Gitcoin Beta Round with Ben West, Michelle Ma, Nate Gosselin

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today we are talking about the git coin beta round so this is a beta of gitcoin's new decentralized quadratic funding protocols uh on the Pod today we have Nate who is workstream lead and a head of aloe protocol and of Grant stack allo protocol is the new protocol that allows anyone to run quadratic funding in their own Dao Michelle is a product manager also an owl protocol and Grant stack Ben is the grants program lead and Lead Troublemaker uh at getcoin and so this round is about git coin and quadratic funding so if you have not heard Bitcoin

grants is a crowdfunding application that has just delivered 50 million dollars worth of impact to the web3 ecosystem funding for things like open source software um decentralized science uh covid relief Ukraine stuff like that and basically what they've done uh at git coin is released a new decentralized protocol version of that product and this is the second round that is a new decentralized quadratic funding round on top of that product so uh what is quadratic funding um just basically a quick primer is that it is a funding methodology invented by Glenn Glenn Weil metallic buterin and Zoe hitsig that basically allows you to

Route Capital to where the projects are the most democratically popular as opposed to just the ones that are favored by the rich in uh the rich people so basically it's a way of democratizing the way you fund an ecosystem's public goods and um you know uh I I am uh one of the co-founders of git coin and disclaimer I hold GTC which is the governance token of the Bitcoin network but I'm disaffiliated from leadership at get coin dial so purely playing the role of podcast host in this episode and um you know this episode is all about the beta round so basically there is millions of dollars of funding available at

grants.getcoin.com available starting today um um and uh the rounds are web3 open source software ZK Tech web3 Community community and education climate Solutions ethereum infrastructure diversity equity and inclusion those are the core get coin rounds and then they also have featured Community rounds so this is this is an interesting new thing is that communities can now run their own rounds and those are web 3 social ens token engineering meta crisis decentralized science mantle grants greater China the Civil resistance and uh advocacy quadratic funding rounds so go to grants.getcoin.com today check out

the projects that are in those rounds and let's fund public goods so this episode is all about the grants beta round and uh Nate and Michelle and Ben are the ones to tell you about it so without further Ado I give you the get coin date around enjoy coordination hair Dow is here to Route Around the middlemen in biomedical research for hair loss hairdow is an open source investment and operating organization using the coordination tools of ethereum to begin exploring the frontier of biomedical research that bureaucracy and Middleman have previously prevented did you know that 66 percent of men and 50 of women will experience hair loss in their lifetimes hair Dow has already done some crazy cool science stuff like their first research study on the impact of synthetic T3 and T4 thyroid hormones

on the human scalp and is also the second doubt ever to Mint an IP nft so if you want to explore the frontier of the decentralized science movement and maybe also You've Lost Your Hair along the way check out hair Dow at hairdow.xyz what's up what's up y'all welcome hey thanks for having us hello hello GM sir Jim so get coin bait around tell us about the beta round what is it and when is it I guess this question we'll start with you Ben could not be more excited about the get coin bait around uh this is the first time we've opened up the new gitcoin Grant stack that these uh two lovely humans I'm joined with today have been working tirelessly on for quite a while at this point

um the beta round is going to be open from the Tuesday the 25th to May the 9th uh so you know good two weeks for folks to get in and show their support for a lot of different projects we have five core rounds and eight featured rounds uh the core rounds were selected by a vote uh from community members uh so the core rounds that we have and I'm just going to read this right off the webpage which is grants.getcoin.co we have the web3 open source software around the ZK Tech round web 3 community and education round climate Solutions and core youth infrastructure those are the rounds that are being run by Bitcoin and then we have eight featured rounds that are sort of run at arm's length by a group of

