Notary Disclosures Tracking

[galen-mcandrew]

Issue Description

A group of companies that have overlapping relationships with one another have submitted requests to be Fil+ notaries in the third round of elections. At this stage of any new ecosystem, there is bound to be collaboration, shared interests, aligned incentives, and at times mutual investments. It is not unreasonable for a company that invests in web3 projects, for example, to have multiple relationships with teams building in the Filecoin and IPFS space.

While these kinds of partnerships are reasonable, one of the primary goals of the Filecoin Plus program is to bring a layer of social trust to the network. With that in mind, the governance team strives for transparency, and encourages all of our collaborators to do the same.

Some questions about the amount of overlap and potential or possibility of collusion have been raised. There is also increased concern in this case, where multiple organizations also have large dataset applications open. This could lead to an entity or group of entities acting entirely as clients, notaries, and storage providers, which would be a violation of notary agreements and against the values and intent of the Filecoin Plus program and the DataCap subsidy.

Proposed Solution(s)

Some questions have been raised directly in the notary applications, as well as on Slack. I would like to consolidate these conversations into a single thread, allow the companies to address the issues, and allow the community to help track the interactions between these organizations.

I propose the companies each explain their role and relationships to one another. They can also list out their owned addresses, and further reiterate their disclosures, as required in the notary application.

Upfront Disclosures: Prior to being confirmed as a Notary, Notaries are expected to disclose all relevant addresses which they control, have a financial stake in, or are strongly connected to by other means. For the disclosure, the Notary should state the relevant addresses and the nature of the relationship
.

With these clearly documented addresses, we would then require that these organizations not act as self-signing notaries for any large datasets or clients, and additionally that the awarded DataCap would not be utilized in deals with their minerID's.

Once the community has sufficient explanation about these organizations and a record trail (for ongoing community audit), then we propose ratifying these applications as Fil+ notaries for the 3rd round of elections.

Table of addresses I suggest these notaries use the following table structure for consistency.

Organization	Github Handles	Slack Handles	Notary Address	LDN Client Address	Additional Address Disclosures - Type of Address (ex. minerID, client)
Text	Text	Text	f1...	f1...	f1... - client, f1... - minerID

Timeline

• Issue open for community discussion
• Discussion in July 12th Community Governance calls
• Decision announced at July 26th Community Governance calls

Technical dependencies

None specifically at this time.

Risks and mitigations

Ratifying all these organizations to serve as notaries and placing on the v3 large dataset multisig could allow for misallocations of DataCap, and an abuse of the notary responsibility. The community, other notaries, governance team, and root key holders will be responsible for monitoring the allocations. With the new tooling to remove DataCap from a client, this risk is mitigated.

Related Issues

Notary Applications:

• ND Labs
• POW Power
• NFTstar
• Bitrise Capital
• IPOLLO

Relevant Large Dataset Applications

• ND Labs
• POW Power
• NFTstar
• Bitrise Capital
• IPOLLO

[galen-mcandrew]

Tagging here: @NDlabs @POWPOWER2021 @NFTStar1 @Bitrise2020 @IPOLLO-OFFICIAL

[galen-mcandrew]

I wonder if this hackmd link works for the organizations to copy the table into markdown. Give it shot and let me know! https://hackmd.io/CRrrrdZ9Rqa_NcVsZ2XFiw

[Kobayashi-interflex]

As committed in the governance call, here I post my view on this issue. Frankly speaking, I don’t think it’s a good choice to make ND Labs a notary here. In the real world, dishonest behaviors will be published and I believe it’s the same for the Filecoin network since it’s some kind of basic ethic and common sense. We should take measures to prevent similar dishonest behaviors, let’s say, one ballot veto or restart the election to evaluate their certification. Notary is a special role in our community, it requires a solid reputation. So, I think ND Labs, are not qualified for a notary in responsibility and reputation, but other roles, SP or investor in the community are open for ND Labs. On the other hand, if ND Labs insist on being a notary or proving their innocence, I’d like to ask them to recover retrieving their history projects for both notaries and the community to check whether there’s something goes wrong. Granting ND Labs a notary is a severe violation of community rules and principles, I’m afraid that if ND Labs make this, there will be more and more copycat to follow their dishonest behaviors and totally destroy our democracy and environment. I believe CW shares the same idea with me.

[galen-mcandrew]

@Kobayashi-interflex Can you please provide some specific evidence or details regarding the "dishonest behavior" you are accusing ND Labs of?

Additionally, can you please provide an introduction? What is your role in the Filecoin ecosystem? I see your GitHub account was created last month; welcome!

[cryptowhizzard]

@galen-mcandrew

This abuse info is given in the initial slack thread.

https://filecoinproject.slack.com/archives/C01DLAPKDGX/p1654530346802849

Short summary;

50% of datacap stored towards 1 miner. Deals not retrievable Miners not pingable.

The question at hand is not the behaviour, as the that is clear. The datacap is not distributed according to the rules. The Q is, was it done intentionally and on purpose. The second Q is that notary’s should be carefully and carry thrust.

Reading in the thread, seeing the bot’s and fake accounts respond gives me doubts. This behaviour should not be something we want to see.

[galen-mcandrew]

@cryptowhizzard thanks for pointing to the thread.

So re-reading that 97 reply thread (😅 ), seems like there is a lot of "chatter" with two specific salient claims: the number of 'new' and suspicious accounts commenting in support of the approval, and 'dishonest deal making'.

