-
-
Our ecosystem
Inspiration
University of Oxford had invited our CEO Saiba Kataruka to conduct a series of workshops on blockchain. ( http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/seminars/2297.html) . While creating these workshops he had been creating various use cases and this one instantly stuck him as something that he wanted to genuinely build.
What it does
Recently, a news was doing rounds about how Divergence Ventures exploited the airdrop of Ribbon Finance by doing a Sybil attack and ended up taking 2.5 million USD worth of tokens by themselves while pretending to be multiple people.
While this case was thankfully caught and money was returned, Sybil attacks are the norm rather than the exception in the crypto world.
Hashtagger is the next generation solution that provides a marketplace for blockchain companies and community members where they can find each other and Sybil attack resistance features are inbuilt to provide added security so that the hacks such as the one by Divergence Ventures are much more unlikely.
How we built it
We've used a conjunction of Web2.0 and Web3.0 technologies to build Hashtagger.com And then we have gone through multiple iterations with various partner projects in order to understand the community behaviour and develop a solution that suits the stakeholder's requirements. We've been running various test campaigns since July and have received tens of thousands of participants from over 70 countries in order to get to the current state.
Challenges we ran into
Sybil attacks' various forms are the biggest challenges that we face. While the attack on Ribbon Finance mentioned earlier has been a recent finding, we've been facing it directly and in every single experiment so we also ended up developing some of the leading solutions in the industry to do airdrops in a manner that's proportionate to the marketing contributions provided by a community member rather than a bot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Developing Sybil resistance mechanisms means : a) Reducing the engagement figures by orders of magnitude. Since the bots are now gone. b) Facing the wrath of attackers who would claim legitimacy despite the proof that says otherwise. So, both the carrot and the stick incentivizes going along with the Sybil attack in the short term because it makes the numbers look good and the conversations go easier. However, decentralization requires that the money reaches actual people and not the bots. So that's the decision that we took and the results are what we're pretty proud of. You can see directly the campaign that we ran for Solana Ignition Hackathon here: Solana Ignition Hackathon marketing campaign on Hashtagger platform where we got hundreds of thousands of views for the campaign.
What we learned
We learned that building in public has tremendous value and gives us both genuine users and the data that's crucial for building the product. It's because of the key statistics we obtained from the multiple campaigns that we've been able to build a leading solution for Sybil resistance and will continue to improve on that.
What's next for Hashtagger.com
After running the Solana Ignition Hackathon campaign and implementing our findings from there, we'll now be moving towards our token launch in the month of November.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.