Partners we have web 3 social uh ens token engineering which is the token engineering Commons The Meta crisis round run by super modular very excited about that one uh DSi run by a group of community stewards who actually just had a vote using joke Dao to determine who was doing their eligibility checks and whatnot very cool to see uh mantle run by bit Dao a greater China round for folks in the Chinese Community a civil resistance round run by a bunch of folks from our fraud detection and defense team as well as an advocacy around run by coinbase which should be a big one this round given all the stuff that's going on in Washington DC and elsewhere so big exciting round as well as some interesting experiments happening uh

we've got a DI round that is a sort of a meta round on top of the other rounds where folks who are eligible can get some bonus funding if they're from underrepresented groups we also have a little experiment going on with our friends from refi Dao supporting some local nodes who are doing organizing which is kind of a subset of the web3 community around Lots going on uh super excited to see how this all plays out we using the new tools and all the Nifty Innovation that's kind of uh happening as a result of playing with everything that's possible in this web3 space great and so the round begins on April 25th it looks like which is the exact date that this podcast will go live so good timing if you're listening go check

out grants.getcoin.com and contribute to one of the rounds yeah some awesome projects in there definitely would love to get some donations going yeah for sure so um I wonder if you could tell us some stories or highlights of of the grantees Ben what's most exciting out of the whole breadth of everything that's happening in the bait around what's the most exciting thread that you want to pull man there it's it's hard to pick uh favorites because there's so many interesting things that happen um personally I just love seeing coordination in action uh there's a group that calls themselves the quadratic friends uh which is uh actually kind of grew out of a number of

uh grantees in the DI round back in gr15 which feels like several lifetimes ago in uh in web 3 time uh but you know that group has continued to organize and support a whole bunch of different community members they've created their own onboarding guides uh instructional videos um you know they've really been holding the hands of other grantees making their way through our Tech and onboarding some new people into web3 as well as pulling some folks from the nft space or the D5 space uh kind of into the this world of public goods funding um so I mean one of my favorite stories to tell about you know just what we see happening is you know just all these kind of forms of peer support and Outreach that are that are just kind of

blossoming inside of the Bitcoin Community you know we've seen all of these Twitter spaces popping up like these uh kind of day-long shill spaces with people just coming all day long jumping in talking about their projects and the end result is a lot of cross-pollination like you know folks meeting uh you know uh their co-founders or like creating new coalitions uh you know it just seems to to Bubble Up more and more the more of these rounds that I've had a chance to to watch I'd be super curious to hear some of uh you know what you saw happen in in some of the earlier days uh but definitely it's like uh it's something that is kind of taking on a life of its own where Community just kind of jumps in and says like we want to do this we want to see

things happen uh we'll just create the resources ourselves and uh you know I think it bodes well for what's possible as people start talking about like forks and other experiments and all the kind of cool things that are going to happen uh you know when aloe protocol uh becomes something that's available for for anybody to play with and uh and you know and invent uh you know what what they'd like to see happen in this in the quadratic Lanes amazing yeah and I'd love for Nate and Michelle I don't know if there's any stories about grantees or things that that stick out for you with respect to projects that are in the beta round but one of the reasons I love asking this question is that quadratic funding is kind of a signal aggravation mechanism where different people can have different takes different Vantage points

on on the rounds and things that they're most excited about so with that in mind uh Nate or Michelle I don't know if you have any any projects or trends that you're most excited about yeah my side I I'm really excited just seeing all of the like the messaging Concepts that are coming through I think there's a lot of projects trying to solve um like wallet-based messaging which just feels like such a big part of of what we're trying to do I think it's something that's top of mind for us too just because we've been thinking about um you know how do we use this as a way for ecosystems and projects to start like building their communities and working um and just like working to build around that so I think from my ends I would just Echo what what Ben said it's been

awesome seeing like these kind of communities forming themselves is one of the reasons that we tried to build uh grandstack as like a self-serve tool so it's awesome to see that starting to happen um before the tech is is even there um I think it's also it's it's just great to see like messaging as a trend um I think happening across the space too I'd I like I wish I knew more about the climate projects I usually go to Ben and say Ben tell me more or tell me who I need to go to um but I'm just I'm always so hyped to see the the activity and the excitement around it too don't get me started I could talk for a while about the climate projects there's some really cool stuff I maybe if you'll if you'll allow me one quick climate

story just because uh I I think there's some really interesting by all means let's get you started Ben let's go all right um there's a project called shamba Network that some of you might have heard of um it's uh they're an oracle project so they're like taking satellite data and uh making uh it possible to help fund both carbon offset funding for farmers in Kenya but also doing stuff around crop insurance which I think is really interesting um like you know so if let's say you're a farmer in a small town somewhere you've got very limited internet access um they we've actually been putting them in touch with this other project uh that is also in a similar part of the African continent uh who is helping people take

