The Discord challenge from the 16th Dec was open for 30min from 6PM GMT onwards. In total, roughly 1000 people participated.You should have passed this challenge if you wrote a (unique) short paragraph on Sybil resistance and pasted your Kovan address.We are currently processing the challenge results and will post an update when you will be able to confirm in the game UI that you passed the challenge.

Previous Sybil challenges focused on users who had participated in in-person crypto events or who had been active in the governance of other DeFi projects. To make sure that people who are new to the DeFi ecosystem are not excluded, Challenge V was launched as the first of several ‘Proof of Work’ challenges that complement the previous ‘Proof of Past Work’ challenges.

The goal of Challenge V was to provide a Sybil challenge in which any community member would be able to participate.

This round involved a new Discord server that was only accessible for people that have linked a phone number to their Discord account. Since Discord has checks in place to filter out virtual phone numbers and several countries link phone numbers to government issued IDs, this is a good first step in determining user uniqueness.

While this is a strong first layer, it has some weaknesses. In particular, (i) people can have multiple phone numbers prepared, and (ii) an individual can link and unlink many Discord accounts with a single phone number sequentially. Because of this, we needed some extra layers to strengthen it. We added an extra task of writing a paragraph about Sybil resistance and a time limit. Since the end process was fairly involved, it helped to filter out bots as it would be difficult to complete the process many times within the time limit.

We initially included a CAPTCHA bot, which was overwhelmed and stopped working. This required impromptu changes to disable & delete the CAPTCHA bot and set-up new permissions for users. As the permissions were only updated with a slight delay, spam led to the instructions briefly disappearing. This was fixed soon, but certainly contributed to creating confusion.

We also noticed that we can further improve the privacy in Discord of all community members and will take action to do so for later challenges.

Lastly, several people expected the Discord event to take place in the voice channel, even though several announcements were made. The team disseminated the instructions in various other channels, but did not go to the voice channel. In the future, the team will be more clear about which channels are to be used.We appreciate the feedback. We will use it in future challenges.

Sybil resistance prevents a single person from creating multiple digital identities to control a disproportionate share of the system. This is especially important for Gyroscope in starting out on mainnet as an egalitarian and decentralized community. As FTL Labs, we were given a mandate to develop Gyroscope v1. In order to be both legitimate and successful, the system must be decentralized and community-driven. Sybil protections are the very basic measure to make it happen.

As an individual community member, Sybil resistance is also in your interest! To see why, consider a slight bit of game theory:

While you may want to have many accounts yourself, you should not want anyone else to have fake accounts as fake accounts dilute your own stake in the community. If it is easy to have multiple fake accounts, then you know it is for everyone else as well. This means that you have to make even more fake accounts to not be diluted. As a result, everyone ends up making many fake accounts (and wasting their own time in doing so). To prevent this and align everyone’s interest in participating from a single account with a single vote, we made clear from the very beginning that Sybil protection would be used.

We are now fulfilling that promise in as diverse and inclusive ways as possible. Typically, Sybil attacks are deterred by making them costly (e.g., this is the reason behind Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake in blockchain protocols) or by checking government-issued IDs (e.g., to open a bank account). Since Gyroscope is, however, currently on a testnet and aims to be open to all, different deterrences are necessary.

We do this through a series of many different types of challenges, which give community members many different tools to demonstrate to their fellow community members that they are a unique person.While there are many different types of challenges, and a given user may not be able to participate in every one, each user will be able to participate in enough challenges to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that they are a unique identity.

We recognize that this type of Discord challenge necessarily provides advantages to certain time zones over others as it requires users to be active at a specific time. We have intended for follow-up challenges to be widely spread to accommodate different time zones to even the playing field.

The next challenge with time restrictions will be aimed toward community members who are spread over Asia and Pacific time zones and will be announced well ahead.

Please monitor the announcement channel in Discord and the official Twitter account for further updates. Further challenges will also be announced after a brief Christmas break and will continue to cater toward community members who are both, new to crypto and DeFi and DeFi veterans.

Gyroscope is a fully-backed stablecoin with algorithmic price bounding and all-weather reserves.

• Read about Gyroscope in our docs

• Follow us on Twitter @GyroStable

• Join our Discord and Forum to learn how to get involved

• Stay engaged & continue the game!