DAOrayaki Reserach |Sybil: A Governance Tool for Discovering Delegates

7 min readJul 20, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：200 USD

Category: Sybil, Uniswap, delegates, delegation-based governance, Twitter, Web3.0, on-chain addresses, digital identities

Contributor：Jones, Julie，DAOctor @DAOrayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/untitled-4/

Brief Overview About Sybil:

Sybil is a governance tool for discovering delegates developed by “Uniswap” publicly announced on 15th December, 2020. Sybil maps on-chain addresses to digital identities to maintain a list of delegates. These verified mappings are public and open for anyone to use.

Project summary:

Before we speak about Sybil, we first need to come across the project behind such a protocol, which is “Uniswap”, On November 2,2018, Uniswap was publicly announced and deployed to the Ethereum mainnet. In an exciting, anxiety-inducing moment Hayden Adam one of the Uniswap team fired off the announcement tweets for his ~200 followers. For many people, this was the first time they heard of the project. But for Uniswap team this came after years of hard work and a huge amount of help along the way.

On July 6th, 2017, Hayden took his friend “Karl Floersch” advice and start to get into blockchain community specifically “Ethereum”, after a quite amount of time for knowledge acquiring Hayden finally took a chance that was announced and described by “Vitalik” to build an automated market maker, which is known today as “Uniswap”.

And from that time Uniswap kept upgrading to provide better tools for crypo-currencies facilitation to the point it reached “Sybil”, which we are interested in talking about in this research report. Sybil has been founded for the hope of growing the adoption of Uniswap’s governance system and encouraging both existing and future Uniswap delegates to verify their identities, making it easier for delegators to discover and engage with their community representatives.

Why delegation has such an importance?

Experimentation with on-chain governance systems continues to gain popularity, and for good reason community ownership reduces single points of failure and as protocols begin to develop into products that resemble legacy services — albeit in a structurally decentralized fashion — they naturally require good management.

The ability for token holders to delegate their votes, or to stand as a delegate themselves, is key to the success of on-chain governance systems, allowing for high quality community members to build meaningful influence and otherwise marginalized token holders to engage in a representative fashion. For Uniswap team the most successful protocols are the ones that are able to attract the best and the most engaged communities. Yet as an emerging primitive, delegation-based governance systems are still gaining some important infrastructure.

Project introduction:

Sybil maps on-chain addresses to digital identifies in order to maintain a list of delegates without the need for user signups, on-chain transactions, and manual record keeping. Sybil is solely integrated with Twitter, however, and as it stands the verification flow with Sybil is a 3-step process. Later on, we are going to briefly explain this 3-step process.

Simply put, Sybil’s purpose is to provide a simple way for governance token holders to identify their community representatives, and in doing so grow engagement in the protocol’s development process. However, when it comes to privacy, some members of the crypto community were concerned regarding the privacy aspect of such a system, especially those who are not pseudonymous on Twitter.

Uniswap’s first-ever governance vote ended in failure, despite 98% of the votes being cast in favor of a proposed change, the total number needed for a successful vote fell short by about 400,000. After that, on Novermber, 2nd, of 2020, another governance proposal to Airdrop UNI tokens fell short by little less than 2.5 million voted UNI tokens.

It seems that the main concern with respect to Uniswap’s current governance system comes down to inadequate engagement to reach a quorum when governance proposals arise. From the other hand, Uniswap hopes Sybil’s governance mechanism will increase the adoption of Uniswap’s governance system.

Everything About Sybil Functionalities:

First of all, let’s start with how does Sybil works, the short video below is provided by the uniswap team as a self-explanatory demonstration.

Now we explain the 3-step process we spoke about earlier concerning the flow verification:

1- Users must first sign into Twitter and connect to a Web3 Wallet.

2- Users sign a message that includes their Twitter handle using their private key.

3- Finally, in order to complete the verification, users tweet this message from their Twitter Account.

Once a user has been verified, their Twitter handle is matched to their Ethereum address and will appear on the Sybil interface next to their associated vote count. Through this process, Uniswap essentially launched an on-chain delegation tied to Twitter Usernames.

Extending Sybil:

At launch, Sybil supports both Uniswap and Compound’s delegate lists but its mapping tool can be used to display public identities for any project. In addition to that, Identities work cross-platform, so users will only ever need to go through Sybil verification once per identity. For now, Sybil is solely integrated with Twitter, although the architecture allows for any other service to act as an authentication method such as GitHub which is coming soon according to the Uniswap team.

Sybil Use cases:

Sybil’s use cases extend beyond delegation. The mapping of addresses to social identities can be leveraged for features like trading and gaming leaderboards, as well as Ethereum-based messaging. Similarly, the Sybil verification process is not constrained to the Sybil.org interface. The documentation below provides detailed steps for both supporting the Sybil verification process directly from your existing interface and running custom verification flows around list creation.

Delegation and Governance:

Decentralized governance has been gaining momentum, but participation still remains low. Uniswap most of all recognise this, as their previous proposal didn’t reach the quorum of voter participation necessary to pass.

Delegation is becoming a standard solution, allowing users who would otherwise not have the time or motivation to participate still have their voice heard. By delegating their votes to a respected figure or organization who share their views, these users can remain enfranchised in emergent governance systems. Synthetix have taken this one step further, launching a Spartan Council of elected representatives.

Team members:

¡ Hayden Adams — Founder, CEO and Board Member, Hayden is founder of Uniswap, one of the most widely used decentralized applications built on Ethereum. Prior to Uniswap, Hayden was an engineer at Siemens. He graduated from Stony Brook Unviersity with a bachelor in engineering in 2016.

¨ LinkedIn Account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haydenadams/

¡ Ian Lapham — Software Engineer at Uniswap from 2019 till now. Before that, Ian worked as a Blockchain Engineer at John Hancock for more than one year as a part of the LOFT Innovation team. Ian got his B.S, degree in Computer science at the Brown University.

¨ LinkedIn Account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianlapham/

¡ Marvin Ammori — Chief Legal Officer at Uniswap and a Partner at “Carrot Capital”, Marvin is a mission-driven investor. He has invested in startups in debt-relief, drug discovery, and healthcare delivery drones. An experienced general counsel and startup executive, he spent the early part of his career as the nation’s leading advocate for freedom-of-speech online and for net neutrality. He graduated from Harvard Law School.

¨ Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/ammori

Future:

Currently the Sybil interface only supports verification through Twitter. Other social media platforms like Github may prove to be useful as well. Support for these will likely be added over time, and new entries will be formatted to exist in one shared JSON file.

More verification channels:

Right now, the interface is the only easy way for users to verify using Sybil. However, more verification UIs may be built in in the future. This could take the form of standalone sites, or verification flows embedded within other web3 UIs.

Point of the line, Sybil looks to be a helpful governance tool, and we hope it leads to greater voter participation in the future. Uniswap and Compound are considered the first ones, but other governances also join such as Aave, PoolTogether and Radicle leading to many more protocols integrated as the ecosystem continues to move towards delegation.

Contact Information:

- Official website: https://sybil.org/

- Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/uniswap/

- Discord: https://discord.gg/K9Dtw4d6

- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UniSwap/

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