{"signature": "0x6dc6a3d00beb0b680fd1884d10fb0c5b082f13cdf5fd3e8f93f02bfa0290e85d60178ac69dad224160d40d8173b64b6537f253abdc3c9ab712e9bbbd0f49a40d1b", "application": {"round": "0x145052E87140b7309F6EE18Ba12fC187560d5D89", "answers": [{"type": "email", "answer": "shinya@fracton.ventures", "hidden": true, "question": "Email Address", "questionId": 0}, {"type": "short-answer", "answer": "@MorleySheen", "hidden": true, "question": "Telegram Handle We Can Use To Contact You", "questionId": 1}, {"type": "short-answer", "answer": "https://github.com/fracton-ventures", "hidden": false, "question": "Project Github Repo", "questionId": 2}, {"type": "link", "hidden": false, "question": "Link to your Public Group Chat", "questionId": 3}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "We have joined in Gitcoin Grants 19.", "hidden": false, "question": "Have you participated in a previous Gitcoin Grants Round? If so, please name the rounds or link the builder profile to prior rounds.", "questionId": 4}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "We are contributing to the Ethereum network's infrastructure by improving the effectiveness and fairness of public goods funding. Public goods, such as open-source software and community activities, are crucial for the growth and sustainability of the Ethereum ecosystem.\nActually, we have analyzed grant programs and built a protocol for impact evaluators, who can get incentives.\n\n- https://research.fracton.ventures/reports/a-retrospective-quantitative-review-of-crypto-grants-programs/\n- https://youtu.be/YyoQSc4iDPk?si=MunARyCkIkpjY93X\n- https://dorahacks.io/buidl/18262\n\nEspecially, by focusing on measuring the impact / outcomes of these public goods, particularly community activities like events and hackathons, our project will seek to enable more informed and evidence-based funding decisions. This can lead to a more robust and thriving ecosystem built on Ethereum.\n\nSpecific examples of how this contributes include:\n- Providing a tool for DAOs and funding organizations within the Ethereum ecosystem (like Optimism and Scroll, with whom we plan to collaborate) to objectively evaluate the impact of projects they fund.\n- Focusing on the often-undervalued impact of community activities, which are vital for network effects, user adoption, and developer engagement within the Ethereum ecosystem.\n- Aiming to optimize capital allocation in the public goods sector, ensuring that resources are directed towards projects that demonstrate tangible positive effects on the Ethereum network and its community.\n- Positioning our product as infrastructure for public goods funding, suggesting it will be a foundational tool for entities supporting the Ethereum ecosystem.\n\nWhile specific metrics on the impact of using our tool are not yet available (as the project is in development), the goal is to provide evidence-based insights that lead to more efficient and impactful funding decisions within the Ethereum space.", "hidden": false, "question": "How does your project contribute significantly to the Ethereum network's infrastructure? Please provide specific examples and metrics if available.", "questionId": 5}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "Our project's pioneering development work lies particularly in enhancing the ability to evaluate the impact of community activities using causal discovery and causal inference methodologies. This is a novel approach to address the challenge of quantifying the effects of initiatives like events and hackathons, where traditional metrics can be insufficient.\n\nSpecifically, this involves:\n- Applying causal inference techniques to estimate the causal relationships between specific interventions and their outcomes in community-led public goods projects. This goes beyond simple correlation to understand if a particular activity truly led to a specific result.\n- Developing models that can analyze both on-chain data and off-chain data (such as community activity data, social media data, and data from existing impact evaluation projects like OSO and Karma) to infer causality.\n- Aiming to measure intangible yet crucial aspects of community activities, such as networking effects and participant satisfaction, which are difficult to quantify objectively.\n- Creating a product that can visualize these causal inferences in an understandable way for funders.\n\nThis focus on applying rigorous causal analysis to the evaluation of community-driven public goods within the crypto space appears to be a pioneering aspect of our project.", "hidden": false, "question": "Describe any pioneering development work in your project, particularly in enhancing privacy, interoperability, or user experience.", "questionId": 6}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "Specific problems or challenges:\n- Our project identifies several key challenges within the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly in the domain of funding and evaluating public goods. One major issue is the subjectivity and reliance on past performance in grant allocation. Current practices tend to depend heavily on subjective assessments or historical achievements, making it difficult to objectively assess the potential or actual impact of new or ongoing projects. This often results in biased and inefficient distribution of funds.