COCM: Connection-Oriented Cluster Matching

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A Quadratic Funding Algorithm��Oct 7th, 2024

1. Why & What is COCM?
2. How does it work?
3. Where do I use it?
4. When should I use it?
5. Q/A

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What we’ll cover today

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Why COCM?

Quadratic Funding is Gameable

• We like standard Quadratic Funding because it’s democratic. It gives more matching to projects with more donors.
• Yet this is also its weakness. To get more matching, just get more ‘donors’ or anything that can look like a donor:
• Bots
• Influencer Followers / Social Collusion

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What does a Sybil Attack look like?

It looks like Crypto Babes Club

• Blue Nodes are Projects
• Red Nodes are Donors
• Green Lines are Donations

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What does a Sybil Attack look like?

It looks like Crypto Babes Club

• Blue Nodes are Projects
• Red Nodes are Donors
• Green Lines are Donations

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Consider: what if these weren’t bots?

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Get a clearer signal of your community

• Even if the Crypto Babes donors weren’t bots, they’d still be really misaligned with the larger community
• COCM is better at reflecting what your community as a whole wants
• Sybil attacks, collusion etc create noise. COCM reduces the noise.
• COCM is the next generation of QF, and has distributed over 5.5M in funding

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How does it work?

COCM looks for agreement across difference

• Agreement: people supporting a project
• Difference: those people have different donation patterns
• Raises the cost to attack, since we pick up on the fact that sybils look very similar

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Fund project X by looking for diverse support among other projects

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Project A donors Project B donors

Project X donors

If the green areas have donors, then fund X!

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Where do I use it?

Our QF calculator

• Run COCM and QF side-by-side
• Access other tasty analytics and tests
• Get the best round results possible
• The code is open source if you wanna go deep
• You will find a link to your round’s calculator inside of manager on the ‘Round Results’ page
• Demo!

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When should I use it?

Use COCM in big, spread-out communities

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• Super tight-knit communities shouldn’t use COCM
• If you want to encourage lots of advertisement, don’t use COCM
• If you want to reward projects with broad appeal across the ecosystem, use COCM

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You can blend QF and COCM results together!

Get the right mechanism for your round.

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USING THE QF CALCULATOR…

Big Picture: Sybil Defense

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Big Picture: Sybil Defense

• Passport Model Detection available on:
• Arbitrum
• Optimism
• ZkSync
• Polygon
• Mainnet

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Big Picture: Sybil Defense

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Disclaimer: COCM is not ironclad!

• Tests show it’s much less gameable than QF, but exploits exist
• COCM is meant to fit into a larger sybil defense strategy
• (and in general, complete sybil resistance is impossible in any QF-style mechanism)
• Read More

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Q&A

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Thank You