uh on-chain uh interactions and then turn them into credits on cell phones so for people who don't have like access to the internet even uh even with like a cheap little phone you can get these like hour dollars or minute dollars that a lot of people actually use kind of as a replacement for cash uh you know in some less developed countries um so now like just imagine this farmer uh you know standing in a field somewhere uh doesn't have any idea that all this stuff's going on on the blockchain that satellite data is being pulled down um they just have an agreement where if it doesn't rain enough uh in a certain period of time and they're not able to make the money because they've got this insurance package that you know somebody walked up to them on their Farm told

them about onboarded them the end result is something just magically shows up on their cell phone and now they can take those little minutes and transfer them you know through SMS text messages to somebody else uh you know so that they can buy food or or you know whatever they need on their farm so this kind of combination of shama Network and this other project that I'm trying to remember the name of I think they're called uh coinly uh but cool seeing these different projects come together one actually came through the uh the UNICEF round that we ran uh uh earlier this year as kind of one of the first experiments on the platform uh and uh the other one has been sort of one of the top recipients of funding uh you know in in some past Bitcoin climate Solutions around uh you know so that kind of cross-pollination

is really cool and and like you know just actually seeing the pictures that Chama Network posts of like you know these farmers who uh you know are benefiting from the activity of people you know whether it be trading uh Carbon offsets on chained in New York or wherever else they might be uh but the end result is that it's like actually putting money directly in the hands of people who need it uh and I just think that's super cool yeah it's it's been super cool like just seeing all the uh the hype around like the web 3 community and education round two I think it's like our most applied to round at this point uh also fun fact Milwaukee there's multiple applications for setting up green pill chapters uh worldwide in there so that the the trend

is spreading yeah totally well a quick show for that if you're interested in in creating a green pill chapter we've got ones in Japan and India and China um and there's a Discord that will have a link in the show notes that people can join if they're interested in setting one up in their own their own jurisdiction and then also you can you know we're gonna hit a critical mass weather likely will already be one in in your own jurisdiction so so check that out for sure uh Michelle I feel like we haven't gotten a chance to uh Center your voice yet so what are you most excited about with respect to the rounds yeah I think I Echo a lot of what Ben and Nate shared um and generally just sort of an observation of the beta rounds versus

the alpha roads just sort of seeing um all the different types of rounds running on the same brand stack same protocol um it's super cool to see that we're supporting rounds um like deep in like each infrastructure and OSS and then also we're seeing climate and we're seeing all these different new Niche Pockets um would be super exciting to see in the future rounds like more um like IRL or more like maybe like web3 adjacent rounds um super cool to sort of see more funding go to folks who don't even understand like what web3 is or what blockchain is but um understand the impacts of the work that we're doing so generally super cool to sort of start to see us expanding and

more into different different Niche categories okay well it sounds like uh if people want to get involved in funding the any of these grants or just want to check out what's out there they can go to grants.getcoin.com and do that in this episode will be airing on the start of the grants round so if you're listening to this then time is right is there anything else uh that the time is right to contribute um is there anything else to say about the program in the current round if not would love to uh to talk about Grant stack next I mean I can ramble on about the program endlessly but we should probably talk about Grand stack and I I mean I I think uh just cool to sort of point out some of the Nifty new features uh that are

happening uh you know as the result of what's built in Grant stack so maybe that's a good sort of uh transition to just kind of talking about where things are at but like uh you know in terms of the the experience we see users having like you know just the fact that like everything's gated on passport that like you're actually writing your proposals on chain uh like this is the first time for a lot of people that they're having that experience and it's just like really interesting to like watch people have that experience of like actually creating their their proposals on chain and supporting each other in the process of doing that um so yeah I just raised my hands to uh to these Wizards and all the work they're doing to make that all possible uh and uh yeah I I think uh you know

just getting those feedback loops of like kind of what is working and how people are are sort of experiencing it um you know it has been the part that's super exciting for me is just like to kind of be a point of contact between you know the folks that are are like using the platform either as supporters or grantees and and then kind of coming back to Nate Michelle and going like you know how do we how do we make this uh this change or how do we make this work so that uh and and you know that the beauty of kind of like building the spaceship while it's flying uh you know and and doing it uh in real time in public together is is a pretty neat thing to be a part of yeah it feels like there's a quarterly round and um

