Gitcoin 3.0: Funding What Matters in the d/acc Era

Transcript

Introduction: Gitcoin 3.0

GM. >> All right. So, uh, this is, uh, let me set some context. This is a 20-minut session and we're going to talk about Gitcoin 3.0. Okay, cool. So, um, hey everyone. I'm Kevin Walke. I'm the founder of Gitcoin. see some of you in the audience that actually worked with Gitcoin in the past. So, thank you for your past contributions. I'm uh excited to talk about Gitcoin's future today. And the first thing I want to say is that I screwed up the AV. >> The first thing I want to say is that to me, Gitcoin's mission has always been what it's all about. Uh we have funded $70 million worth of Ethereum open

Funding $60M+ in Ethereum public goods

source software and public goods for the world. And we've landed on this saying fund what matters. We want to fund what matters in the 21st century. And we think that crypto as a funding substrate is a way that we can do better collective action and we can fund things that matter to the communities that they serve in a way that doesn't have as much administrative overhead as traditional bureaucracies or institutions do and leverage the power of networks in order to make sure that the funding makes it to the places where it needs to go. And so fund what matters has been our mission over the last several years and we've been dogmatically pursuing this mission of building better crowdfunding technology and using it to support the

Gitcoin 1.0: centralized grants era

causes that matter in the world and it's been a winding road. Uh I started Gitcoin in 2017. Uh we called that in retrospect we call that Gitcoin 1.0. Having a little bit of AV issues here that that might be me. I'm not sure. Um Gitcoin 1.0 0 is basically our our centralized grants era. So we basically ran a grants platform and it was a way of funding what matters to the Ethereum ecosystem. I think Matilda if you want to try to make sure the AV is okay. I also just stepped on this cord so this might be me.

Discovering quadratic funding

Cool. Um Gitcoin 1.0 know was uh centralized grants and we eventually stumbled on this mechanism called quadratic funding which is an extremely democratic way of funding what matters to the Ethereum community. Uh as Gitcoin blew up and it became a super popular project in the 2019 2020 era. Uh Vitalic I'm I'm proud to say called us a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem. And for me this caused a sort of existential crisis because I believe in decentralization. I believe in democratization but the way I built Bitcoin in the beginning was just wrong. it was just centralized. And so we went on this odyssey of launching Gitcoin 2.0, what was called Gitcoin Dow in the day and in back in the day. And in 2021, we launched the GTC token and

decentralized Gitcoin into a communitygoed project. Um, turns out that we were extremely naively optimistic about how Dows could run and it was extremely hard to find product market fit in the ecosystem as a grants provider. Um, and I think doing it as a DAO was like ten times more in hard mode. And so, uh, at the time I I exited, uh, the project and and went off and did my own thing for about, uh, two years and, uh, decided to come back in 2023 and 2024. And we're calling this new era Gitcoin 3.0. So, we basically tore Gitcoin down to its studs. And we're trying to figure out how do we work in the 2026 cycle, in the 2026

Gitcoin 2.0: DAO era & decentralization

environment. How do we work in a world where stable coins are going mainstream, where the geopolitical environment is changing a lot and AI is everywhere? It's the hot new thing. And um I think that you know another thing that I'm seeing that's happening in the Ethereum ecosystem is the increasing amount of plurality that's happening in the Ethereum ecosystem in terms of how it funds what matters. This is a uh a graph that I'm really proud of this research project that I worked on with John Bow and and Neil if you're in the audience uh to to uh a a really talented designer and a really talented engineer that I work with. And basically the way to read this graph is that uh the xaxis is 2019 to today. And then this is a