\n- Another significant challenge lies in the difficulty of quantifying the impact of community activities. While open-source software development receives substantial recognition and funding, crucial community-led efforts such as events and hackathons are frequently overlooked due to the absence of clear, quantifiable metrics. Yet, these activities are essential for ecosystem growth, user adoption, and developer engagement.\n- The lack of clear return on investment (ROI) and accountability in funding is also problematic. Grant operators and sponsors often find it hard to visualize the outcomes of their investments, which in turn makes it difficult to justify continued support. This lack of transparency can undermine community trust and hinder the effectiveness of funding programs.\n- Additionally, smaller or newer projects face challenges in securing funding, as the allocation often favors more established and well-known initiatives. This skews opportunities away from potentially high-impact projects that lack visibility. Compounding this issue is the limited ability for projects to analyze which specific interventions contribute to their success, leaving them without the tools to refine their strategies and improve outcomes.\n\nOur solution:\n- To address these challenges, our solution focuses on the quantification of project outcomes through causal discovery and causal inference. By applying these methodologies to both on-chain and off-chain data, we introduce a more objective and evidence-based approach to evaluating the impact of public goods. This reduces dependence on subjective judgment and supports funders in making more informed decisions grounded in actual results.\n- Our platform places special emphasis on measuring the often-intangible benefits of community activities, including networking effects and participant satisfaction—areas frequently neglected by traditional evaluation models that focus primarily on OSS development. By visualizing causal relationships between actions and outcomes, we enhance accountability for grantees and increase transparency for funders and communities alike, building greater trust and enabling more informed participation in funding programs.\n- The insights generated through our system allow funders to identify and support the projects that deliver the most significant positive impact. This directly supports a more efficient and equitable resource allocation process across the Ethereum ecosystem. Moreover, the platform empowers projects to refine their strategies by understanding the causal factors behind their success, ultimately maximizing their long-term impact.\n- Technically, our architecture is designed to integrate with existing on-chain data sources and tools such as OSO, Karma, and Metrics Garden. This collaborative and interoperable design promotes a more comprehensive and resilient evaluation ecosystem.\n- Although other organizations are also exploring impact measurement, we distinguish itself through its targeted application of causal inference within the crypto ecosystem—particularly Ethereum—with a dedicated focus on community-led initiatives. Our commitment to developing the core platform as open-source software (OSS) reinforces our goal of democratizing access to evaluation tools. Looking ahead, we aim to implement automated funding mechanisms via smart contracts, advancing the decentralization and efficiency of public goods funding in the ecosystem.", "hidden": false, "question": "What specific problems or challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem does your project address? How does your solution improve upon existing alternatives?", "questionId": 7}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "The project's roadmap is outlined in several phases:\n- Phase 0 (~May 2025): Leverage existing databases to evaluate the causal relationship between interventions and outcomes.\n- Phase 1 (~June 2025): Develop causal discovery and causal inference models for specific projects, establishing a system for data collection and analysis for a single project.\n- Phase 2 (June~August 2025): Develop features to import and share causal inference results, enabling the comparison of multiple projects and analysis of their mutual influence.\n- Phase 3 (September~November 2025): Build a data pipeline to measure the outcomes of multiple projects comprehensively, integrating different datasets for cross-project causal relationship estimation.\n- Phase 4 (2026 onwards): Fully automate data collection, causal inference, and funding allocation, including smart contract-based automatic fund distribution; allow users to select and apply custom analysis models; ensure compatibility with other causal inference tools and databases.\n\nUse of funds: \n- Research and development of the causal inference models and the overall platform.