you know I've of course disaffiliated from Bitcoin leadership but back when I was involved in running the coin grants rounds we would always learn from the last round and then talk to vitalik or whoever else about how to change the experience and deploy that and then the next round would be updated from there so um it feels like this is the second cycle of doing decentralized grants and uh the alpha round was the first one three months ago and this is the beta round and and it feels like that iterative cycle is starting all over again and um and and you know it's an opportunity to try I know that uh some of our listeners had problems with passport going down very first in the alpha rounds and it feels like y'all have learned from what

you had in the alpha round and have deployed fixes so definitely give it another shot if uh uh if you had problems with passport in the alpha rounds because every quarter of the idea is that iterates iterates forward um yeah so uh Nate I'll maybe uh hand hand it off to you what's going on with Grant stack and uh and what's happening right now yeah I mean I think from our perspective one of the reasons that I've been so excited about this project and there's been working on it so hard for the last six nine months however long it's been um is we've been really wanting to take qf out of uh kind of like a centralized uh private stack and just give it to the people like we really wanted to

democratize quadratic funding and let let anyone come in and do that and that's what we've really been laser focused on as we've been launching this first version of of Grant stack um the alpha rounds was our first real pass at that um it was a lot of like MVP functionality um seeing you know seeing how it could work for folks we're planning to launch this self-serve experience on May 15th that's when anyone will be able to go to manager.kitcoin.com and uh start around but the the beta rounds are sort of our last test drive of what we've been working on uh in the product and I'd actually I'd love to turn it over to Michelle to talk a little bit about what that means because I think we've been just cooking up some awesome stuff to really make soft serve a reality yeah

totally thanks me um yeah I guess we'll be taking a step back I think grandstock is composed of three primary products uh Builder which is for project owners to go in and like create your project um eventually build reputation applied arounds um and then we have manager which is primarily for program managers round operators to receive applications review applications approve reject applications manage the round uh create the round forget that create the round um and just generally coordinate all things around Logistics payouts as well which we'll get into in a sec um and then our last product in the grandstat currently is um the Explorer which is really what

you're seeing during around when you're going into around and looking at projects uh donating Etc so just to kind of like provide a little bit of that context always a grant stack that's really what we're talking about yeah we ran the alpharons on all three of those products back in January and learned a lot of really great stuff from that first pass so coming to the beta rounds some of the new things that we are building slash Heaven building include payout so being able to enable communities to pay out their guarantees entirely via allo protocol just generally more ways for program managers and round operators to customize their

rounds you can set matching caps minimum donations you can add new question types you can gate to Applications based off of project socials and stuff like that so just adding some more customizable customizability there um also having more consistent and auditable qf calculations with a new indexer tool that we've built improved in streamlined donation flow so this will be for donors on Explorer like just having a more intuitive and um easy to understand way of finding projects to support and donating to them also working on improving ground discoveries so being able to like see

what rounds are going on at all times and being able to explore toggle between rounds for donating and stuff like that um and also like a whole host of new enhancements for grantees um one of the biggest things that we heard during the alpha rounds is really wanting to have Rich Text so that's available this round we support markdown we're showing you a preview of what your project will look like on Explorer so lots of sort of um bells and whistles to improve the application flow and general grantee experience and we have a brand new passport score so we'll hopefully have even more accurate Square mechanisms this round

um but yeah we can dive into any of those but just sort of as like a quick overview some of the um lots of really good stuff happening on the aloe side yeah and so aloe protocol what is is that short for allocation protocol yes I think so yes I'm like I'm pretty sure but just checking it yeah well I'm excited I'm I'm curious which question or sorry uh which which features or or changes to Grant stack that you're most excited about why don't you go first yeah oh yeah um yeah it's a great question um I've so I worked a lot on the grantee Improvement so like adding Rich Text

um application preview also just having new like Bell's whistles for customizing around so um that was really exciting to hear because it really felt like um so me and the design team we did a lot of ux uh research and feedback and hopped a lot of calls with um grantees that participated in the alpha rounds and the UNICEF rounds so um I think it was really awesome to sort of hear that that was something that uh grantees themselves wanted and um was definitely like a pain Point throughout the alpha run so um I feel really great and and happy to be able to deliver that on the product side this round like a lot of the primary pain points around like Rich Text around um being able to like see your project

