Incentive compatibility and Sybil resistance of Unbrowse incentives

Prove the incentive compatibility and Sybil-resistance properties of Unbrowse’s contributor incentive mechanisms, including the delta-based contribution attribution used for Tier 1 fee distribution.

Background

Unbrowse distributes Tier 1 fees among contributors using a delta-based attribution mechanism. The paper notes potential manipulation risks and that formal analysis is deferred, indicating a lack of rigorous guarantees about strategic behavior.

The authors explicitly list incentive compatibility proofs as an open problem in the conclusion.

References

Formal economic analysis, incentive compatibility proofs, controlled multi-region benchmarking, and deployment-scale validation remain open problems; the present contribution is an architectural proposal with an implemented system and initial empirical evidence that shared route lookup can outperform redundant browser rediscovery on the evaluated tasks.

— Internal APIs Are All You Need: Shadow APIs, Shared Discovery, and the Case Against Browser-First Agent Architectures  (2604.00694 - Tham et al., 1 Apr 2026) in Conclusion (final paragraph)