How Gitcoin funds and builds public goods

Transcript

gmgm welcome to another episode of web3 Academy your trusted source for useful and legitimate information to remain on the Forefront of the internet Revolution I'm Jaybird and we believe that web3 is going to change the world that's why we're here to guide the world's top talent into this space to contribute get ahead of the curve and capitalize on the opportunity today we're exploring how gitcoin is disrupting the way we fund and build public goods this is a fascinating episode with Nate Gosling from get coin Dow when we dive into what are public goods and open sourced

software why are they important and what's broken in the way that we currently build these incredibly needed shared resources and how does web 3 present a new way for us to fund and Bill build shared resources and exactly how git coin is doing this with projects with UNICEF with uniswap with many other large players in both the web 3 space but also in the more traditional NGO space such a fascinating conversation that's an absolute must listen for really anyone that believes in web3 and

the power that blockchain enables for funding for governance for voting for Community accountability but also for anybody who wants to see the world become a better place Nate is just such a great human that really leads us into building a better world together Nate is a product lead of git coins aloe protocol which is their new protocol that aims to provide open source solutions for anybody to use git coin grants in their fundraising and in their allocation of funds previously nate-led product teams at Flatiron health and

share through and we dive into so much in today's episode so buckle up everybody we got a great one for you today before we jump in let's just take one minute to hear from our lovely lovely sponsor the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to the profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to

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Academy our motto is Community First profit second why because engaged communities tell you exactly how to improve your product and ultimately Drive growth they act as team members recruiting new customers and providing crucial feedback and they become brand super fans sticking by you through thick and thin but to engage your community you must first understand them that's where Chasm comes in Chasm is our go-to web3 tool for managing and understanding our community members it combines both on-chain and web 2 metrics all in one user-friendly dashboard with Chasm you'll know things like which other communities your members are part of and which of your campaigns are truly

driving results that's why at web3 Academy we use Chasm to launch campaigns optimize growth engage our community members and automate workflows with this all-in-one tool if your community is already on chain and get to know them better with Chasm head to chasm.xyz using the link in the description and discover why top brands like a mutable Nifty labs and collab land are using Chasm Nate welcome to the show thanks for having me good to be here Nate I'm so excited to have you for so many reasons I've been a big fan of git coin for many years and following you guys closely but before we jump into everything get coin and some really exciting things that you guys are

working on that's coming up at East Denver which is a next week by the time this recording will Air let's go back a bit let's start from the beginning of how Nate originally got into web3 or crypto how did you sort of fall down the rabbit hole I'd say it's definitely more web 3 than Krypto is what pulled me in so my background is in Tech I've been working in startups for the last 15 years at this point I've done them in a few different Industries Healthcare media things like that but I've always been a real food lover at heart so when I left my last job before Bitcoin I was exploring a couple of different food and business ideas like how could I bring like Tech and food together and I ended up talking to a lot of chefs and one of the things that was really interesting

about chefs was like they were all starting to experiment with I don't want to work in restaurants how can I be a professional culinary expert and as I was talking to them like a lot of their problems were coming down to like how do we pool funds how do I own space how do I have flexible space how do I have these sort of Creator style platforms and I just got really excited about this idea of community on platforms some of my favorite products in web 2 are those platforms you know it's the spotifys of the world it's YouTube there's so many interesting things that you can go in but I think what is really powerful about web3 is like rather than having a third party owning that platform There's an opportunity for the community itself to own it and to govern it so I think

there's a lot of assumptions kind of built into that like we haven't figured out how does a community effectively like run a platform and products I was so excited about what it could mean for different communities to be able to like work together and like fun what they need in a really flexible way and I found Bitcoin and kind of the rest was history and at first when you mentioned food I thought you were gonna bring up fly fish Club garyvee's tea based restaurant I was like no way is that where this is going guys you know what I am a very interested in the idea of like what is a neighborhood owned restaurant look like and what we sort of unlock that which I so I think like there's something there but the angle that garyvee took on it was just like way too

I think highbrow like I feel like restaurants need to be like neighborhood spaces second space I feel like everything that's sort of been pushing food in the web 3 space has been a little more like high-end oriented what do we do with all our with our nft bags and I kind of want to get into like all right how do we make this attainable to a local community mm-hmm yeah well and I think For Better or For Worse the current nft and I'm going to put nft in air quotes because nft is a misused word so much of the time any new tech it's always about profit first and everybody just wants to make money so that's where we're at right now we're not yet at the point of the idea of like just owning something within a community because you support that there's not a lot of that yet right

now it's still do I make money off this I live in New York cost of living is high I want to make money I want to support my family I want to do all those things that you do I feel like that's really important in sort of the web 2 space I feel like we started getting to these real like outsized gains where you would build this platform you would get the network effect and then all of a sudden it was like one sort of company owning everything and I think what's really interesting about how we're starting to think about protocols and what those could mean is that we're going to see this really cool explosion of viable small businesses that I think haven't really been able to exist in the tech space in the past getting back to this idea idea like what could a small

