Crowdspot Unveils New Updates & Features
Core developers have made significant updates to Crowdspot, making it more accessible and streamlined for the community to identify and report abnormal Hotspots.
Legitimate Hotspot owners who uphold the values of the Helium Network are negatively impacted by a small percentage of bad actors who continue to engage in malicious activity to game Proof-of-Coverage (PoC) rewards without providing any real value to the network.
Schemes that seek to obtain rewards without providing network coverage often involve using hardware modifications or software attacks, which may make it appear that Hotspots are deployed in falsely-asserted locations. Hotspots that are participating in these attacks can be rewarded before being detected and blocked from the network.
Ensuring the reliability and integrity of Hotspot coverage is crucial for the Helium Network.
For the past four months, Crowdspot has provided the community with the tools to investigate Helium Network Hotspot data and understand atypical Hotspot behavior.
Since then, community members have stepped up their involvement and leveraged this resource to help keep the network healthy by analyzing individual Hotspots and using their voice to recommend Hotspots to the Denylist, a list of Hotspots identified as gaming the network.
With this update, Crowdspot will feature an easy-to-use submission system to enable any community member to directly report atypical Hotspots to the Denylist through an enhanced interface.
By integrating the Denylist process with Crowdspot, community members have the ability to identify and report gaming Hotspots directly in the tool itself, without needing to sign up for a GitHub account.
Ultimately, these Crowdspot updates help ensure rewards are going to trustworthy Hotspots that are providing valuable coverage.
By integrating Hotspot submissions directly into Crowdspot, community members can directly identify and recommend Hotspots based on the data available to be added to the Denylist. Additional features include adding comments, linking external evidence, and associating suspicious wallets for further investigation.
In addition to simplifying the submission process, Denylist signers are able to directly analyze submissions and review the same evidence the community provides, without navigating to another website. This will drastically speed up the time it takes for a gaming Hotspot to be nominated to and appear on the Denylist.
With this release, Hotspot submissions take place on www.github.com/helium/denylist.
This Crowdspot update includes a number of key new features, including:
: Crowdspot provides an easier way for users to submit reports to the Denylist. For example, submissions can be made for one or many Hotspots.
: By using a combination of signal information, witness data, and ownership history, submissions are assigned a trust score to help determine their legitimacy.
: Users simply login with their wallet credentials, ensuring only network participants can make submissions.
: Users can search for submissions and see at a glance the type, status, and time submitted.
A big thanks to community members who have been actively involved in helping to keep the network healthy.
Start exploring Crowdspot at crowdspot.io.
To learn more details about Crowdspot, including instructions on how to use it, please visit Docs.
To provide feedback and participate in Crowdspot-related discussions, please join the #crowdspot channel in the Helium Discord.
We look forward to keeping the network healthy by reducing gaming and continuing to improve this process. Thank you to the community for your contributions!
