Committee Grant #009 - Karma3 Labs / Permissionless Distribution of Snaps

Project Name Karma3 Labs

Project Category Permissionless Distribution of Snaps

Champion(s) Christian Montoya, Dayan Brunie

Project Description

Snaps is now live and has set the foundations for Metamask’s permissionless innovation strategy. The next step now is to move towards Permissionless snaps distribution. Today snaps are distributed with the MetaMask team’s permission for security reasons which is an intermediate step towards the endgame: a fully permissionless distribution. To get ready for this vision, MetaMask Snaps team has designed an architecture relying on the community for an open and verifiable reputation and trust mechanism. Karma3 Labs solution would build and compute a trust graph based on on-chain activities and community’s attestations, with sybil-attack resistant mechanisms to assess snaps trust scores. To build this solution, Metamask will need several building blocks, such as a “decentralized snaps registry”, a “decentralized attestations registry” as well as a “Trust scores computer”. Karma3 Labs has one of the most advanced decentralized reputation protocols based on social graph algorithms such as EigenTrust. With our solution, we will enable a “Trust scores computer” for Snaps. It will be responsible for assessing Snaps trust score (to be exact, individual versions of snaps) by computing user’s trust scores (for different roles, e.g. as a security auditor, or as a UX reviewer), and attestations (snaps audits & reviews, attestations acknowledgement etc.). As mentioned before, MetaMask is envisioning a permissionless audit & review system, therefore this will open the door of a risk of malicious audit reports and reviews, potentially created to game the system, e.g. to promote a malicious Snap. The reputation system's job is to provide a sybil-resistant trust (or confidence) score assigned to auditors/reviewers, audit reports/reviews and snaps. This trust system for Snaps will be open, verifiable and configurable by the community.

Project Goals

Karma3 Labs plans to accompany MetaMask in the delivery of the MetaMask Snaps permissionless reputation-based distribution system with an experimental MVP which will demonstrate an end-to-end system where any user can audit or review a snap, leading to each snap accruing a rating or score based on reviews, weighted by the user’s reputation - creating a sybil resistant reputation system for Snaps. This system will be designed in an extensible way to accommodate evolving needs of trust signals, schemas and reputation scoring systems.

Target Milestones

1. Product development support for the front-end interface that allows users to a) rate and review snaps, b) rate reviews and audits submitted for snaps, c) vouch for or follow any set of users/auditor/reviewer (demo wireframes below).

2. Collaborate on designing the optimal schemas for submitting audit/review/follow type trust signals among users and snaps, leveraging the Verax attestation system on Linea.

3. Reputation & Trust compute system that calculates reputation scores for users (auditors/reviewers) and snaps. Includes attestation subgraph/indexer, score computer, publisher, and score verifier.

4. Sybil attack simulation for EigenTrust using synthetic data across test cases on a staging environment. Includes definition, test cases, test results + visualizations.

5. Multiple iterations for fine-tuning compute parameters with Snaps team: a. attestations schemas covering different user stories b. seed-peer assumptions in EigenTrust c. local-trust weights

6. Architecture for scalable and decentralized computation infra for Snaps Trust system.

Timeline / Path to Production

Timelines for Phase 1: September 2023 - January 2024

About Team Total Team Size: 7

The team has experience in building both web3 infrastructure (Ethereum, Harmony, Celo, libp2p) and web2 infrastructure (Google Cloud, PageRank, Facebook platform engineering). The team has been doing product development for top web3 applications in the social, governance and marketplaces categories in building permissionless reputation systems.

Sahil Dewan - 3x founder, Cofounder & CPO Harmony, President Harvard crypto club, HBS MBA (https://twitter.com/SahilDewan)

Eugene Kim - Platform eng at Facebook, Networking engineer Google, AWS, Harmony (https://www.linkedin.com/in/astralblue/)

Gloria Wu - Cofounder Orange Protocol, Director Global Ecosystem Ontology, Minerva University (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriakexinwu/)

Sep Kamvar - Author EigenTrust, Founder of Celo protocol and Mosaic, Prof. MIT Media Lab (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepandar_Kamvar)

Funding Request

$125,000

$90,000 for engineering development $20,000 for external audit $15,000 for operational expenses, marketing, conference workshops

Karma3 Labs' Resources: 1 product engineer for smart contracts+indexer+ETL 1 architect for back-end and EigenTrust compute 1 engineer for testing, simulation and visualizations

What specific software license does the grantee intend to publish under?

MIT License

Other Information / Relevant Links / Supporting Documents

This grant application is focussed on execution for Phase 1.

Proposed Phase 2: Deploy the decentralized trust compute solution on production. Tentative Timelines for phase 2: Q1-Q2 2024

Our Essay on Reputation for Decentralized systems - https://mirror.xyz/0x6BE454113A58861A09Fc2A57940a344357B3859a/OC0H2b4cT8tU_OVq_a7TSmiVXFjCYjZ3V9uaIQLQG_E

Website - karma3labs.com Github - https://github.com/Karma3Labs Twitter - https://twitter.com/karma3labs Docs - docs.karma3labs.com EigenTrust - https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/eigentrust.pdf