Studio do or like a 20-person company do if they have the resources of some large protocol platform that they can build on I just think there's something there's there there and that's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to there's also like a societal desire for that now as a result of as you said what really happened over the last 20 years with the internet which was fantastic don't get me wrong it's so easy to hate on Facebook and hate on all these big web 2 companies but look they allowed us to connect they allowed us to engage they allowed us to share photos with our grandma in ways that we couldn't before like that's incredible but it also as you mentioned it did lead us away from

community and I think we all want that and we need that and so it's interesting how things happen and how sometimes Tech can play such a role in more of a general need of humanity which I think is really where we're going with this conversation today before we jump into git coin I want to sort of set some context for our listeners around public goods funding and building open source infrastructure you know words that appear all the time when you were talking about git coin let's first explain the category that git coin fits into do you guys consider yourself in the category of public as funding what is public goods funding to you can you

give us some definitions in sort of a high level overview yeah definitely so git coin I think one of the things we're probably best known for is this meme of public goods and build and fund public goods and I think you know if you look at the textbook definition of public goods generally what people are describing are things that are non-excludable and non-rival risks meaning like no one's person's use of that thing can prevent you from using it or like take that away from you you know so like the classic examples for things like that are air or National Defense or like public parks like someone using those things doesn't prevent you from using those things either similarly I think you know open source software falls into that pretty neatly as well like someone else deciding to fork and

use your code doesn't prevent another person from doing the same and building on top of that so I think what's been really interesting is a skit coin's been evolving is like we're very much Believers in public goods and we want Republicans to keep evolving but I think as we've been growing and interacting with more communities there are these like really valuable things that communities may want to put money towards that aren't technically like public goods we were talking about like community on restaurants before like restaurants are great for the neighborhood they bring foot traffic they bring kind of cachet to a neighborhood if a community owned that it isn't technically like non-excludable non-rivalist you know there's only something you see from the restaurant you're going to make money from those things but that doesn't mean that it's not this idea of something that's super

valuable for like a given community and what they can do like it might reach property value maybe that aspect of it is like the problem I once we get in there but so I think what's been really interesting is like we've been moving into like public goods is really at our core but I think there's like this second order that we're calling shared needs um also like super powerful and that we're building towards so we would definitely consider ourselves both the public goods and a shared needs kind of organization and we can get into this a little bit more when we talk about like what we're building and how we're organized but I think one of the things that was like our initial in for this was this idea that like public good funding today it's been existing in like local communities for a long time if you

look at you know taxes or fundraisers or communities governments like all of that is like how do we take these resources that we've Acquired and like funnel them back into public goods funding like education things like that and there are a number of challenges with that I think one of the classic kind of challenges is the idea of like a free writer problem where like one person may be able to consume more of a public good than they may actually need or deserve um fair so we think there are these fundamental tools one of which is quadratic funding which I think we're going to get into later that can start to like attack these problems in different ways so make it a little bit more I think equal in terms of your access to a public good I think also giving communities more say and sort of

like what are their public goods so maybe that's the TF does that make sense yeah totally so we sort of got we've got a few different side to whether it's public goods or shared resources we've got the funding side to it and we can talk about that and how that currently works and how git coin is doing that differently the building side to it which is deciding once you have the resources once you have the funds where does that go how do you distribute that what's the voting you know who has the power over that and then maybe we've also got this Greater Community side to it of just the power of community using it long term upkeep are those sort of the three categories did I get that

right yeah I love that framing let's switch from public goods to open source infrastructure so how does open source infrastructure funding happen right now is that funded through VC models and what are the challenges and problems you see with that the answer is it's not funded well open source software is the backbone of everything we know about the internet today like there are so many open source projects that are powering every app that you use and a lot of those you know projects are just labors of love it's someone who has cared about the problem wanted to work on it wanted to build it they basically subsist on donations there isn't a way for them to sort of collect funds for what they've built and that was really the core of

like our first grant funding program was open source software it still is one of our like core Grant programs is how do we fund open source projects I think what's really interesting about web3 and where that's going today is like there's sort of an initial a new set of tools to allow Builders of Open Source projects to collect funds like you can charge fees in more usable sort of like repeatable ways you can funnel those to people that have like helped support there's just all these different ways to sort of collect and distribute funds with like the tools that we've been building in web3 and that to me like we haven't quite cracked what that system is yet but that's sort of again what we're building towards like how do we make it so that people who are building these open source projects are able to

live sustainably off of those things so there's techniques like fees like we've described our friends over at optimism are also experimenting with retroactive public goods funding where you can build an open source project and you can go back and people can vote on sort of the impact and usage of that tool and almost give them the sort of like exit after building a successful piece of software so maybe to sum it up I would say funding of Open Source software up till now has been like fundamentally broken I think there's a ton of burnout for people who are building and working on on open source projects and I think it's in a place of transition right now where there's kind of this explosion in of new tools and methods for how to fund it and I think people are doing a lot of experimentation around like what the