\n- Engineering efforts required to build the data collection pipelines, the AI/ML analysis layer, and the user interface.\n- Team operational costs during the development phases.\n- Facilitating collaborations and PoC projects with some ecosystems.", "hidden": false, "question": "Outline your project's roadmap and how the grant funds will be used to achieve your development goals.", "questionId": 8}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "Our project contributes to the decentralization and security of the Ethereum ecosystem by promoting its sustainable development through more effective public goods funding. By enabling objective and data-driven evaluation of community-led initiatives, we aim to support a broader range of contributors across the ecosystem. This, in turn, is expected to increase participation and engagement, leading to greater decentralization. In terms of security, we believe that providing effective and continuous funding to open-source developers and their surrounding communities will enhance the robustness and resilience of the Ethereum infrastructure.", "hidden": false, "question": "How does your project contribute to the decentralization and security of the Ethereum network?", "questionId": 9}, {"type": "paragraph", "answer": "N/A", "hidden": false, "question": "For any project deploying smart contracts on blockchain networks, please list all your deployer addresses and their corresponding blockchain networks. Use this format for each entry: [deployer_address], [chain_id]—for example, 0x123abc..., 42161 (This represents a deployer address on the Arbitrum network). Please include a separate line for each unique deployer address and blockchain combination.", "questionId": 10}], "project": {"id": "0xfcb0fd086356d27f72dae1abc9cd4821c41877f9ca9b1934d5e89d6577f6c505", "title": "Fracton Research", "logoImg": "bafkreic5eipukazppzhbsqbz626qahsbbdvj3dswj6eby5qgclaho3hj4a", "metaPtr": {"pointer": "bafkreiesooiyfzqqkscslbcqwpeohzcjp2s4qehgixr5o62odqbjkr455u", "protocol": "undefined"}, "website": "https://research.fracton.ventures/", "bannerImg": "bafkreidgx7ii2mftgr7gblywpt7sxdfutjhssr5pi5ubt4apegoeo4gehy", "createdAt": 1699408951612, "userGithub": "SHiNYA-MORi", "credentials": {"github": {"type": ["VerifiableCredential"], "proof": {"jws": "eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSIsImNyaXQiOlsiYjY0Il0sImI2NCI6ZmFsc2V9..B63BcKSKIpPxLKzrkG0ChvhFLWHVNo-P3DL8Mptkva_B-wv-0-vtuC7SI8Z0kZbJ6WmnnNlINzYUpq9KhyYYAA", "type": "Ed25519Signature2018", "created": "2024-10-11T16:48:10.599Z", "proofPurpose": "assertionMethod", "verificationMethod": "did:key:z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC#z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC"}, "issuer": "did:key:z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC", "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/2018/credentials/v1"], "issuanceDate": "2024-10-11T16:48:10.599Z", "expirationDate": "2025-01-09T16:48:10.599Z", "credentialSubject": {"id": "did:pkh:eip155:1:0xF5CA53792C47e3a0792380292D15c894097015fF", "hash": "v0.0.0:ijdBmvXJ+BaANCMHFO4Hlv8LVDgtzX/tjE3T1g4B4wU=", "@context": [{"hash": "https://schema.org/Text", "provider": "https://schema.org/Text"}], "provider": "ClearTextGithubOrg#fracton-ventures#66508490"}}, "twitter": {"type": ["VerifiableCredential"], "proof": {"jws": "eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSIsImNyaXQiOlsiYjY0Il0sImI2NCI6ZmFsc2V9..YZ1wGiVSPGlxuWYFP43NCgk4T9hz3B4ipyGCLTa3M1Nym45UjiG6qfHAwLOFO0XCG8hN6xTI-wwq9JtHb_uCDg", "type": "Ed25519Signature2018", "created": "2023-11-08T02:02:12.180Z", "proofPurpose": "assertionMethod", "verificationMethod": "did:key:z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC#z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC"}, "issuer": "did:key:z6MkghvGHLobLEdj1bgRLhS4LPGJAvbMA1tn2zcRyqmYU5LC", "@context": ["https://www.w3.org/2018/credentials/v1"], "issuanceDate": "2023-11-08T02:02:12.180Z", "expirationDate": "2024-02-06T02:02:12.180Z", "credentialSubject": {"id": "did:pkh:eip155:1:0xF5CA53792C47e3a0792380292D15c894097015fF", "hash": "v0.0.0:uuhskVFLC4aVO0MFS6hBN8wGj9R9XKmSRGUzEPCxW8E=", "@context": [{"hash": "https://schema.org/Text", "provider": "https://schema.org/Text"}], "provider": "ClearTextTwitter#fractonresearch"}}}, "description": "Fracton Research is a R&D institution for a positive sum world through exploring inclusive coordination design. Our focus is to solve coordination problems and public goods problems such as free-rider problem and tragedy of the commons, and to create positive externalities through coordination mechanisms based on blockchain: regenerative funding mechanism, collective decision making, and other protocol design. Also, we will collaborate with profit/non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and government, so we will achieve them by getting experience and knowledge from practical fieldworks.", "lastUpdated": 0, "projectGithub": "fracton-ventures", "projectTwitter": "fractonresearch"}, "recipient": "0x411f9a3cf8B761c0b29A7c18f0ca228C8E79BEB3"}}