While I agree the accounts are suspicious, I would rather focus on the specific claims of 'dishonest behavior' as it relates to quantifiable chain behavior.

So, it seems like the biggest actual question comes from unretrievable/un-dialable minerIDs and a consolidation of deals? Which specific minerIDs are in question here? My hope is to get specific data-driven evidence to present to the community so that we can make a decision from fact.

[cryptowhizzard]

@NDLabs there is no malicious fight.

What i don’t understand is this:

Suppose that one of you guys becomes notary as i suggested as solution. This identity can do all the work and voice your groups input to the community. He/she can organise the datacap request which is more then fine as you are not allowed to sign your own datacaps anyway. One man can do this job perfectly.

By having 5 notary’s (according to the rules you can not sign your own datacap requests) you only hamper your own ability to act straight? What are these 5 going to do then? For LDN’s it doesn’t matter either. One notary can sign as many LDN’s as he believes fit, no datacap limits here one can give out. This makes my solution a perfect fit?

That brings me to the doubt of the community. You guys are one group. We want to prevent that you have 5 notary’s at hand to push your own LDN requests as there are 5 needed for support. What exactly is it that each of you will do to benefit the community then what I have missed?l and how do we guaranty that this is not the case?

[cryptowhizzard]

@NDLabs @Bitrise2020

Please check -> https://github.com/filecoin-project/notary-governance/tree/main/notaries

"Upfront Disclosures: Prior to being confirmed as a Notary, Notaries are expected to disclose all relevant addresses which they control, have a financial stake in, or are strongly connected to by other means. For the disclosure, the Notary should state the relevant addresses and the nature of the relationship."

[galen-mcandrew]

Tagging again: @NDLabs @POWPOWER2021 @NFTStar1 @Bitrise2020 @IPOLLO-OFFICIAL

Please list out your info (org, slack & github handles, notary address, ldn client address, and 'owned' address disclosures) here in this specific issue. You may be able to copy this hackmd link to structure the table: https://hackmd.io/CRrrrdZ9Rqa_NcVsZ2XFiw

Once we get the info listed here, I can update the parent comment with your details.

[aaronsjx07]

From what I understand, is it impossible for these 5 notaries to sign an LDN at the same time? If they don't, I think it's reasonable. I don't think there are any other concern.

[llifezou]

We believe that it is reasonable to have a partnership in the WEB3 field. As long as the initial notarization applications are recognized, and these organizations have sufficient explanations and records to track, then approving these applications as notaries is beneficial for building the Filecoin ecosystem.

[ipfscn]

Two questions here: Can you guys guarantee that you have disclosed all relationships? @POWPOWER2021 @NDLabs @NFTStar1 @Bitrise2020 @IPOLLO-OFFICIAL What if these five notaries sign their own LDN in the future? Can we revoke their notary qualifications and LDN application? @galen-mcandrew

[NDLABS-Leo]

Hi, @raghavrmadya @dkkapur @galen-mcandrew ND Labs has filled in the form. (https://hackmd.io/CRrrrdZ9Rqa_NcVsZ2XFiw) Please let me know if it need to be edited. Thanks! Long-time discussion has also given us some ideas about our role as a SP in the Fil+ community. The most fundemental thing we need to do as a SP is to store our clients' data in a reasonable way. The goal of Fil+ is to make the network more valuable, so we should be actively contacting clients and introducing more clients to the Fil+ network instead of waiting for them to "place orders". While some people come between and prevents SPs from finding valuable clients to participate in the Filecoin network, and this does not help the network at all.

To point out, NDLabs is not going to put these five notaries in our pockets. Acting as a proposer, what we do is recommand those partners to participate in the Filecoin ecosystem. We expect those partners to be treated equally. ND Labs can't and won't replace them as notaries, and we refuse to be replaced.

This is our first involvement in notary governance. As we know, during the last notary application, one company would also recommend and guide others to participate in the notary application. They got enrolled and made a credible contribution to the Filecoin Ecology (this is not an accusation). Therefore, we consider this to be an appropriate behavior in favor of expanding Ecology's boundaries. Besides, after many conversations with other notaries, we realized that we needed to disclose as much detailed information as possible to make Fil+ more transparent, which we already did. Not only have we disclosed our relationships with 4 other notaries, but we've also disclosed other companies that are active in the Filecoin network. Hopefully, these disclosures will make members of the community more aware of ND's relationships with these entities. In addition, the disclosures will prevent us from acting as a self-signed notary for any large data sets or clients.

The most controversy previously was the relationship between ND and several other companies, which made community members doubt. Due to the problem of Github account, we resubmitted our application for notary several days ago. We also tried to contact other 4 companies. However, I'm not sure whether they are willing to resubmit their application or not.

As discussed above, we hope that community members can cast their worries aside.

Finally, we will obey the rules like before. Thanks governance team for following up. If there is anything that requires our cooperation, please let me know! Thank you all for your support!

[raghavrmadya]

Commenting for everyone's visibility - Based on no pushback to @Stoibers comment above and community discussion at the governance call, NDLabs will be added to the V3 Multisig today. Their round 3 notary application was impacted by Github flags and they submitted the new application here - https://github.com/filecoin-project/notary-governance/issues/604

If anyone has a concern, please follow-up in this thread