right model is how do you do that in a repeatable livable way why is there an explosion right now of Open Source software it's not something we talk enough about but it really is the core of web 3 100 where's that coming from for me what's interesting I think about the narratives around web3 is it feels like such a return to like the web 1.0 days you know I think a lot of like the early computer and hacker culture it was all you know garage groups homebrews sharing ideas hacking together here I built this you use it try it it's very like communal oriented and then we saw this launch of web 2 and I think the reasons that web2 moved to this more kind of Consolidated centralized private space we're kind of sound you know a lot

of it was around how do you provide a good user experience like how do you make it safe how do you provide security now we're just seeing that like if you put it all in one place it's a really irresistible place to go and hack and try try and steal and like do all this stuff web 3 to me feels just like sort of a return to that element people have realized that this idea of centralized data or centralized funding or centralized storage and infrastructure needs some sort of economic model it seems like the tools are there at least like the raw materials are there to build tools to collect that funding I think you're starting to see oh okay this is now viable right this like I know that this is powerful and how do we move towards that right and that's exactly what you guys are building at

git coin and I don't mean to keep teasing that we are going to talk about this but I just I have a few more questions about sort of the current state so we talked about the different categories of funding and building I think one of the issues that we see a lot is the issue of transparency accountability how are we able to use web3 and web3 Tech to incorporate more transparency more Community accountability in the allocation of these resources to open source I think a lot of it comes back to sort of like the fundamental nature of blockchain at its core most blockchains are this publicly available and distributed Ledger of who owns what or what is what whatever the state is that you're trying to record on

that blockchain it's enabling is the ability to do that and I think having this sort of secure way to store this information publicly I think is really what's starting to like unlock this idea of transparency and legitimacy it's really interesting if you talk to folks who are not too deep in the web 3 or crypto space because they might look at it and still have like the Silk Road kind of opinion of web3 was like totally Anonymous and private and no one knows anything and it's like yes it's that but also it's 100 public and you can't hide anything you know it's a really interesting kind of point in time where like we have this ability to really surf the core more information and create this audibility and I think we're going to get into this when we start talking about what bitcoin's building but like

we're building tools that we want to be fully auditable and I think where we're starting with is we know that we can store things publicly on chain immutably and that anyone can come and look at those things and that's step one for us every sort of decision point or design point we want to make sure that that it's recorded what that person did and then I think what becomes cool beyond that and this is something that like the data teams at Bitcoin are working on it's like how do you then access that data you know how do we make that readable to the average person so I think we're at this point where like we can record everything on chain and like it's now getting easier to be able to like access those things on chain and I feel like the next step is sort of okay

how do we make sure that you don't need to be a data analyst to be able to like check those things on chain I mean it makes me think just because it's topical in the news right now was Russell Wilson who's a NFL quarterback very successful he's got a foundation and it came out recently that his foundation only Direct directs 24 cents for every dollar towards the needs that they are fulfilling towards their charitable Learners which is incredibly low if that's the truth yeah and who knows if it's the truth it could not be the truth and it could just be media creating a story there's a real polarization over media we don't need to get into that but the point is because of the lack of transparency there's no

way to know where this is going and we have to wait for the media to break a story like this for us to figure this stuff out and what you're doing can solve all of this yeah 100 this kind of ties it back to open source I'm gonna take a brief detour I promise it's brief I'll come back but when I was working at flattering Health a lot of what I was working on was you know providing data sets and data methods for cancer researchers and there's this incredible community of statisticians and analysts who are working on like really interesting research with these data sets but they haven't necessarily come from like data science background so a lot of their code that they're doing for this is Happy paste but as you start to see these more open source tools come up you're starting to just increase the

auditability and viability of these tools where like if you do an analysis and uncover something new you don't need to wait such a long period of time for someone to like rebuild your analysis and go from there you can say like I use this audited tool that we all know about and I got through control and I think we're starting to see that now happen with other sectors as enabled by blockchain Finance I think was really the first place that it started you know we're thinking about it in the community in public goods funding space you're seeing it with art it's just cool to start to see these like open source tools now enabling us to work we have sort of the open data and now it's like how are we building those open tools to let anyone like really understand what they're working with we've talked about

decentralized science recently and Pfizer was part of a raise for Dao which is aiming to bring these scientists together and create research that is better authenticated because one of the biggest issues in science is to be like in a certain Journal before it can be considered valid and it's so hard to get into these journals and so it just slows Innovation down right so I think what you're talking a lot about is like the speed of innovation the flywheel that can come from blockchain is very different than what we're used to that sort of leads me to this next question around one I think the thing that is very exciting about this is this opportunity

to tap into the collective intelligence of the community because the way that we can do funding now also involves governance that wasn't really a thing before right before it was like you give and then you have no say again what we just said that flywheel I think the speed of innovation picks up because you have more people involved that can participate in a meaningful way yeah I think this is one of like the aspects of web3 that like I have the hardest time explaining to folks outside of web3 because I think it's easy to sort of describe what we were talking about before of community-owned platforms and the idea of like okay why does web3 uniquely enable that there's these big sort of ifs around governance and

