Slashing is an automated mechanism that penalizes bad actors by confiscating and burning their staked GTC. If an identity staker violates Gitcoin's trust, their staked GTC is removed and nullified, safeguarding a community’s integrity. This proactive approach deters Sybil attacks, which aim to manipulate voting or governance processes by creating multiple fake identities.

When a bot or bad actor is caught, their staked GTC is “slashed” which means that it is confiscated and eventually burned. This starts by taking the staked GTC out of the contract send to an escrow. A 90 day appeal process then begins. Once the appeal window closes, the GTC is “burned” which means it is permanently removed from the overall supply of GTC.

The staked GTC will be slashed only with very specific criteria. For example, if you've captured duplicate credentials (which will warn you in the UI) and used the same duplicate credentials to capture a reward (ex: donate in a Gitcoin Grants round), then your GTC would be slashed. Even if this may have been a mistake, there is appeal period where you can attempt to reclaim your staked GTC.

There is no minimum amount of GTC that you need to stake on yourself or your friends. However, the more GTC that you stake, the higher your Passport score will be.

The Onchain Trust Graph is a decentralized network connects verified humans within the web3 ecosystem, making it difficult for malicious actors to create fake identities. It also verifies identities, incentivizes community engagement, and supports decentralized governance.

We use a combination of automated and human-supervised processes. The automated processes look for patterns that are indicative of sybil activity, such as duplicate identities, anomalous activity, and the use of VPNs or proxies. Human reviewers then review these flagged accounts to make a final determination. It should never be a surprise if GTC tokens are moved to the Passport Token Vault—before staking, everyone must agree to the rules and violators are given a warning in the UI. Only upon a wallet’s 2nd violation of the rules would we consider taking action.

We recommend checking out a website like Coinmarketcap for a list of exchanges carrying GTC. For folks entirely new to the space, consider checking out the lessons on Bankless Academy.

Identity staking comes with some inherent costs, including the purchasing of GTC and associated gas fees. If you’re not able to afford this, there are still lots of way to raise your Passport score high enough to access your favourite web3 experiences. Alternatively, follow Gitcoin Passport on Twitter or verify yourself in real life at an upcoming event.