Lessons learned from DAO hard mode

percentagebased graph showing you where Ethereum public goods funding things like open- source funding were coming from. And back in the day it was uh basically the Ethereum Foundation and Mullikdo and Gitcoin grants. And I'm really proud that Mullikdo and Gitcoin grants were pioneers in an onchain way to fund what matters. Um I see some of mystitutional friends in the audience. That's just the opposite of an institution. Uh think like how would a network fund what matters as opposed to an institution which does it through hierarchy and bureaucracy. not calling out any specific hierarchies or bureaucracies in this uh but I think networks are super cool and we've always been about pushing the frontier of

Rebuilding Gitcoin for 2026

what's possible and then in 2021 when Gitcoin I think was a name brand in the space we sort of proved that this is possible we saw plurality of different projects that launched in the Ethereum ecosystem that were funding what matters and um you know some of these were like direct Gitcoin clones some of these were just innovative things in a in a new way but I'm really proud of what happened with optimism retrofunding and Uh, Protocol Guild I think is so cool and Octton and Artisan and Cultd and Radical Drips and QAC and Giveth and Cello Public Goods and Dow Drops and like I could just keep name dropping all these projects because now we're not just innovating on networks of funding. We're building networks that are building networks of funding. Okay, so it's fractal. The innovation is just

spiraling in all directions. And now we have programmable money. And so the way that we could build democratized institutions, executions that fund what matters is this design space is being explored by the network. And so I'm just really proud that we were early to that and sort of like in a lot of ways proved that it was possible. Um, but you know, I also think that now that I've returning to Bitcoin and we're trying to reinvent it, the world has just changed so much and it's the obvious things like AI and stable coins. Yes. But it's also the plurality of the Ethereum ecosystem and how it funds what matters that I think we have to adapt to. We're not the only game in town when it comes to onchain crowdfunding. And so this new direction uh that we're moving in is going to stay true to the mission but is

Plurality in Ethereum public goods funding

going to really embrace the plurality of providers in the space. And I think with that teed off I will hand it to Matilda who's going to tell us about the future of Gitcoin grants. Uh please join me in welcoming Matilda. Thanks, Awaki. Um, yeah, so my name is Matilda. I'm chief of staff at Gitcoin. I've been around Gitcoin for like almost four years now. Um, back in the day, we used to call the Gitcoin grants rounds GR. I've been around since GR15 and we've just concluded, end of last year, we uh concluded GG24. So, I've been through quite a few evolutions and iterations of the program and kind of taking a step back following on what

Fractal innovation & networks funding networks

Awakcoin grants program as I'm sure most of you in this room are familiar with kicked off in 2019 and we used to run four rounds a year. So, around a quarter was really predominantly focused on QF and that from 2019 to 2024 that's what we were focusing on. But then in GG23 which was beginning of last year which that was our first multi-mechanism round we started realizing that yes quadratic funding is a really powerful mechanism but it's not a one-sizefits-all. So we ex uh ex um we did we ran our first multi-mechanism round where we um

experimented with running our own legacy OSS program within two buckets. So we bucketed the early stage projects through quadratic funding which is a really good crowdfunding signaling tool to highlight those early stage projects. But the more mature builders in our ecosystem, we ran them through a retrofunding round. And just separating early stage and mature builders was a really successful way of um I don't want to say comparing them to each other, but just putting them in two separate pools allowed us to evaluate them in a much more fair and valuable way. Um and also just going multimechanism with our community rounds. We encouraged everyone

Multi-mechanism rounds (GG23)

that came in and applied to run a community round alongside us to become more plural with the mechanisms that they were using. And we saw a lot of really really great innovation and um a really a lot of great mechanisms coming to the table. What we did in GG24 was we started stepping uh we we went a step beyond that. So kind of like Awoki was mentioning you know up until then it was a very centralized kind of decision-making process with the Gitcoin grants program we as Gitcoin used to decide what to fund in each round and with GG24 we said well

Early-stage vs mature builder separation

actually we should go to the community we should go to the ecosystem to figure out what's the most important thing to fund at any given time. So, we did a um rigorous sensemaking process process which I'll get into on the next slide. Um but that really um established kind of the foundation of what we're moving into next. And as you can see through the Gitcoin grants program alone, it's been over $60 million in distributed funding towards builders. Uh we've had also some of the really biggest in the name uh biggest in the ecosystem have get early seed funding through Gitcoin.