ownership and those are the things that I feel like we're really iterating quickly on right now like if I look at your average Dow governance right now Bitcoin included I don't think anyone would say like this is the end State you know this is how governance should look this is how it should work but I think what's happening is we're seeing the ability to like innovate quickly through a lot of those different governance methods to figure out like okay what is the right way to do this and short right now it's Believers it's the early adopters it's the people who are willing to like take those extra ux steps to actually like engage in governance and be part of it if web3 is really going to take off we need to sort of cross that Chasm and like how do we make governance a really

you don't even have to think about it you use the platform and it's part of your day like the average Uber driver or Uber user doesn't want to have to vote on like the next Uber pay scale but they do want somehow to have a say in how like uber the platform operates a lot of what we're building and like one of the things I'm really excited about for what we're building like we're starting very much with a grants program and that's something that like Bitcoin is known for and is a natural state but if you abstract that away a lot of that is like how do communities make decisions how do they govern sort of like their resources and what they're doing and that is 100 governance and I think internally whenever we're talking about what we're building I can't wait to test this with

budgets grants are awesome really exciting but like it happens to sort of generalize that to other spaces too okay let's lead into git coin here so yeah give us the 30 second elevator pitch what is git coin yeah so get coin started as a grants program it was how do we take funds and distribute those to open source software projects I think what was unique about what we were doing was that we adopted a model that italic and some of his collaborators first put out there called quadratic funding if you think about a basic matching pool I have a hundred thousand dollars I'm going to give it away to projects or I'll match up to a hundred thousand dollars what everyone is doing whoever sort of gives the most money to a given project like that project is also going to get most of the pot it may only be

one person who gave fifty thousand dollars to that project and then everyone else gave you know a dollar or ten dollars to other projects but still looks like that is the most valuable thing to be doing there what quadratic funding does is create a more democratic sort of method of allocating that where the amount of a matching pool that you get is actually way more dependent on the number of unique contributors who are donating to you as opposed to the volume of dollars that you're getting but that's a little bit of a simplistic way because we do sort of like wait how much you are donating to projects but the idea is that you want to be finding things with broad appeal the things that are closer to a public good than sort of like one individual pet project and like see where that kind of allocation is so

that's where git coin really started was this grants program using quadratic funding to do that over time I think we're meeting more communities who wanted to be able to use the same mechanism so we started building out a platform to do that we worked with uniswap we've worked with climate initiatives a number of other kind of ecosystems in the web 3 space and I think what we're learning is that every Community is going to have a slightly different way of wanting to do that you may want to complete the algorithm you may have different who is eligible for these funds there's a lot of different ways you want to like customize that type of a grants program to a community so what gitcoin is today is both a grants program that we still use to fund public goods like open source software and climate those are kind of our big

like classic funding pools but then we're also building this open protocol and software for running these Community allocation programs so basically any Community can come in and spin up a quadratic funding grants program using our tools yeah that totally makes sense so let me just repeat quadratic funding for a second because I do think it is it's almost better to go to get coin's website and watch the short video that they have that is very good at explaining it it's a tough one to understand verbally but yeah essentially it's this idea that money shouldn't be the only decider in allocation so it's not who gives the most amount of money that should decide allocation it's also

the most amount of people so that if you had one person give ten dollars and 10 people give one dollar that the 10 people who gave one dollar should be able to direct have stronger Direction because they have more people and we're trying to appease the most amount of people not the deepest Pockets exactly exactly am I simplifying that well I've tried to explain it on the podcast before so it's not my first time doing it no I feel like I keep experimenting with like what's a different way to say it's like if you show it to someone visually they're like oh yeah that's great right away but trying to do it in language is a little bit challenging but it's important you know both you and I were talking about we're both dog owners

and when you're training a dog you need to use language and languages what connects us all so it's good practice for sure I want to dive into this protocol that you're building in this new tool that you're building but before I do was there anything else sort of high level you want to talk about git coin do you want to give us any other data or information or overview in a nutshell Bitcoin is a community of people who are both building and funding public goods so building these protocols also running this public goods program we're Believers in those public goods and how do we just kind of make the world a better place I'd say we're sort of like quadratic funding Maxis but yeah I think that's probably the Top Line the takeaway okay cool okay so let's dive into this new tool or this new protocol

that you're building can you give an example of how it's being used and then we can talk more in detail about it yeah definitely so I'm going to give a hypothetical example first because it's one that we've been talking about with potential partner I'm not going to dox them because I don't want to give it away but basically they're a Sports organization and they have a really cool use case for quadratic funding where they're trying to get communities to fund local basketball courts there's kind of this idea or knowledge that like the more sort of local basketball courts you build like it becomes a focal point for Community it becomes a rallying a lot of what you're doing so they're running a quadratic funding program where basically all these different local Court projects are applying and saying like I want to receive funding

the program is putting up a certain amount of dollars in matching funding and then they're going to use our algorithm to decide based on other people's donations how much of that should be allocated so basically like when a project is in a quadratic funding round they're getting two streams of funding they're getting the direct donations from people who are supporters of them who are saying like yes this is important and those donations are counting as their votes for sort of like how those funds should then be applied so then they'll get a percentage of this like overall matching funding but it's a really interesting use case because I think you know they're looking at this on a global scale and it's becoming a really cool way to sort of like tap Community intelligence around like where are their vibrant

