Gitcoin 2.0: Retroactive Funding, Quadratic Funding, and More

Transcript

hey everyone my name is Kevin aukee I am the founder of gitcoin and my presentation today is about the future of gitcoin and how we're going multi mechanism so I've just shared my screen and I'm going to take you through a quick deck which talks about that trajectory and how we got on it and what it means for where getcoin is going in the future so basically uh what I'm going to tell you is how we started with quadratic funding uh which is a mechanism which is very good at funding communities based off of what everyday community members think and I'm going to talk about how I think the future of public goods funding and regeneration of dows is multi mechanism and how gitcoin is pursuing that in the future so uh for

those of you who are not familiar with getcoin here's a little bit about us we run getcoin grants which is a quarterly grants round that supports public goods open source software and other initiatives in the ethereum community over the last last 20 quarterly rounds which is about six years we've generated about 4 million unique donations to about 4,000 different projects and generated $60,000 towards public goods in the ethereum ecosystem I'm very happy to count some of the most talented people in the ecosystem and projects in the ecosystem as users of gitcoin Grants first raising money on getcoin grants back in the 2019 and 2020 cycle and now

many many of these projects have figured out that grants equals growth for their own ecosystem and so they're using uh getcoin grants in order to build their own ecosystems from there so uh it's been a lot of fun to work with some of the top projects in the ethereum ecosystem and help power their growth the way that we have done that is through our Flagship product gcoin grants which is based off of a mechanism called quadratic funding quadratic funding was based was invented by Zoe hittig Glenn W and vitalic buan and it's basically a a capital allocation mechanism that is very Democratic and is good at getting small donors and large donors to get together and fund things

so basically the way quadratic funding works is that you set out a matching pool and then projects are able to apply to be a part of that matching pool and then everyday contributors when they contribute to those projects will get their contributions matched by the matching pool but it'll be based more on the number of donors to those projects as opposed to the amount that they've been giving so um basically a really powerful way of doing Democratic Capital allocation in the ethereum ecosystem and I think that it's an amazing tool but it's got some dependencies which add some complexity uh because the amount of funding is given to projects that have the broadest space of support we need to have what's

called civil resistance so basically making sure that people are uh not making up identity when they're contributing on getcoin grants and doing that in a privacy preserving way that prevents civil attacks sock puppet account attacks is uh quite a challenge and it adds a little bit of complexity to quadratic funding uh another attack Vector of quadratic funding is collusion collusion is basically hey I'll give you a dollar if you contribute to my project and uh collusion is is a a thing that can that can mess up quadratic funding rounds so um basically gitcoin came to prominence thanks to quadratic funding and uh we've been running 20 rounds over the last six years in order to support projects in the ethereum ecosystem and I

like to think that we're using these rounds as learning experiences where we can navigate the search space of what is the best possible mechanism designed for creating a quadratic funding Capital allocation ecosystem and we've learned a lot over the last 20 rounds of quadratic funding adding features like that that now come standard in quadratic funding apps things like match estim uh things like the ability to check out in a cart are things that we've added over time and that's how we've generated 4 million unique donations with uh with quadratic funding but we have discovered over the last couple years that the future is multi mechanism so if you think about the again the search space of trying to find the best possible

Capital allocation mechanism in order to distribute funding to ethereum communities and Dows that are using Bitcoin grants I think the search space is fundamentally has many local Maximas to it so we uh when we were doing quadratic funding rounds we're just looking for the local Maxima of what's possible with quadratic funding but I actually think that there's many other elegant ways of doing Capital allocation in web 3 and I want to just say mad respect to optimism and retroactive public goods funding really good at retroactively rewarding contributors I think that I've also because quadratic funding can be kind of complex gained a new reverence for Simplicity just giving

out direct grants uh very simply on chain I think is a really great way to reward Innovative projects that are working on the public good in these ecosystems so I have discovered over the last couple years that this search space will not just have one winner one optimal design it is a plurality based search space and we're going to see lots of different local Maximas of different Capital allocation mechanisms and want to spend the rest of my talk just kind of going through what some of those are so direct grants uh I think that if uh if grants funding mechanisms were were uh ice cream flavors then direct grants would be vanilla it's the most plain it's the most simple but Simplicity we shouldn't Overlook Simplicity because