GG24: ecosystem-first sense-making

Um it's been for me personally it's been an amazing journey being part of this program and seeing their evolutions and so many other programs in the space popping up. So something that we saw with the problem first public goods funding that we did in GG24 was the sensemaking process. You can't really see the chart on the right too well, but I encourage you to scan that QR code because hats off to Open Source Observer, specifically Roit Melikar. He created a GG24 interactive data analysis dashboard. And you can go in and look at the data from each QF round. Uh this one specifically that I'm linking is um all

about Ethereum problem space mapping which was our that's what we focused on for GG24. We wanted to figure out and fund Ethereum's biggest problems at that time. So what this chart shows is it shows the category. So it's the high level problem um in the Ethereum ecosystem and then the specific challenges within each category and then how each round within GG24 addressed um those problems and yeah so you can go have a look at that detail um on that dashboard as well and what that showed us is it wasn't a perfect round but it did show us that the outside in network network first approach is really

Problem mapping & Open Source Observer dashboard

valuable. So that's what we're doing at Gitcoin now as we're reinventing ourselves and also our program is really focusing on that. And like I mentioned, it's really kind of established the foundation for what we're moving into next. And kind of just an interesting thing that we also saw with quadratic funding is that it really worked well. This is also on that data analysis dashboard that um I shared earlier. It worked well um with uh the visible tooling so dashboards, developer frameworks etc. but it actually underfunded long horizon infrastructure.

Why QF underfunded long-horizon infra

So I think it is a really important thing that we have been doing in the space for the last year or so is looking at different mechanisms. Um because I do personally I do think that within the public goods funding ecosystem we do have to sometimes maybe quite often these days just take a breath and take a step back and figure out how are we funding things and how can we change um what we're doing. So for GG25 before I hand it back over to Awoki what we're going to be doing next year and you guys are getting some alpha here because we have not announced this yet but as I mentioned earlier we used to do quarterly rounds and then we used to do two big rounds a year but what we want

to move into next is going smaller but more often. So perhaps going around a month. So what we want to do is kind of take what we learned from GG24 and that domain first um approach but have a category span for example from GG25 to GG29. We want to focus the next iteration on DAC which is quite a broad category but then every round can be focused on a specific um category within that. I would love to then see within those smaller rounds maybe build a demos come back and you know yeah just bring in like more value and impact in that

Smaller, more frequent rounds (GG25+)

way. But um I also want to give a huge shout out to Carl Savone from open source observer Benjamin life and Awoki and the team for working on the DAC market map. Awaki do you want to give a preamble on? Thanks, Matilda. Forgot that I was speaking again when I walked all the way across the stage. Um, so, uh, basically, uh, does anyone in the audience know what DACK is? Raise a hand. Uh, can you just shout it out?

What is d/acc?

>> All right. >> There's there's there's four of them. Anyone else know the other two? >> So, the ones that I'm aware of are differential accelerationism, decentralized accelerationism, democratized accelerationism. Excellent. Do you know what the fourth one is? There's a fourth one. It's purposely uh a little bit ambiguous. So, basically the idea uh DAK is this really um interesting set of ideas where basically high level um the idea is that uh there's the accelerationists, people who think that we should just move faster and move through any contemporary issues we have uh in society by moving faster with technology. Um, and then there's

like the D cells, the people who think that no, we should go back to sort of like farming and move technology out of our lives like the sort of like lettake. And DACK I interpret as sort of a compromise between accelerationism of everything and the del position which is that we're moving too fast. We need to like slow things down. Uh and basically with DAOK, the idea is what if we accelerated our defensive technologies, our democratized technologies, the things that limit the blast radius when something goes wrong with technology. And over time, if technology is growing exponentially, then the difference between the defensive tech and the offensive tech is going to just mean that we have more stability and we have uh better things that are better

