Gitcoin Passport on Ceramic: Enabling Trustworthy Beta Round Donations

Gitcoin Grants Beta Round kicked off last week, providing an opportunity for developers and creators to raise funds for their projects by connecting with potential donors. The platform has been instrumental in supporting open-source projects and fostering innovation in the Web3 ecosystem over its past grants rounds, with over $50,000,000 donated toward public goods.

Gitcoin created Passport in 2021—a reputation system integrated with Ceramic—to ensure that each vote cast during the Gitcoin Grants rounds are linked to a unique human. Since then, the use cases have expanded to help a plurality of communities better detect when a wallet is linked to a unique human. Gitcoin Passport offers critical scoring mechanisms to keep Web3 communities safe from malicious actors. So far, Gitcoin Passport has been used in conjunction with a number of other data science analyses to prevent $3M of fraud during the grants rounds.

As part of Gitcoin's efforts to decentralize and democratize the grant funding process, they are transitioning from a centralized grants platform to a decentralized protocol—Gitcoin Allo. This protocol and the accompanying dApps in Gitcoin’s Grants Stack will enable multiple grants rounds to run concurrently on-chain, empowering any community to permissionlessly coordinate its own grants program and create a more inclusive and community-driven funding ecosystem.

We're excited to see how developers leverage the decentralized Grants Stack, with tools like Gitcoin Passport, to launch and manage their own projects. Passport enables developers to verify the 'unique humanity' of a wallet that wants to access an application or project. The data collected is intended for broad interoperability for any system that wishes to issue or consume VCs to establish the unique humanity of an individual through their direct ownership of multiple accounts (Twitter, BrightID) or Web3 assets (ENS).

To determine who gets access to a developer's application, the new and improved Passport Scorer App gives users a 'Unique Humanity Score'. Developers can check out this starter video to integrate it into their application—helping to increase the trustworthiness of Web3 and onboard more users. Developers can also check out ComposeDB on Ceramic if they're just getting started building a decentralized application.

The Gitcoin Grants Beta Round runs from April 25th to May 9th, you can read more about quadratic funding and sybil resistance with Passport on Ceramic here.