fully developed governance products. There's also NEAR Sputnik DAOs directory and other networks that have their own.

However, at DeepDAO we take a broad view of the ecosystem and consider the multichain, multi implementation world. Our north star is to serve the growth of the DAO ecosystem so we're focused on expanding data coverage to as wide as we possibly can. This is sometimes difficult as the ecosystem is developing at such breakneck speed.

What excites you most about the DAO ecosystem and the future of DAOs?

DAOs are one of the most fundamental innovations in human coordination. Since the establishment of firms, humanity was able to lower the coordination cost and collaborate to produce impactful outcomes. With DAOs, the coordination cost will reduce multifold further and I believe it will in turn enable a borderless economy.

Within the next decade DAOs will transform the way society is run, assets are owned and capital is allocated. I believe this could lead to a vastly enhanced technological future and improve the lives of many people.

What triggered you to become a clr round recipient ?

We feel really grateful to have been a recipient of a Clr round as DeepDAO shares the ethos of supporting public goods. We love community collaborations and we certainly hope the DAO research that we contributed serves the community.

Why do you think clr.fund represents such an opportunity in the ETH ecosystem?

Clr fund has been supporting projects that have unique value from deep research perspective. While the Ethereum ecosystem is thriving, it's important to remember it's still a young ecosystem that needs effective tools to support public goods as we have a long way to go if we'd like to see the decentralized space serving societies at a massive scale. DeepDAO is committed to contribute to this ethos with reliable data.

How do you feel about the future of quadratic funding?

Algorithmic "wisdom of the crowd" applied to funding is very interesting. QF as it stands to day is a beautiful innovation and will likely be further developed, I'm looking forward to see QF innovation integrated more into DAO tooling.

What key use cases beyond the current ETH ecosystem fundraising do you see Quadratic funding being helpful for?

QF can be used in the broader public goods context by legacy governments, municipalities, the UN and charities.

If you could change one thing about the space right now, what would it be? aka what keeps you up at night about the Ethereum world?

We need to talk more about well-being. The historic bull market we're all experiencing is providing great access to capital, and while we're building the tools to take it to even greater heights we should emphasize and support people, and communities in ways that the centralized world may support us.

TYSM for joining us in conversation, Eyal!

This week we dive in with Petr from Upala, a proof of personhood system that provides human uniqueness score.

How did you get into web3?

I read an article about Ethereum in May 2016 and instantly started to build my first project - Decentralized Cabbage Farm (decentralized advertising space)

Tell us about Upala ...What was the inspiration behind it?

My personal motivation is peace. I want to give people an instrument to unite and oppose bad government decisions (including war declaration).

Why does SSI matter so much?

As far as I can see in the media SSI is mostly about storing existing credentials and controlling access to those credentials. This is already awesome. We need this. But there's even more important aspect of identity - the issuer. We don't have many decentralized identity issuers right now. Governments hold monopolies on identity issuing. This causes massive trouble of course. Some governments suppress their citizens with ID, others are just not capable of even creating an identity system. 1B people in the world don't have any ID's now. Meaning they cannot access basic services - healthcare, education, banking - they cannot protect their property. Technically they cannot even own anything.

What's the relationship between Identity and privacy?

This is a tough one. In perfect world those are totally different things. So ideally they should have no relationship unless "the user" decides to "disclose". This is what we are aiming for.

What are the core competitors/alternatives to Upala?

Upala has a very unique approach : price of forgery. We don't have our own human verification methods. Upala is a protocol. It builds incentives for human verification methods to provide their "staked" human uniqueness data to DApps. Thus Upala may be viewed as a quality control and incentives layer for other identity systems. So we have only partners. Among very desirable ones are BrightID, Proof Of Humanity, Idena, Gitcoin.

What are your thoughts about the state of the Ethereum ecosystem in 20212?

To... the... mooooon!!!!.... Just kidding. What can I say? It evolves fast! But in its early days. Most people still view it as a mean of speculation. They don't understand most of the amazing stuff going on here. I usually explain flash-loans to my friends to show how far we went. But that's of course just one example. I think the best blockchain use cases are still to come. Hope to see more non-DeFi, non-NFT projects soon. The room for innovation is vast.

What triggered you to become a clr round recipient ? (a cold plunge)

Clr fund allows to earn some funds - this is already cool! Apart from that curiosity. I knew clr fund is using MACI - a very interesting concept for me. And I got attracted by the first clr fund logo (the shaving man) very much!

Why does Clr Fund need Upala? ELI5

In quadratic funding systems, bots have very clear and quantifiable incentives to attack the system. The better Sybil-resistance Clr Fund has, the more effective it's funds distribution gets.

How do you feel about the future of quadratic voting?

It depends on Sybil-resistance heavily too. We have a long way ahead.

What use cases beyond the current ETH ecosystem fundraising do you see QF being super helpful for?

Probably it could be useful outside crypto. It looks to me, that Sybil-resistance is not solved yet. So we could move into "real world" and rely on existing IDs. Then we could fund some "real world" causes (and onboard many people along the way).

If you could change one thing about the space right now, what would it be?

Pretty happy with how things are!


TYSM for joining us in conversation, Petr!

At the heart of clr.fund is a magic black box called MACI (Minimal Anti Collusion Infrastructure). The wizards that built MACI tell us that it uses some fancy math called ZK-SNARKs to ensure that contributions are secret.

ZK-SNARK applications rely on a number of different circuits and each requires a trusted setup which ensures that no one is able to fake proofs and compromise the privacy of clr.fund contributors (this would be bad because it would enable bribery and collusion). The setup is performed in such a way that, to fake a proof, an attacker must compromise every single participant of the ceremony. So the more people that contribute to the ceremony, the greater the security of the system.

To that end, Geof Lamperd and the folks at Privacy and Scaling Solutions have put together a super simple UI for running trusted setup ceremonies, which means that anyone with a computer and a github account can contribute to making projects like clr.fund more secure.

We just launched our first trusted setup ceremony for the brand new MACI circuits that will let us scale the number of contributors in clr.fund by several orders of magnitude. Remember how we hit the cap of 512 contributors last round? That won’t happen again.

If you’d like to dive on in and contribute to the security of clr.fund (and any other projects using these MACI circuits), head over to ceremony.clr.fund to add some of your very own small batch, home grown, artisanal entropy to our trusted setup.

If you have any questions, you can find us on Discord, forum, and Telegram.