and be able to edit it um it feels like it's one of those times where like this aligns with like our product and in protocol development and is also like directly addressing um whatsoever core users really want so um feel is super fulfilling on my side to see that roll out in the beta runs yeah that on my side it's it's been I've also been working really deeply on the the qf calculations and I think one of the things that's been awesome about this project is trying to figure out how to make qf approachable for people who have not like managed a qf experience before I we've been running them for four years so we just have a ton of like institutional knowledge built up around how to do it but it can get really complex really fast

um So within grants Tech we've been trying to design for basically two two sort of approaches one is like the easy button for qf and then one is like enabling more sophisticated users if they want to do deeper civil analysis um so it's been fun to Think Through like how do we take things like matching caps and minimum donations and passport and make those really easy for folks to turn on without having to think too much about it um so we we have a flow like that which I'm really excited for for people to start using to start getting feedback on but we've also started just surfacing more of the data um so that if you do want to go deeper and like audit around or if you do want to like edit results or do more like

sophisticated civil analysis um we've now like made it a lot easier to pull that data and work with it so trying to um help people who are really like pushing forward the uh the implementation and the practice of quadratic funding while also making it really approachable for um new people are trying it for the first time so really excited to start seeing how people use that yeah I mean I think the meme there is decentralizing Bitcoin right um it's not about just putting the protocols out there but it's also making all of the design decisions that get coin has traditionally had to made uh make uh accessible and and I think that what you've been calling it is self-serve qf right so you know how do you instead of

fishing for all these Dows that might run around quadratic funding or any type of funding around how do you teach them to fish so um yeah can you tell me a little bit more about self-serve Nate yeah I think um one of the things that was I think Ben and I'm sure you saw it too lucky was like as we were running more and more rounds on our old platform um we were just seeing like more and more communities were like I want to do this like how do I do this how do I get involved and it was just really hard to get people up to speed like there's I think qf is a great mechanism for like tapping the will of the crowd and and really identifying like the hot spots in in the community

um but there is definitely a learning curve for managers to come in and figure out like okay how do I do this in the right way like how do I think about it how do I configure it um and kind of solving that problem was really the the core thing behind behind self-serve um so for us a lot of it was around like how do we sort of strip back um qf to something that is really easily understood um I think people when I think about qf um I think about it more as like a um category of funding mechanisms as opposed to one individual funding mechanism um so what we've done is try to implement the the simplest version of that so linear qf is the initial mechanism that we've built and launched

on Grant stack we are letting program managers set a matching cap this basically makes sure that like the pot is spread more evenly across projects we've given them the ability to set a minimum donation we found that you set like kind of a lower threshold for donations then you start to increase the cost of a civil attack and you start to reduce the overall risk of civil attack on your um on your round and then we've also upgraded our passport score and passport I think is one that for us we feel like there's a ton of sophistication but also a lot of ease of use that we want to be thinking about so right now you basically have the ability to turn passport on or off we have an out of the

box uh passport score that um checks for Unique humanity and will like gate donations or gate matching excuse me on whether or not the person has that so those are the three levers we decided to use for this sort of intro qf for qf101 soft serve qf a bunch of different names um but uh those are yeah those are the things we're going to be giving to people and letting them play with um personally yeah I'm just excited to see what the feedback is yeah Ben you want to add some I just wanted to give a shout out to this group that we're calling the grogs the grant round operators Guild uh who are like where a bunch of these folks uh uh that Nader talking about is talking

about who are like interested in running their own rounds or actively involved in running our featured rounds um are you know coming together you know right now it's basically just like a telegram thread uh and a series of assets that we've created like run books and loom videos that help walk people through things but it's become a really generative space really quickly uh you know just it's cool to see all these different folks with sort of different visions of what they're trying to build uh you know kind of coming together and like jamming on how to actually implement this and supporting each other implementing it uh you know so I I just wanted to throw out that if anybody is interested uh in running their own round uh using the existing Grant stack um you know the grogs is a great place to plug in there's a lot of rounds that