Simplicity is power it's the ability to just send projects uh money based off of their application and what is in their application and I think that many uh grants programs will be built on top of direct grants and optimizations on top of direct grants retroactive public goods funding I think is something that optimism has pioneered and I'm just really really proud of the optimism Community for putting retroactive funding on the map and I think it's really a profound Insight that it's easier to fund public goods with the benefit of hindsight uh than it is to know ahead of time what's going to have value so basically uh it's easier to say what was good as opposed to what might be good in the future and retroactive

funding I I think is is really something that has been proven out over the last year or two by the optimism ecosystem and getcoin has been doing some retroactive funding rounds with projects like pocket and cello and filecoin and Li P2P and we're really excited to take what optimism has pioneered and to build it into other ecosystems another mechanism that I'm really excited about right now and is being built in and around the getcoin ecosystem by our friends at onehive is conviction voting so basically this is a tool that's very good at Bottoms Up decision making within a dow basically proposals uh become objects that you can stake your governance tokens on within

the context of a Dallas funding infrastructure with conviction voting and so basically conviction voting is a way of De demonstrating your conviction and what projects you want to be see funded by staking tokens on those different projects and the conviction charges up over time the more longer you stake your tokens the more money can be pulled out of the treasury by those projects and so um really excited to see what happens with conviction voting as onehive and Alo protocol are able to make it available to Everyday members of the web3 ecosystem okay so again uh just to zoom back out getcoin grants is now becoming multi mechanism and we're playing with all of these other different mechanisms

that we think are complementary to quadratic funding and the next one that I want to talk about that I'm really excited about is uh self-cured Registries so basically Guild is the biggest example of this right now and what protocol Guild is is a list of people who are working on ethereum layer one public goods on the actual protocol and basically uh it's a list of protocol Guild members that curate who's else also on the list and then from there what they do is they go out to Dows and uh increasingly to hedge funds that are launching on ethereum and saying hey why don't you fund the people that are building the base layer of this network that you love and uh this really works well at Bottoms Up curation and

definition of important domains when there are clear domain definitions protocol Guild is for protocol developers and I I think that um you know we're still going to see how this scales but protocol Guild is the most successful self-curing registry that exists out there and um I think that people have been flirting with ideas of of forking protocol Guild and building other types of guilds out there and I'm excited to see how that works in the future um let's see how much time do I have I guess I could talk about maybe one or other or two other mechanisms and then and then I can start heading towards the end of my presentation the next one that I want to talk about is this thing called grants ships which is uh a project built by the Dow Masons shout out Dow Masons if you're listening

to this talk basically Grant ships is a meta grant funding mechanism basically what it what it is is instead of saying hey we want our grants program to be retro pgf or quadratic funding or conviction voting or insurance contracts or any of these other things uh with Grant ships basically what you can say is you can say I'm going to let any of these mechanisms be fair game and I'm going to allow different ships to apply to access funding from the treasury and deploy it according to their own methodology with their own product and I think that what we're looking at here is basically Grant programs that have a meta allocation framework and they're allocating to qf direct grants retroactive funding all at once and so

um Grant ship is sort of is like a meta allocation framework in what in which you allow Dow governance to decide what happens with the grants programs and it puts plurality at the base layer of your Dow uh using Grant ship so um for those of you uh uh that that are are sort of reading between the lines I'm just really excited about the endless possibilities that I see for New Capital allocation strategies to exist on top of blockchains we can now program our values into our money and so we can build cryptoeconomic systems that represent our value and wow that's just so profound I think that as tokenization eats the world the Tam the total total available market for onchain Capital

allocation becomes massive trillions of dollars uh uh will be spent on Capital allocation in the future through Capital allocation tools and capital allocation is really a very simple thing in our everyday lives it's how do we decide to spend money on things when you pay bills you're allocating Capital when you go to edcon and uh you pay a taxi cab on the way over that is capital allocation but at scale Capital allocation becomes mirrored by gatekeeping and intermediaries that causes it not to be precise for Grant giving organizations and for Nos and governments Capital allocation is a full-time job and now that we can have trustless programmable precise and scalable Capital allocation on chain I think the world is our oyster

in terms of funding what matters for-profit and nonprofit across the world and so I'm just really excited about the the endless possibilities for Capital allocation the ones that I showed you right now are quadratic funding and conviction voting and retro funding but I think that it follows that anything that is capital allocation in the future could be reinvented by blockchains because blockchains change the way we move money around the world so uh there's a bunch of other future mechanisms that I hope to see be built in and around the gitcoin ecosystem and in ethereum and I am just I'm here for it we're going to do more scalable precise Capital allocation than has ever been possible before by uh by bringing these Primitives on chain um getcoins current offerings if you're out there and you're trying to

build growth for your web3 community we offer direct grants which is basically just like a simple Grant giving program that you can put your grants on chain and basically send tokens to projects that are doing valuable work in your ecosystem usually this is where ecosystems will start when they want to start allocating Capital uh of course we offer quadratic funding to any Dow that wants to distribute tokens based off of the number of communities Community supporters that actually support that project quadratic funding is really good at Democratic catap allocation getcoin offers quadratic funding out of the box so that you and your Dow can do quadratic funding fund what matters in your ecosystem and build an ecosystem of contributors around your uh around your Dow so we've done this for ethereum