Defensive tech: atoms vs bits

technology that are working for everyday people. So basically DIAC is this sort of like broad idea set that has been put forth by Ethereum founder Vitalik Bdderin of a bunch of things that are good because they follow this sort of like DAC view of the world and there's believe it or not a market map out there for DACK. So if you want to fund DAC if you want to fund things that are contemporarily good then we want to start having a map of the topology the ctography of that design space. And so that's what we've put about 3 months of research into producing. Um you can see uh basically the left right axis is atoms versus bits. So basically are we

Thrive vs. Survive Framework

accelerating defensive things in the physical world or in the digital world. And then the up down axis is thrive or survive. So basically, are we helping people accelerate human thriving or are we helping just things that prevent us from from from having uh from a lack of survival? And so basically there's a bunch of different subcategories of things. And what I love about this is that it bridges privacy zero knowledge proofs uh in in as as a defensive technology to things like decentralized social or resilient crowdfunding. These are all defensive technologies in uh in in a lot of different ways. And so as Gitcoin is moving into funding what

matters in a contemporary view, we're we're turning our aperture of attention from just Ethereum's infrastructure and open source to things that are DAC for the world. Things that are projecting the good things about crypto out into the world. And we're doing that by mapping and sense making the things that actually exist out there. So, we've got an actual uh physical copy of these infographics that we'll be putting around ETH Boulder. This is the first time we've dropped anything like this. I'd be curious to get your feedback about it and especially if there's something that we missed, there's a QR code up in the top and you can tell us about it. Um, I'm a big fan of uh Cunningham's law. I don't know if anyone knows what that is in the audience, but it's basically if you want to know the answer to something, uh, you don't ask a

Exporting Ethereum public goods globally

question, you post the wrong answer to it. Uh, and then people get so triggered that they have to tell you how wrong you are, but then you get the answers. And so I think we'll publish probably a V2 of this when when we release this out on the socials and people are so mad at us for not including their project, uh, which is like the way Twitter works, uh, then we'll update the map to include everything. And then when GG25 rolls around, I think in a couple months we're thinking about doing the first GG25 round. We're going to start hopscotching across these domains and funding things that are actually good for the world. exporting the public good funding of Ethereum to the world. So, I'm excited about Gitcoin moving forward in this direction and I think DIA is a great place for us to wedge ourselves into the

Future funding domains

next generation of the Ethereum And I think with that, I'll hand it back to Matilda who's going to close us out. Is that right or am I closing us out? >> Yeah, I can close out. >> Okay. All right. Matilda, welcome back. >> Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, and just to go back um so how we're going to be operationalizing GG25 um is I think Awoki you said hopscotching from one to the next um throughout the next few rounds and I'm actually going to be co-hosting a workshop on this at 2 p.m.

at Terrible Turtle with Benjamin Life who is the brains who was one of the big brains behind this. So if I would love um this is part of what we're doing now with getcoin grants. It's not just us making the decisions. So, I would love to work with anyone in this room um who is interested in coming and jamming with us to figure out like what should we fund in GG25, you know, how should we be structuring this and how can we um serve the community in a more valuable way every single time we run these rounds. So, I'm really excited to be um rolling out a more a more regular cadence of the rounds again and I'm very excited to see how all of that plays out. So I think it's a a very, you know, important time

Closing & call to participate

in our ecosystem right now to be taking stock, to be figuring out how how do how can we do this better and as Gitcoin, that's something I'm really proud of with the work that I've been doing with Awoki and the team for quite a few years now is that that's something that we've always done. We've taken stock. We've figured out where we went wrong, what we did right, and how we can change moving forward. So, I'm really excited about this next um endeavor. So, yeah, join us at 2 p.m. if you are free. Thank you.