could always use another set of hands to get involved and to get some experience and this is going to be for uh you know folks running grants rounds not just during our quarterly program but also anybody who's interested in running independent rounds you know can kind of plug into this community and really decentralize the uh you know the skills that are required sort of in that human technology space uh to sort of successfully coordinate organize and run around um and uh you know I I just wanted to make sure that that was out there that people are are interested in uh in getting involved that the grogs is the way to do it um and you know you can just reach out to you know folks from Bitcoin in a number of different ways on telegram Discord Twitter uh and we'll sort of

point you in the right direction as to sort of who to talk to and how to get involved but um you know it's uh it's a pretty neat uh thing to see in terms of like just all these Brilliant Minds kind of uh you know kind of working together to try to Envision sort of what we could build uh collectively yeah I'm a lurker in that telegram group and there's just a lot of fire and gold happening in there it's uh it's pretty exciting just to see everyone working together um it's also I mean it's even happening within Bitcoin too like we um we just approved a gcp where some members of the community are going to run um their own qf rounds to fund like projects that are happening around uh get coin so it's it's cool to start see

it just becoming this like emergent way of like we have an idea we have some funds how do we how do we organize people around it so so for the uninitiated gcp stands for yes uh get coin Community proposal uh so we had some members of our our group um want to support some of the work that's been happening around git coin over the past few months we've seen things like people creating Dune dashboards for the protocol we've seen um kind of like side projects that are happening we just think there's like so much cool stuff happening at the edges within the get coin Community um and some members of of the Dow decided to submit a proposal to get some funding to run qf rounds to support those folks so just really excited to see that come to fruition

yeah well um I'm wondering if there's anything else that y'all want to say about aloe protocol or Grant stack or the the product group within gitcoin um I mean I feel like most of our listeners are primarily interested in the program but the product is the foundation of the program so just um you know what what do we know should we know about its continued Evolution and maybe Nate we'll start with you yeah yeah so um just by way of context we have we have two kind of products that we're thinking about um one is aloe protocol which is our our protocol for Democratic fund allocation so basically a protocol for communities to pool funds and decide how they want to distribute it with legitimacy

um and Grant stack is our first uh app built on top of the protocol and that's really aimed at communities that are running grants programs specifically and giving them a really friendly interface for spitting those up and running with them um we've been building those two like very tightly together for the last uh six months as we've been getting this first version out um and I think we're about to get to the point where you're going to start seeing some Divergence and starting to see us work on different things which I'm I'm super hyped about so I'm the on the grand stack side um we we've always been big Believers in qf and that's something that's why we wanted to build it first it's a big part of the get coin brand um but I think one of the things that we've been learning as we talk to other

communities is that um there are a lot of different types of grants that happen both within web 3 and outside of web3 and we want to be able to give teams more tools for doing that so in Grant stack you'll see like quadratic voting as a type of grant program coming into our our suite we're also creating what we're calling a direct grants program which is a little bit more of apply for a specific amount of funds and get that amount of funds based on like a smaller group approval or Community Committee approval type thing so those are what we're kind of looking at at our base set for Grant stack we feel like if we have those three those three Tools in there most program managers will have kind of 80 of what they need to run their

their grants programs uh on the aloe side we're going to be start focusing in a lot more on builders in the ecosystem where Grant stack is focused on like program managers and communities uh aloe is really focused on people who want to be able to leverage um this Democratic Capital allocation tool so we we have a bunch of different archetypes that we've been talking to on that side um you know we've been working with uh independent grants apps who want to use like the project registry that we're creating um to be kind of like the back end for their own applications that they're building we're seeing some communities who want to like build their own version of Grant stack essentially like really own the end-to-end experience of of how their community members engage with their grants rounds we're also just

seeing some other really fun uh Integrations like some folks are sort of saying like as soon as you create a project with an aloe like they want to also create that project entity in their own protocol so I don't want to steal too many people's ideas or docs too many things but like that's kind of what we're seeing team happening which is super exciting so um the tldr I think on on the grand stack side you're just going to start seeing more types of Grants programs that you can run through those uis and have that like self-serve friendly experience and then on the ls side we're going to be getting a lot deeper with Builders and trying to make the um the protocol just more user-friendly to build on Michelle let me know if you have anything to add if not we can move on

um yeah I think the only other thing I will add is um we had done a lot of research around this concept of project reputation I think heading into um I actually for like the last like few months um so I think that's something that we'll start to see come to fruition a little bit more um we want to build more mechanisms and tools for um project owners who are participating in rounds but also doing other great stuff that's building their project reputation we want to sort of start to uh formalize and productize I guess what that would look like um within the aloe protocol ecosystem so um perhaps like if you participated in a lot of rounds right um and you received a certain amount of

