Grant Reviews – Ethelo

Fraud Detection for Public Goods Funding

GitcoinDAO is a community of internet citizens funding and building digital public goods, such as open-source software and climate projects. Since 2017, Gitcoin has distributed over $51.4 million USD to public projects, supporting a pool of more than 312,000 monthly active developers. Grants, hackathons, and open bounties are the lifeblood of the ecosystem.

But with hundreds of applications submitted each round, Gitcoin faced a growing challenge: some applications were fraudulent or malicious. The Fraud Detection and Defense (FDD) team needed a way to involve the wider Gitcoin community in fraud detection, rather than relying solely on a small group of reviewers.

Challenges

Gitcoin has an extremely high-volume granting process that is vulnerable to bad actors

Hundreds of grant applications per round

Risk of scams, deception, or policy violations slipping through

Manual review by the FDD team was resource-intensive and opaque

Needed a transparent process that built trust with the community

Process

Ethelo partnered with Gitcoin to create the Grants Investigation Agency (GIA) — a community-driven decision system.

FDD pre-flagged suspicious applications.

Community members (“agents”) audited each project using an 8-point weighted rubric, evaluating risks such as:

deception or scams

racism, sexism, or other misconduct

large external funding ($500k+) or previous token offerings

Participants rated applications via Ethelo’s algorithmic platform, where a binary pass–fail system was combined with a discussion forum.

To incentivize participation, community members received a Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) NFT.

Results

The GIA team was extremely happy with the results of the review process.

About 60 community members participated as GIA agents.
12 fraudulent or ineligible proposals were eliminated.
Decisions required a 90% minimum score with no policy violations to be approved.
Participants reported strong appreciation for the transparency of the process.

Impact

The GIA created a scalable, community-powered mechanism for fraud detection. Instead of depending on a few reviewers, Gitcoin now harnesses the wisdom of the crowd to keep fraudulent projects out of its ecosystem.

“The designers [of this project] have a perfect understanding of the black box, this is perfect! It is important to ensure that the critical factors are in compliance with Gitcoin’s vision and mission values. Otherwise, failure in one major critical factor would suffice to deny or approve the grantee application.”

– Gitcoin GIA participant