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COCM: Connection-Oriented Cluster Matching

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A Quadratic Funding Algorithm��Oct 7th, 2024

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  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?

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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

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?

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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?

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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?

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Use COCM in big, spread-out communities

  • 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…

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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