funding and and you are able to prove that you um you know did what you said you were going to do with that funding that lends well to your overall project reputation uh maybe we're also going to be pulling in your personal reputation um like on like a sort of a team member basis um uh and impact certificates generally have been something that we've discussed um on the project reputation side um while also migrating data from the Legacy sequence platform um and having that build towards uh existing projects is reputation I think these are all sort of things that we'll re-explore in the next I would say like

probably three to six months and maybe we'll see some of that come to fruition in that timeline as well I just wanted to add how excited I am about that in particular uh like in you know in terms of like solving problems for for folks that are deep in the weeds of like operating grants rounds the eligibility decisions around like you know who should be in around or shouldn't be in around can be some of the most time consuming and difficult stuff and I think that that's just going to be a huge unlock for people trying to run rounds like just having more data points more like information both in terms of like helping with fraud protection which you know is always an arms race with the you know all the folks trying to like find their ways to sort of scam the grants around or like

you know hack the grants around um but like at the same time it's just it's tough to make some of those decisions and like the more that you've got you know whether it be impact certificates or like other forms of digital identity uh you know or hyper certs you know there's there's a lot of these different Primitives that are uh kind of floating around in the space that I think are just going to massively unlock opportunity for people to like much more easily deploy rounds and make those eligibility decisions especially when you're doing this at scale like just thinking about some of our rounds where we've had like a thousand grantees and you know a team of people have to carefully go through and do the review of each one of them uh you know couldn't be much more excited about what that will mean not only for Bitcoin and our

ability to like run more rounds and offer more public goods but like I think for a lot of our partners who are trying to run around for the first time just having those kinds of tools at their disposal I think is really going to be a game changer um we've got about five more minutes left I'm wondering if there's anything I didn't ask y'all that you want to say I feel like I've my brain has been so deep in getting ready for these beta rounds that I haven't um haven't had room for anything else uh yeah I'm just so hyped for self-serve qf to be live I'm excited for the beta rounds to be to be up and running um I'm kind of excited to get back to normalcy and I feel like we've been in this sort of wilderness

um as we've been like transitioning onto Grant stack in the protocol so I'm just really excited for us to be sort of past those awkward years and start getting into uh getting more people building on top of it yeah um I'm just realizing I think it's actually been roughly exactly a year since I joined Bitcoin um and I remember when I joined we had we had stickies on a mirror board that was our protocol so I think we've come a really long one so I'm super excited and um generally really excited to see all of the rounds kick off next week self-serve same with same food yeah I just want to wish everybody best of luck in the round uh you know I'm sure

there's folks out there listening who are like jumping into the quarterly grants round as kind of a shelling point for coordination for them and a way to fund their projects uh you know it's it's always a sort of interesting moment for the community overall just as we see kind of all the new stuff that's bubbling to the surface and people kind of get to know each other and what people are building I'm always interested to see what trends kind of evolve and uh and emerge you know that that's a Nifty thing to to experience and uh you know I just encourage everybody to like double down on uh on coordination like you know really go and like help others who are sort of new to the space uh you know and and also like share what you've learned as a pass

grantee if you are one and if this is your first grants around like don't be shy to reach out for support or help or ideas we do have this grantee portal which you can find at link.getcoin.com grantee no S's and in there just link.getcoin.co grantee and that's got a whole bunch of guides and run books and videos and things to help you with like all the different aspects of uh you know being a grantee and don't be shy about showing up on Twitter spaces and you know Shilling your project uh you know that's a big part of Bitcoin grants rounds is like sharing your ideas uh you know and really refining your ability to like talk about and answer questions about your project uh so you know as as our friend pranav says from refi by

South people come to get coin for the funding but they stick around for the community uh that definitely has been true in what I've seen so uh you know I'm just stoked to see all the new people who pop up in the community and uh I look forward to giving you all virtual high fives on uh out there on Twitter and elsewhere as the round gets underway so yeah best of luck to everybody yeah and whatever you do do not DM owaki on Twitter asking for Grants around support I've been disaffiliated for a year now you can stop damning me for Bitcoin support yeah um and the grantee portal is is is where you can get support I know there's an intercom on the site in order to close that Loop so uh it's kind of an inside joke uh but but yeah don't