we've done it for zalo we've done it for a handful of other projects and really excited to give more democratic Capital allocation tools out to the people which will help them fund what matters to them of course retroactive funding is taking off right now big shout out to our friends at optimism that have uh basically we worked with them on their voting interface and now they're allowing us to offer it to other people in the ecosystem retroactive funding is really very powerful for giving funds to a project after the completion of a goal and based off of badge holder opinions and one of the things I really love about retroactive funding is just how much heat there is there and how much there's people discovering best practices it feels like the early days of quadratic funding in 2019 and 2020 it

feels like that for retr funding right now so we offer all three of these things if you want to do funding what matters in your ecosystem then please reach out uh to me or uh you know hit up getcoin doco and you can you can uh sign up for a grant program and we can help give you a checkup for the best practices for your grants ecosystem um and then I'll I'll I'll close my talk by just talking about this book that I've written and have started Distributing over the last uh over the last month or so I actually launched it at at ECC and it's uh it's called it's called the onchain capital allocation handbook I'll uh let me just un unblur this for you right here okay

so onchain Capital allocation handbook and basically the idea here is that there's this really rich design space of what's possible for onchain Capital allocation and my goal with this book was to help people discover this on emerging Frontier of onchain coordination and capital allocation that we're going to be doing in web 3 and uh you know I am not a mechanism maximalist my job in in this uh in this book was to talk about the 30-some mechanisms that I discovered uh quadratic funding retr funding conviction voting Grant ships Assurance contracts honor uh rotational voting systems bonding curves nosce safe like that there's 30 different

mechanisms that are available to help your Community Fund what matters to it and I just so so excited about cartography the design space and making it available to uh everyday everyday members of the community I think that you know as the founder of gitcoin I maybe have access to a lot of these ideas and the throughput of knowledge that is contained in the sheer power and Brilliance of the ethereum community I wanted to make sure that that access is democratized and that everyone else can see uh what I what I see with respect to this domain so alob book. gcoin doco uh you can download a PDF of the book but uh the the art is is pretty is pretty great and I would recommend that you get a print copy of the book you can get that for I think 30 bucks United States

that's just basically our printing costs and um I put a lot of work into into uh making this dry domain of mechanism design that typically appears in academic papers and giving it a little bit of zaz and visualizing the sort of life in biology that uh that I see when I see these onchain Capital allocation networks the the things that they allow people to do and so yeah it's uh it's a it's worth picking up if uh you're into any of these ideas so I'd say uh check out gitcoin if you are uh interested in funding what matters in your ecosystem and you can pick up the book at alob book. gcoin doco if you're interested in learning more and my email is Kevin

gitcoin doco doco if you have any questions about this presentation the future past or present of gitcoin then please hit me up and thank you so much for inviting me to speak at edcon I really wish I could be there IRL I went to edcon a couple times ago and I think it's a really great community and I uh I hope to be invited in the future so thanks so much for the for the time and uh let me know if you want to do any q&as and if not I guess I'll I'll hop off from here thanks so much all right thanks very much let's give a big hand to [Applause] Kevin Uh Kevin is available for some questions he said Kevin can you still hear us yeah I can still hear you I

can't see anything there okay but I can hear you all right um yes let's see how do we do this uh does anybody have any questions all right we have a gentleman at the first row or can you maybe come here and you can ask ask your question here okay Hey Kevin uh yeah uh thanks for uh the speech it's very inspiring to always hear about how uh gitcoin can help uh developers and and and and and uh ecosystem that want to fund them is there any plan to uh

allow let's say getcoin fundies or funders to help each other like instead of just like two side two ways so do you have like funders help fund uh uh project help projects or ecosystem help ecosystems is there any plan on that thanks for the question I couldn't exactly make out all of it would you would you mind repeating it or with someone with the mic could you repeat it yeah so the question is of uh it's good to to know that ecosystems can fund a project through getcoin right um what about is there any efforts that you plan to have projects help each other who are being funded by gitcoin like using this power of network in uh in a gitcoin

yeah um well so uh you know part of our vision is to enable every doubt a fund what matters to it and I think that what I see emerging hopefully over time is a dow of dows where basically uh people participate in Bitcoin rounds and they earn GGC people contribute to optimism rounds and they earn o op uh and for every token and DOW Under the Sun I think there's sort of a plurality of ways that we can all work for each other and exchange tokens with each other and so I hope projects will be not only funders but fundes and uh play on both sides of the coin there but there's probably more we can do there email me at Kevin gcoin doco if you have specific ideas and happy to chat more thank you awesome thank you any other

questions looks like everyone has had a long evening last night yeah okay well uh thanks thanks for having me edcon is great and I hope that you all have a have a great time all right thanks Kevin all right bye bye [Applause]