As a community-driven blockchain platform, Neo debuted the Polaris Plus phase in this year’s Launchpad to allow the community a voice in deciding which projects receive prize money. We also wanted to provide support and community exposure to talented teams that have high potential to bring life into our ecosystem. Unfortunately, DoraHacks has alerted us of several projects using various methods of cheating the voting system.
One of these methods is sybil attacks, where the attackers continually create new wallets to repeatedly cast votes to game the system. Another is collusion, where real users secretly coordinate among themselves to game the system.
Additionally, some projects have been encouraging votes in ways that increasingly blur the line between “supporting” the project and “buying” votes. We have even been made aware of voters being promised a percentage of Polaris Plus winnings.
None of this is in the spirit of Polaris Plus or Quadratic Funding.
Behind every vote should be a community member who wants to see the project they voted for succeed for the benefit of the ecosystem — not because of a personal financial incentive.
After careful consideration and discussions, we have decided to divide Polaris Plus into two phases:
1)During the first phase, $20,000 will be taken out of the total $101,300 prize pool, with the first $10,000 to be equally distributed to all the participating teams to show Neo’s appreciation for their time and effort.
The remaining $10,000 will be distributed to teams based on their ranking in-line after removing all invalid votes, which emphasizes Neo’s vision of hoping every vote stands for a real user behind.
2) During the second phase, we will reset the Polaris Plus voting and have zero tolerance for all illegal actions. The remaining $81,300 will be distributed to teams based on the valid votes only.
We have reflected on the vulnerability of the Quadratic Funding system and after careful consideration and internal team discussions, we would like to make clear several rules to ensure that Polaris Plus will continue in a better and fairer community environment during phase two:
- We will set up a filtering mechanism to remove votes from suspicious addresses moving forward.
- Encouraging votes by offering prizes, airdrops, competition entries, or any exchange of value to encourage votes is not allowed.
- Any projects that continue to offer voters prizes, airdrops, competition entries, or any exchange of value to encourage votes after this notice has been published will be removed from all illegal votes or disqualified for Polaris Plus. (All teams have been contacted to ensure they are aware of the rules, Neo will reserve the rights of the final decision).
- We will set up a channel where users can fill complaints of any further breaches of competition rules.
Further, phase one will end on June 28 at 8 PM (UTC+8) as scheduled, Neo and Dorahacks will take one week to validate counts and distribute the initial $20,000 in funds. Phase two will start on July 5th and lasts for two weeks until July 19th to allow all projects a chance to compete under a fairer community environment.
We sincerely hope the community and project teams will respect the rules moving forward to ensure competition funds end up in the hands of the teams that the community loves most. We’d want to see real users with real belief in each project behind each vote. Neo Community, it’s your time to participate in the Polaris Launchpad to decide who the winner is! Let’s see out the remainder of the competition in the fairest possible manner.