DM Milwaukee for support on get coin it happens every round no matter how far I've been disaffiliated I think my first job at Bitcoin was helping to have less stuff show up in your inbox uh for shelling point two years ago if I remember correctly yeah well it's been a journey for sure I mean I I think that um you know of course I'm disability from Bitcoin leadership and get coins no doubt but I think I'm still known as the get coin founder and so I think it's it's okay for me to share that like you know get coins started off um as a bounties Network and then it launched Kudos which was this nft and then it had an ad Network and then it had Bitcoin labs and then like Bitcoin grants launched and um and Bitcoin grants was originally a subscription

service where you could subscribe to your favorite grants and then pay them 9.99 a month and um you know the big idea back then was that everyone was monetizing with icos why not monetize with subscriptions and actually build a base of Revenue turns out no one cared about subscriptions and um we pivoted to qf and then um had 15 successive rounds of quadratic funding chasing that local Maxima of what quadratic funding looked like but then when metallic kind of pointed out that oh this is becoming a pillar of the ethereum ecosystem we realized oh wait it needs to be decentralized so it can be credibly neutral um and more democratic and so we had to come down from that local Maxima of the

best centralized product that we could produce under the circumstances and now chase the global Maxima of decentralization and I feel like now that the like we're finally getting to a point where we Pat we're gonna like getting close to that local Maxima um that we had to descend down um and and like passing that to chase a new Global Maxima of decentralized coordination and the fact that we're even talking about self-serve qf on a protocol uh just shows how far it's been but I just wanted to paint a picture for The Listener of how much iteration it has been in order to to get to this point and um wow it's been six years of of trying to figure out and figure that out and I just wonder where things are going to be in six more

years from now so that's that's my long tail perspective on where things are at hmm but tldr congratulations on getting the program to Beta um looks really good curious to see what we learned from the bait arounds yeah that's two we're excited cool well as we wrap maybe I'll ask each of you for uh for a closing statement or uh a closing few words maybe a sentence or two and uh since I know that Ben can YOLO uh I will uh pass it to you for spend any last words um you know I uh I I always find the book recommendations that you do on uh on on greenpill interesting uh this is totally out of left field but I'll throw in a book just because I read an

interesting book that I think some of the folks listening might be into uh it's called tracers in the dark a guy named Andy Greenberg a writer for Wired Magazine um it's about how like FBI and CIA are using uh blockchain technology for hunting down criminals on the dark web and whatnot um I think it's like super controversial like it definitely opens up kind of this conversation around like you know is uh is blockchain a divining rod for finding criminals for governments uh you know uh and like in the context of all this discussion around sort of where blockchain fits in our society right now uh I just think it's an interesting perspective for folks who are in this space to sort of see how we're being talked about by others kind of at an

arm's length from the space Also interesting how many of the people in the book now work for big orgs in crypto um you know but uh I think there are some some very interesting perspective in there and I think it would be a useful conversation for people to be having in this space kind of uh you know as we talk about sort of how crypto fits into our world sure maybe two reduction reductionist but I think crypto's impact on the world will be weirder and more nuanced than we all imagined and that's maybe an example of that absolutely all right uh anyone else want to take a swing at my at my prompt closing statement I I like the book recommendation idea I can roll with that um I'm reading in a very different vein

I'm reading Rick rubin's uh new book the creative act which is basically a bunch of like short sort of meditations on how people can be creative in everyday life and sort of like how do you sort of tap into the things that excite you um and enable you to really like unlock new ideas so it's um it's really not like a front to back reading experience it's more of like Drop in read a few pages take the idea yeah yeah yeah it's um it's a fantastic book highly recommend um and yeah I guess the uh the last plug would just be go donate grants.getcoin.com there you go we had to end on a shell

all right Michelle what do you got if anything oh gosh um I honestly wish I had as good book recommendations as Nate and Ben have I guess my closing notes just this has been awesome um yeah thank you for having us Milwaukee uh definitely a listener Greenfield so super cool to be here totally well uh congratulations on launching the beta rounds and for the listeners go contribute at grants.getcoin.com as of today the round is life peace and love everyone foreign [Music]