[Phase 3] HIP-72: Grant to fund a PoH airdrop solution

DAO
1 
HIP: 72
title: Grant to fund a PoH airdrop solution
author: green
status: Phase-3
created: 2022-06-29
conflicts with: None
languages: EN

Simple summary

Launch a grant to build an app to ease the process of airdropping to humans registered in PoH.

Abstract

Airdrops are the currently most used feature of PoH and it would be in the general interest of the DAO to provide an easy way for philanthropists to airdrop tokens to its humans. This HIP sets up a grant to incentivize building such a tool.

Motivation

On making KIP-51, we came to realization that there is no such thing as a tool to airdrop to humans registered in PoH. Since the most interested party in the existence of such a tool is PoH DAO, and not Kleros DAO, it makes sense for PoH DAO to be the one that spends the resources needed for it to exist.

Other DAOs that are interested in performing sybil resistant airdrops could use it as an easy default allocation. Then, in the future we might see projects such as Optimism liberally drop tokens to PoH.

Specification

Upon completion of the PoH airdrop tool, send 3 ETH from the PoH treasury to the grantee, forer.eth. If PoH treasury does not contain enough funds but they are deposited in vaults generating yield (such as the UBI Burner), then this amount will be withdrawn from the vaults and then sent to forer.eth.

The tool will work in the following way:

Contract

  • Anyone can create an airdrop. They pass a token, an amount for the whole airdrop, the merkle root, a JSON file uploaded to ipfs with info to allow for redemptions.

Subgraph

  • Keeps track of airdrops and redemptions. Allows fetching information quickly from the frontend.

Frontend

  • If the user connects with a wallet with pending airdrops, they’ll be notified and will be able to trigger the transactions needed to withdraw them.
  • It provides a way for donors to create an airdrop to humans easily. Donors can create airdrops just by going through a form, and sending ERC20 tokens to the contract. The frontend will then fetch all eligible recipients, create a merkle tree, upload it to IPFS and then finally create the airdrop in the contract.

Completion

Completion (the criteria for delivering the grant) is defined as:

  • supporting these features described above.
  • open source project.
  • deploying it publicly, at the latest, 60 days after this HIP is accepted.
  • accessible through a frontend, that will be accessible through a domain. (either web2 or ENS are fine).
  • will require low, or no maintenance in regards to the features described above.
  • contains, in the frontend, a mention of proof of humanity that reads “Commissioned by Proof of Humanity”.

Rationale

Why is there no maintenance requirement?

Originally, maintenance was part of the grant, and the bill of costs was greater. But there were a few edge cases around it:

  • If everything is delivered at once upon completion, you’re trusting on the grantee to deliver on the maintenance.
  • If the grant is delivered after the maintenance period, then the grantee will probably be less interested.

Also, the grant amount would also had been higher. So, instead, the project will just be built with low or no-maintenance requirements.

Why not support NFTs

It would increase the complexity severely to handle both ERC20 and NFT in the same tool. Merkle airdrop tools benefit from fungibility. To reduce the time needed to ship the tool, reducing features was chosen as the approach.

Why self-select as grantee

Since I made the proposal in June 29 (3 months ago), no one offered to take the grant. So, to avoid the proposal from getting stale, I advanced it to Phase 2 through selecting myself.

Why 3 ETH

It was approximated through the following bill of costs:

  • 0.5 ETH: ideation, design of the tool and stack.
  • 1 ETH: smart contract
  • 0.5 ETH: subgraph
  • 1 ETH: frontend
3 Likes
2

lets do this! long live PoH!

3

Copying this from the Phase 2 thread:
Although I greatly support the financing of talent and do not doubt Green’s abilities to develop and implement tools, at this point in the discussion, I do not see the clear benefit for this grant to move forward since:

  • It is not something exclusively done for the DAO (other projects will benefit from it, but they are not paying).
  • It is not being advertised as a PoH Project. For what I could see, it was even being advertised as a Kleros project at Devcon Bogotá. So not even indirect marketing benefits coming from there.
  • It does not support NFTs distribution, so the utility is not that much given that, for now, it seems like the only use case for such a tool seem to be the distribution of PNK tokens (something that has been in the agenda for Kleros for a long time). Not many other token suppliers would benefit from a token airdrop the way I am seeing it right now.
  • It is solution that does not bring back the investment back to the DAO, resulting in a net loss of funds (and even possibly more spending in the future due to maintenance).
4

The tool is cool, I’m always happy to see some work being done!

I really feel that before passing this through we could hit two birds with one stone here and tick off a primary objective: a genuinely marketable use case system for PoH and UBI, as well as Kleros. It really would be amazing for the solution to have NFT implementations. So much work could begin as a result, and it would be nice for overall morale I think :relaxed:

What do we need to do to achieve that? More time, more resources, or more devs? If the issue is the complexity of combining to the tools then would it perhaps be easier to just have two seperate tools?

Either way having both NFT and token dropping would really get the ball rolling for new implementations.

1 Like
5

@green can you add to the proposal something like: “the frontend must indicate that the tool was granted by poh dao” as was mentioned in some TG groups?

3 Likes
6

If someone is interested in NFT drops they should create a different tool, there are a few different ways to do it. But making this tool do everything would make it too complicated, and I’m not interested in doing that.

1 Like
7

Just pointing out this is included.

3 Likes
8

Not many projects will be interested in humanity-wide airdrops, except for Kleros.

Most projects want to reward their early adopters and maintain sybil resistance at the same time, so they might be interested in intersection of sets Humans and User Accounts sets or some anonymized variant of it, i.e. user doesn’t use his doxxed account, but still wants to claim the air-drop. In this case, creation of custom https://app.sismo.io/ badge (PoH clone for single use) or semaphore signaling, combined with additional air-drop criteria (usage) is a lot more promising, but complicated path. Unless the solution considers above customization, it’s likely to be used only once if not less. Kleros is exception, due to the fact that it was a court solution from the start, so technically every Human is also Kleros user.

Given ongoing fork discussions, it doesn’t seem like such a great idea to have PoH pay the upfront cost for enabling potential, but unlikely, bribe from Kleros. Note that KIP-51 hasn’t even been voted in and PNK token holders have every reason to be reluctant.

Even for this trivial case, generalized solution, like granting an NFT, then NFT holder-wide air-drop seem much more scalable and composable solutions.

1 Like
9

Easy, wide, Sybil-resistant airdrops will be available for the first time with this implementation. It is difficult to know in advance how many will use it since the option never really existed before.

10

This option did exist before, but it required a bit more coding or a graph query, which every air-drop required anyway. Every project from ENS, OP, SUSHI, LOOKS and many more decided to make precision air-drops, rather than dropping tokens on a wide range of people who have no stake in project and are likely to sell it immediately for whales to accumulate cheaply. AirDrops, except UBI, aren’t supposed to be free money, but responsibility to govern and a loyalty bribe.

Even if there is another ENS airdrop in the future, they’ll still aim at domain holders, but might use PoH as sybil protection from domain farms. This is the only responsible and rational thing to do from any projects / DAO perspective - I can’t imagine voting otherwise, even though, I’m pro-UBI.

EDIT: Additionally, if there is customizable solution, using it for humanity-wide airdrops would be possible as well - simply make User Account set Any.

1 Like
11

This HIP has been put to a vote.

12

I agree that this tool is virtually useless on its own. Something like NFT drops or the combination of profiles that ALSO have, for example some specific POAP would be far more interesting than this.

I believe treasury at the moment is so scarce that I would favour project that would directly increase the treasury after its approval, not the opposite.