basketball communities and where are there people who want to like invest in basketball as a hub so by seeing like okay yeah all of these people are donating to this project they're just getting this incredible data point on sort of like how do we build a network of basketball lovers I think what's really powerful about quadratic funding too is because they're using this qf model it levels the playing fields like if you're looking at a local core project in the U.S versus a local core project in a third world country you're not necessarily going to have the funds to compare across those but you may find that like the third world country is just going to be able to get such a higher volume of donations that they might actually get a lot more funding otherwise it's a really cool sort of application of what we're doing and it's

the type of thing that's just like so excited to see more of you get a much better result because if somebody was to go and say yeah I want to in your basketball court example which I love because I had dreams of being an NBA player when I was young I'm six foot five so I'm a tall guy I did not make anywhere close to the NBA in case anybody's wondering but if you were to just say Okay I want to support basketball communities and build basketball courts you know you do your research and you'd probably pick the best communities that you thought deserved either a new basketball court or refurbished basketball court but how do you know that that basketball court is actually going to be used or that people in that Community even care about basketball maybe they're tennis players who knows right exactly and so with this

model it's almost like you get people involved in the project before the funding even gets spent because now I'm invested and I'm excited about that project that's coming and where does that lead is there opportunity to involve the community yeah I mean I want to shout out like another example of exactly how we're describing this too we ran around with Unicef on our new project back in December and theirs was a similar use case where they had put up a bunch of funds they or put up some matching funds and they accepted I think it was like 12 different ngos from around the world into their their matching pool and they ended up getting almost doubling their matching pool in individual donations so wow where like they could have just distributed that money to those individual projects but

now those projects are getting two and three x what they would have got in that model because they have these like these supporters and it's a great signal for Unicef because now they're seeing like okay which of these missions and projects are actually impacting people's lives that's where people are donating or like this did something for me how do I sort of get that funding out of it when I'm explaining this to like my mom I'm usually trying to use like Kickstarter as an example you know like okay you're planning to Kickstarter they're like I believe in this I got some sort of symbol that I participated in it and now I can like track what's happening with this project we want to be able to do the same thing with what we're building we're creating these structures where like you can sort of create a project profile and build up

reputation over time but then because everything's on chain you know like who you donated to and you can go and say like what are they doing now like what is if they're a open source project you can go and look at their GitHub and say oh they have shipped three new products in the last you know six months like this is great maybe I want to give more money to them there's so many different factors that play into it because then like as a donor too you're discovering all these interesting new projects uncover new communities like there's just such a cool sort of Melting Pot I think of ideas that are coming together in these and where my mind goes to as I was a spent over a decade as a digital marketer so I'm naturally marketing is my first incline when we talk about any

business example is the power for the organization to have access to the donors now I don't know what sort of access they have and also having somebody's wallet address 10 years from now that's gonna be like having somebody's email right you're going to be able to direct message their wallet address you're going to be able to share so much with them like it's a marketer's dream right right now it's a little bit as you said earlier we're learning and experimenting and testing a lot with everything in the space but I'm just curious are you seeing that at all yet are any of the organizations taking interest in the donors and involving the donors in any way absolutely yeah we had our old centralized platform for you

what we're building now which was called like a web 2.5 stack and that we had a couple of contracts for Distributing the funds but we had your classic centralized database and user profiles and all of those things outside of like the funding the next most important thing to I think a lot of the projects were the ability to like interact with their donors we had some features where you could email them you can like post to a board I think there were a lot of projects that built up their following through like what we're doing I think we a lot of times we use like uniswap as like our classic success story at Bitcoin where they started as an early project they received some funding from us they graduated and got some funding from the ethereum foundation and now they're huge and everywhere but it's

crazy that sort of interaction I think is really powerful you know when we talk about like who are the different players and constituents in this ecosystem we're building it's kind of three-sided there's the community Community managers themselves like the people who are running these programs there's the community members or donors and then there's the projects and I think what you start to see is this really interesting interaction where like Community or Community member may like start hyping projects that are in their rounds which unlocks that projects like knowledge of all these other rounds that are happening and they can start to like build their following go from there so you're exactly right in terms of like the technical limitations right now or like because we're building this in a decentralized fashion we don't have the ability to like have a centralized kind of messaging service but yeah I think

there are ways around that and like those are the things that we're starting to think about now there's some really interesting protocols looking at messaging based on wallet addresses you can sort of fake it with other sort of like message boards and things like that so there's some really cool things we can do with it but that to your point that interaction between projects and supporters is so important and something that we want to keep building totally toy we had Matt Galligan who's the founder of xmtp which is a protocol an open source protocol that's for messaging and we Dove deep into that and the way that they are looking to disrupt the way we communicate online I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole today if you guys are listening to this go back and listen to that episode just from a few weeks ago but what I do think

is so powerful is just the power of composability and interoperability in web3 means that you don't even have to build the messaging platform or the messaging service by building on chain then somebody else can come along and they can tack on their protocol or their service yeah and then away you go and now you've got that ability that's a great segue into sort of like what we're building and like what we're doing a lot of what we're doing is sort of like enabling this really interesting point in the chain with web3 I feel like there are so many interesting ways for people to raise funds you know you can do token sales you sell nfts like there are all these different things you can be doing to just be like collecting funds as a community there's also all these ways that you can like pay funds

