Onchain Builders: Expand user metrics beyond Farcaster IDs

[ccerv1]

What are you providing feedback on?

Metrics - feedback about the metrics used in the Eval Algo

Please describe your feedback

This issue captures feedback raised by multiple community members here.

Feel free to comment / add more ideas!

Summary

Community members have highlighted concerns about relying on Farcaster as the primary (or exclusive) onboarding mechanism within the OP Stack ecosystem. While recognizing Farcaster’s advantages (e.g., being built on the OP Stack), people urge considering additional options to prevent gatekeeping and provide alternative user metric derivation methods.

Background

• Farcaster is currently being positioned as a key part of the metrics models, but in the long run we want more than one source of user numbers.
• For any user model, the risk of Sybil attacks and bot accounts is real, but can be addressed through multiple verification strategies.

Proposed Solutions

Note these come from the discussion, they have not been prioritized for impact or feasibility

1. KYC-Verified Users

• Leverage Gnosis Pay (or similar) cardholder data, which is KYC-compliant.
• Although the total number of these users may be limited, analyzing connected addresses could identify user patterns and potential trust scores.
• See also: Dune Query #4120201

2. CEX-Linked Addresses

• Use addresses associated with reputable centralized exchanges (e.g., Coinbase, Kraken, Binance).
• Filter these addresses by additional metrics (Optimism activity, account age, balance, attestations, or Superchain engagement).
• Potentially incorporate the existing Superseed participants for more robust data points.

3. Non-KYC Addresses

• Filter by meaningful onchain activity (transaction history, account age, or asset holdings).
• Employ heuristics to discern legitimate users from bots or Sybil attackers without requiring full KYC.

Please provide references or examples

No response

[JSeiferth]

Thanks for raising the issue @ccerv1.

Cross-posting some feedback from the forum for reference
@cheeky-gorilla 's feedback:

I’m not in favor of using Farcaster as a measure of users for Sybil resistance. My Farcaster address is unique to Farcaster, and I believe everyone should use one unique address per service for privacy and security reasons. Encouraging the use of a single address for all activities is risky and could lead to significant losses if not managed carefully. Instead, it might be worthwhile to consider a community-run competition to identify and exclude Sybils, scammers etc.

GFXs feedback

Guess our key critique here is that we don’t believe the distribution of Farcaster addresses is simply a random selection of actual humans, and will skew the results in ways that are not intended or desirable. Farcaster is a specialized social network, and there’s no particular reason to think that activity or presence on Farcaster maps to economically important/active users onchain.

OPUser Feedback

While Farcaster has positive aspects—such as being built on the OP Stack and I am in facor of supporting protocols within OP Stack—it should not be the exclusive onboarding mechanism, nor should it gatekeep participation.