Gitcoin: Build for the Public Good - Scott Moore - [Toronto Ethereum Developers Meetup]

Transcript

so um yeah by that was an awesome talk like for me that kind of just like option of jumping into crypto you know even if you're not necessarily like you know that the typical joke in like development is you're asked to have like 10 years of experience and something that's existed for like five and i think that like blockchain isn't really very particular about that i think it realizes that everything's very fluid everything's moving very quickly and like you want to get involved in something like that's actually like the probably biggest takeaway um beyond even what i would say here like i think the most important thing for anyone to take away from this is like if you just get involved in stuff um you will have like a lot of

opportunities just like emerge because the space is so new and there's so much to actually still do so just like join discord channels like talk to people like everyone's pretty open like dm someone if you're like hey your project's cool like wanna learn like more about what you're up to like people will respond so just uh that's one important note but what i just wanted to talk about is actually um a bit about bitcoin and like what we've been doing over the last few rounds with um keep one grants and um for those who don't know like bitcoin is kind of uh amalgamation of different experiments around funding open source software and it started with the idea of bounties so paying someone for an individual task anywhere around

the world and allowing them to accrue sort of like skills and then experience from doing that unlike you to me like you'll get paid instead of having to pay for that experience which is cool um but the thing that we sort of realized was when people got to the point that they developed a certain amount of skills they ultimately didn't really have anywhere to fund the projects that they wanted to go and work on um especially if they were new to the space didn't have like a level of background where they could just like ask for vc funding where their project was like not quite as um you know ready for that that stage um and so we created this idea of quickly grants which actually was originally just like let's try to

crowdfund projects and very shortly after we built the first prototype vitalik wrote about this idea of uh quadratic funding and uh quadratic funding was actually like really what uh like make kequan grants work um the idea for those who don't know uh just to be very brief the goal of this is not to dive into like the mechanics of all this is just that like in traditional matching funding you have a pool of funds people donate the amount that like is directly proportional to um the donation and the matching pool goes to that grant in this case um what you're trying to do instead is like democratically distribute funds uh from the matching pool based on the actual number of people who are

signaling their interest in a given project so you know if 10 people or like let's say eight people donate uh one dollar each to some project um and like two people donate four dollars each to another the former would get sixty four dollars in matching whereas the water would get sixteen dollars matching like a naive example and that's even though that the numbers are the same in terms of amount donated uh the amount of people who support one project is clearly greater in the former case so um that's roughly the mechanism we've like done a lot of work on a few parts of this to improve it which i'll get into but like really just to like hit at home our mission is like around a collective creation

of open source and open internet and open economy and it's kind of just being fortuitous that like ethereum has very much evolved around that mission um so we find ourselves very aligned with ethereum um and naturally that's led us to a lot of the projects that we're working on um this slide has way too many things on it but like just to hit home like roughly what we're trying to do here um we've you know funded a lot of the d5 main things that have come into the ecosystem uh unispot people don't really know was a grantee actually at one point it also received in the three foundation grant to be sure it wasn't just us um prismatic and lighthouse both received funding uh samsung who's now sort of one of the um more well-known sort of white hat hackers in

the space kevin van ness um richard who will be coming up in the second we we've got some funding for ethercs through this this process um eip1559 which i think after a lot of debate we agree is a good thing for the space mostly um and then coindesk and others um helped us raise about 200 000 for the variety of health and social justice classes this year given that there's been a ton of stuff outside of this crypto going on um that we thought it's mechanism to reply to so uh ultimately yeah the goal here is being like you know create this funnel of people who want to participate in web3 not just speculate

um help those people create projects and then help those projects actually sustainably form themselves and that's been you know the ecosystem that we've helped develop alongside the community so actually like i'll get to it in a second but like the funding pool that makes up that 500 000 was actually um from a bunch of different projects in the ecosystem that have come to support us and then the 1.38 million just to be clear is also not our money like it's also just the community who decided that like hey if we create this ritual around like funding public goods on this quarterly basis like we can actually do a lot more together and like there's something valuable to that so we're not really like trying to be extractive we're just straight up like providing a service

like does these things and then the value comes from the fact that like all of this underlying infrastructure supports everything that we're doing uh from that point so uh this round was actually by far the largest yet um we had about 1.38 million in uh community contributions which i think almost doubles the last round and then you've got like a chart which basically shows the same and then these are the matching funders which i think is worth noting because you have like uniswap you have maskbook you have a few others who were previously grantees um in this list and so you're seeing like kind of the beauty of ethereum being that people are kind of naturally inclined to go back and support

the ecosystems that supported them and it's not something traditionally if you know the history of open source that happens um so it's really been great just to see that sort of emerge um and then in terms of yeah things we've been trying to do um anyone who's really interested in like uh civil attacks or really interested in like the idea of collusion um metallic actually has a great post just like on collusion specifically it's really worth just like diving into some research that block science has done here and basically what we've been figuring out is like i mean it's it's kind of obvious from the onset like if you have the ability to like break up your like funds into multiple accounts and you can't like

prove that those are all like uh you know different people um theoretically you can have someone just attack this by creating lots of accounts and creating lots of matching funding for the uh project that they want to see funded um so what we've done is a few things around like creating robust identity systems working with bright id upola uh identi network and a few others just to make sure that we have actual like proof of like unique human so to speak versus just like addresses um and those don't have to be real name like real histories those can be even just like um distinct um activity or like um otherwise like work histories on platforms like github eventually

hopefully platforms like radical and that can kind of create this sort of like rough protection against civil um the other way we are starting to do this is by just like analyzing the data which is what block science is being particularly good at just like finding patterns in the graphs of um basically uh grants to uh donors that are particularly like um kind of sketchy and uh that's what we've been up to for the last sort of few rounds it's just trying to really um optimize for minimizing the number of uh colluders because ultimately the more that happens the harder it is to scale the matching pool in a sustainable way without risking

a huge amount of the pool so um that's where we are now there's a lot of other stuff i could probably dive into um but i'll leave it there for kind of q a in the interest of time excellent but yeah you guys are doing amazing work with bitcoin um just see you guys all over the place on twitter and uh and it's even more amazing to see former grantees um putting or i guess re-contributing back into the ecosystem that they originally benefited from so it's really really awesome in terms of questions but like that point yeah is really important and like

i i actually would encourage everyone to also read italics post around legitimacy like one of the things that i think allows that to happen is the fact that there are social norms around this topic around like giving back that again don't really exist in web 2 so like if you're kind of interested in those economic models like sustaining open source um and you are like should i join web3 um i'm biased but my answer is yes i'm gonna try to dim my screen here so i'm not like completely blinding but unless there any other questions just thanks so much everyone