organizations like radical and splits who are figuring out like how do we sort of direct payments in different ways is but what's been missing in that layer is the like how do you decide who gets the funds and like how much of the funds to get and that's really where we're trying to like dial in and like offer a protocol where like any Community can like pull their funds at the front they can decide how they want to give those funds to the things that matter and then they can use whatever their favorite payment protocol is to pay that out and work there so as we're thinking about Integrations like xmtp is something that we've looked at we've also been talking with radical and splits about how do we make our protocol interoperable so that we can really focus on that community-based decision making and make

that like a really strong experience and then let sort of the people who are experts in raising fun reading funds or anything like that really own those spaces so going back to the basketball example what's the go to market strategy in that case so you mentioned the different stakeholders you have and I imagine you must have a team that focuses on the community manager side of going on Community managers connecting with UNICEF explaining to them the model saying hey we think we can you know help you match and allocate funds better and here's how it works blah blah what I'm more curious about is on the donor side be because of the ux challenge as a web 3 and the fact that not a lot of people

even have wallets yet or no so what does that look like are you finding that only crypto natives are donating right now and that that's the only space that's active I mean in the UNICEF example maybe you can speak to that right now it's primarily like the crypto natives who are interacting with these tools because of you need a wallet so when we talk about either quadratic funding we're using dollars to vote or quadratic voting when you just have votes or tokens to vote the key vulnerability of that type of model is what's called a civil attack where the whole thing that this is predicated on is like you want to make sure that whoever gets votes from the most unique people gets the most money but if you can pretend that you are a hundred unique people you can

gain the system and kind of move beyond that so one of the other things that Bitcoin doubt is building is what we call the passport protocol and a lot of that is based around decentralized identity like can you verify that that is a individual unique human in a way that it still respects their privacy that's one of our core Integrations with our protocol is this like using passport to verify that these individual donors are unique people it creates this dependency for us at least right now in terms of like you sort of need a wallet address because that's our tool is for like verifying Identity or really built around that but back to like this idea of Integrations I think we're like really close to having some really cool opportunities or projects like there's a lot of folks who

are looking for or are working on ideas of progressive wallets or Progressive login where you can sort of create a wallet with an email address or some sort of more web 2 identifier and you can fund it you can do whatever you need and then interact with these web three kind of environments and then like once you're ready to really step in and like lean into it you can evolve or like graduate sort of your own chain identity and what you're doing I think right now by we're like limited to like web3 natives or like the web 3 curious our hope is that the technology in the next three to six months gets there to where it's really easy for non-web three folks to interact and be part of this and then I think it's Off to the Races it's

something that we're hoping someone else can someone will build right through are there organizations who are building it but that is something that we see as like super powerful important yeah it's the Reddit model or the Starbucks model in that if you buy an nft Reddit you buy it using the Reddit Vault and the Reddit vault is not connected to anything else so it keeps you safe the ux is more simple you know in their case they're free nfts but it keeps you safe and then once you're ready and you want to graduate to that next level it gets into this centralized versus decentralized conversation but I think sometimes we'd love to you know yell from The Mountaintop about decentralization and the power of it and it's so important

and yes don't get me wrong there is a lot of validity in that however there is a lot of people who have no idea what they're doing with web3 and they need security and safety when they first enter and centralization offers that as your entry point and then you can go to decentralization I think for people who are new to web3 it often comes across as all decentralized or bust kind of thing yeah actually I think the deeper you get on the hood the more I just feel like it's a misnomer our society has sort of like pushed really far in the centralized Direction over the last 50 years and now we're like okay what are the parts of this that are maybe better decentralized I don't think we're going to get to a point where it's 100 decentralized I think it's going to

feel like what are the aspects of Our Lives that are better governed by decentralized methods versus small centralized team yeah completely who I meant to ask this question before is there any numbers or stats that you can give us on Grant Stacks so far pre-e Grant stack get coin ran I want to say it was like 15 different grants rounds and I think we distributed about 70 million in funding across those different rounds so different pools it's donations matching funds like that since we've started working with Grant stack so we ran our first round with UNICEF in December on the protocol and we've run another four Alpha rounds since then and over those we've distributed two million dollars so that's about 1.25 in the

matching funds and then another call it 750 000 in direct donations from individuals so it's definitely there like we're excited about it I can't wait to have it out in the world energy your smile really shows excitement I love it so let me ask the direct question how does Bitcoin make money yeah it's a great question so gitcoin is a Dao I'm employed by Bitcoin dial the way that we are structuring ourselves is there a kind of I call it two key pillars of what we're doing one is the grants program which is our method for Distributing funds to public goods and then one is this new protocol world what's powerful about that is there isn't a third-party ownership that's trying to extract any sort of platform

