In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of accountability and transparency within the nonprofit sector.
Many organizations struggle to create effective mechanisms for members to come forward with information about wrongdoing or misconduct.
Anonymous forums, such as those provided by blockchain-based technologies, have the potential to address this challenge by allowing individuals to report concerns or share information without fear of retaliation.
Giveth is pioneering and experimenting with decentralized governance and communication techniques and supporting their adoption by other communities
This proposal outlines the benefits of using anonymity for accountability and whistleblowing, and suggests ways in which Giveth could incorporate our tool into its platform to promote greater transparency and ethical behavior.
In other words, we suggest Anonymity as an Option, which would provide a channel to safeguard Giveth’s integrity, and allow guaranteed anonymity for users who would need to use it.
We propose and offer a solution that is:
- Easy to qualify and implement
- Free
- Grants true autonomy through true anonymity
- Solves for reputation in an anonymous setting
Our proposal - Optional Anonymity as a solution
We are a team that has worked on ZK products, culminating in our current tool (Sacred Lógos) we have in alpha. We propose a way to enable DAO members to post anonymously anywhere in Giveth’s discourse, through our service.
The flow is as simple as follows:
- Member posts anonymously on Sacred Lógos
- Sacred Lógos posts on the member’s behalf on Giveth’s forum
Sacred Lógos uses ZK proofs and a relayer to guarantee the poster’s anonymity, reducing the burden of OpSec.
The message is stored on Ethereum and IPFS before being forwarded to discourse through the API.
We have created a demo flow here to make the process easy to understand.
Anonymity with Accountability
Even as anonymity unburdens the poster from the problems of being doxxed, it also creates the opportunity for bad actors to post low effort or troll posts.
To mitigate this, we have some solutions in the works:
- Token gating posts: Posters to Sacred Lógos can be permissioned, so that only members with a certain token are able to make posts that are transferred to Giveth DAO (ready)
- Optionally, the member’s vote weight can also be anonymized and attached to the message before it is posted on Giveth DAO’s forum. This would show their level of commitment to the protocol without doxxing them. (in progress)
- In the future, we are also working on a reputation system that the system assigns posters with anonymous credibility through Unirep. (in progress)
Summary
To provide a whistleblower/ accountability channel, we propose to use Sacred Lógos to create a token gated sub-DAO for anonymous governance members. Posting on Sacred Lógos will have their post anonymously transferred to Giveth DAO and grant the following advantages:
- Impartiality through anonymity
- Greater Op Sec through ZK proofs and our relayer
- A smaller attack surface to Giveth’s governance process
- True, trustless anonymity offered through ZK-Proofs and IPFS
Additional advantages to anonymity
In addition to the advantages highlighted above, we offer the research we did here, to show the benefits of conversations carried out in true anonymity, over simple pseudonymity available in discourse. Anonymity can be critical especially when matters involve treasuries.
Challenges and objections
We anticipate and address some potential challenges or objections that our solution might face from the Giveth DAO community or other stakeholders:
- Accountability: How can we ensure that anonymous governance members are accountable for their actions and do not abuse their power or harm the protocol?
- We can ensure accountability by token gating members who are able to post on Sacred to be only Giveth members
- We can optionally post an anonymized version of the member’s voting power along with their comment
- In the future, we will also be able to provide a robust reputation system through Unirep
- Compatibility: How can we ensure that anonymous governance members are compatible with the existing governance system and processes of Giveth?
- Rather than presenting an entire system for Giveth to implement, we offer an option, that members can use to stay anonymous, by posting through Sacred Lógos
- Trust: How can we ensure that the members are posting with true anonymity
- Members can use their own relayer to have their messages posted by Sacred Lógos to secure their IP address
- In a simpler solution, members can also use a VPN to obscure their IP address from the relayer
However, we also welcome more discussion on the proposal, as we believe that the solution is something we can all iterate on, to strengthen Giveth’s accountability.