fees around that we kind of want to like cover our costs and then we want to put everything back to public goods funding the thing that we're all really excited about at Bitcoin is how can the protocol allo protocol that we're building be this great source for like more public goods funding we're already like donating to things spending money on things how do we make sure that we're creating this really regenerative sustainable Loop that goes back to the things that we care about as communities so as far as the way we're structuring this we are building aloe protocol with the ability to take fees protocol fees for like usage which is very similar to what you've seen with unusual operating the other V5 protocols there's some sort of component right now like our team is building it but our long-term goal is that this ultimately decentralized and

is like governed by Bitcoin Dao like the broader community and the Dow is going to have the ability to decide what they want to do with that fee switch they can turn it on they can turn it off they can collect those fees we're also building like a series of apps called Grant stack that you can use to work with the protocol if you don't have a Dev team you can just log in and create your round and it's super easy and we'll also be taking enabling the protocol fee for like rounds that are running there but what's nice about that is we can run it at very low percentages we basically have to pay our development team a living wage and then anything over that amount the plan is to like funnel back to our quarterly public goods grants rounds where again the community will be able to decide

what are the things that we want to fund what are the things that we find most important and kind of go from there at the moment Bitcoin is funding itself off of our token but the hope is that we can move to this world where we're in this really great feedback loop of communities running programs us taking a small percentage to like help them run those programs and then taking that percentage and just putting it right back into public goods and the funding off the token did that come from just an initial an Ico basically and that raise gave you enough because you guys have been doing this for a few years that's yeah Runway I want to say we launched the token like two years ago so yeah there was like initial sale we're obviously still emitting tokens and we haven't like got

everything's on a time lock but it's basically entering the ecosystem right now through salaries We All Get Right Aid and GTC but yeah pretty wild but we feel like this is sort of a community investing in us I think the people that you find attracted to get coin are ones who really care and believe in this idea they've given us a platform and be able to like build a tool like this and the hope is that eventually it gets to the point where it's sustaining itself yeah incredible I think we might have to have you back in the future to do more of a dow tokenomics governance conversation because that is also so fascinating I can't imagine what you say to your parents when you tell them that you get paid in GTC what's their reaction you should see me try to pitch that to my

wife it was even better even better yeah I avoid it I was like well it's worth some dollar amounts and as long as I pay the rent that's fine yeah so interesting okay let's go back to Grant stack so you guys are going to be at East Denver yes how can people get involved yeah yeah so as I was saying before we try to differentiate between aloe protocol and Grant stack allo protocol is the thing that we've been like really heads down on lately we want to make sure that there's this really understandable protocol that Builders can come and build new mechanisms and try to like to that idea of fermentation quadratic funding is more of a category than it is a specific mechanism I think there's a lot of different ways that people think about quadratic funding and tweak it we don't think that there's like one

canonical way to do it and we think there's some really small but vocal part of our community who wants to experiment with those mechanisms so like that's a thing that we've been building for is like how do we make it easy for us to like speed run these experimentations so when it comes to Eve Denver that is basically when like the first version of allo protocol will be done we also are launching the MVP of what we're calling Grant stack so this is the apps that you as a community manager can use to come in and run a grants round right now it's you'd be able to come in and run like a quadratic funding round you'll be able to accept projects projects can apply to you you can accept donations in crypto on a number of different chains and each Denver is kind of the availability of

our public beta I guess this is very much like a first version for us we've been focusing I think more on the the underlying protocol and so there's a very like simple UI that'll be available at East Denver but then as we look to sort of couple months past that you'll start to see a lot more like release around a documentation that's going to be available and we want to get to a world where like by the time you know March April rolls around a self-serve group can come in and just spin up a qf round with all of our best practices hit an easy button and they're there so it's exciting at East Denver we're going to be introducing everything talking people through the vision and what it looks like showing them people will be able to like log in and play around with the

tools yeah from then on out it's just going to be more and more quadratic goodness quadratic goodness is that a commonly used slogan I love that that I think it happens I need a hat that says quadratic goodness that's really good who would you be hoping to interact with at East Denver and what would you be hoping that they would yeah or do with you we really see like the core users of grandstack as program managers and Community organizers the people who are trying to pool and distribute funding for their communities so I think we're starting to see some like a really interesting kind of archetypes of people you know there's like UNICEF is a great example of the NGO who's really excited about like what this can do for non-profit funding my community funding

I think there's a natural sort of web 3 protocol use case and we talk to like l2s and anyone who's like collecting fees and like trying to funnel them back into projects like now it's down one that we're always like super excited about anyone who's trying to figure out how do I better distribute the funds that I have in web3 those are the people that we want to talk to the thing that I am just so excited about and want to see more of is like how do we start to cross over into local communities and what does that look like for neighborhoods and things like that okay I think the basketball example from before is like a really cool opportunity like can we use this to start impacting people's physical spaces we ran a couple of test rounds with city of Boulder in the city

of Oakland around like funding non-profits and there's communities so those are also like if you have some web 3 users and want to talk about it great or even if not web 2 payment rails are not too far no that's the thing we're also super excited about so long story short if you are a community who wants to cool and fund the projects that you care about we want to talk to you you have a grants program awesome trying to figure it out come talk to me we can help you figure out how to make it work and right now since you're sort of in this in between the protocol and just the MVP of the app layer the grant stack of this are you hand holding more right now with projects a little bit Yeah I think one of the things that we're like

now really focused on from the ux side is that qf is a nascent idea that we've invested a lot of time and understanding but the actual like implementation of that can be a little confusing if you haven't been exposed to like what it like you can sort of like grasp the concept but the actual like how do I implement it isn't always obvious and like that's the thing that in the next month or so we're going to be really digging into like how do we just create a really simple easy button so you can run a qf round that is safe and usable for your community so we've been thinking about qf internally for three years four years at this point there's a lot of like institutional knowledge so a lot of what we're doing is teaching you know building run books building ux part of the reason that we

were launching the protocol was we're starting to feel like bottlenecks for more communities running qf rounds and we really want to just like open that up and make this possible for anyone to do amazing is there any round if somebody out there wants to experience qf not from the community manager standpoint but more from the donor standpoint is there a round happening right now right now no not in the protocol you just wrapped up the Bitcoin Alpha rounds right and he's got so much good feedback we're going to get going through and like cleaning all that up not right now but there are some great organizations that are running benefits like giveth right now is running a donation round for turkey and Syria which I think is great okay amazing I want to move on to

a speed round but before I do any final thoughts Nate to share anything else any other show you want to give or anything you want to direct listeners towards man public goods are good definitely like keep an eye out for us our next grants program is going to be running in April that's the program not the product itself and there's going to be a ton of funding going towards that so we would love to have people come and contribute to some of our projects then I feel like I need a hat that says quadratic goodness and then a t-shirt that says public goods are good then I'll be fully kitted out for you yeah we'll be the ones in Denver wearing the public good cities yeah nice awesome okay look out for Bitcoin merch I guess you guys have got that all all this good stuff that

we're talking about you guys are going to have this at East Denver yeah our design team has been building some very beautiful things that are all going to be available at Denver too sweet super exciting yeah sweet okay speed round a couple quick questions before we wrap here what's a must read book that you find yourself recommending to people the order of time by Carlo ravelli every time I describe it it sounds like nerdier and nerdier it's basically it's the book around like why time doesn't exist by a physicist but it's actually one of the most beautiful things he's incredible writer it doesn't read like science or anything like that but it's a great reminder of how important human connection is it's one of those books like you read it you're like my brain was just expanded I don't know how but

this is beautiful and I want to think more about it so is it fiction no it's non-fiction it's non-fiction yeah so he actually like kind of takes you through how time is doesn't actually exist like we have a perception of time but there's no sort of physical rule that it's like grounded in so it's all sort of how we perceive it is psychedelics or mushrooms a precursor to reading this book doesn't mean it might help expand your mind before but it is an Incredible Book cool okay one thing you've bought recently for under 100 that brings you Joy my wife and I are huge food people and we love cooking we love doing everything like project cooking like you name it I just bought a pizza peel

for like okay I like moving pizza around when it's in the oven and I get way too much enjoyment out of that I'm not a pizza expert by any stretch but I don't know there's something about feeling like you're making the pizza that's just incredible a pizza peel okay that's the new one that's the new one nobody's mentioned that before my wife and I also love to cook something I've checked it out do you have a special oven like a wood burning oven or anything like that for pizza or you just regular we were doing like a pizza stone in the oven which was probably like the previous like what was the best thing on our hundred dollars that we got but my family kind of pitched in somebody for my birthday recently and we got an uni pizza oven for the backyard so now

that's our go-to-playing it's a lot of fun oh damn make friends with Nate so you get invited over for dinner holy geez I I think that's why my friends are friends with me okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it man it's a good question this one came from Tim Ferriss Tim Ferriss used to ask this question on every one of his shows he doesn't anymore unfortunately Tim if you're listening to this hey I love you B start asking this question again please bring the question back I think one of the things has been like really interesting to me over the last four or five years is how to stigmatized talking about mental health and taking care of

your mental health has become with like people from all walks of life like not in like an intense way it's mostly like once I started thinking about this this is amazing and I had no idea this was a way I could sort of think about the world or talk to someone about the world and I think there is that stigma that people are like oh it's mental health it's mushy there's something in there that makes me feel uncomfortable but if I could do anything it'd be like to tell people this is a thing you can think about like I don't know what my pithy phrase is for it but that would be some of the at least the message I love that that's the longest billboard that anyone's ever said Nate but I like the message boards outside ebbing Missouri but whatever I'm not a marketer so yeah

I thought you were going to go with public goods or good or something like that so I appreciate you've already got plenty of those yeah we already talked about it we've got the merch at Denver I've got the hoodie no we gotta try with something else okay yeah see that's how we know you're not a marketer the marketers on this show just pitch their own products you know they'd be like yeah just go to my website they put their website or something go check it out see what you got yeah Nate this has been a pleasure thanks so much for your time really appreciate everything as you're doing shout out to the whole team at get coin we need more Builders like you in the space thank you so much and yeah thank you my team the people I work with are incredible so it's awesome to

be able to talk about what we're doing together here so thank you thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you next one