Public Goods Funding: The New Meta | Kevin Owocki - Gitcoin

Transcript

stages so remember there's lots of talks all day long until 6: p.m. and in addition to our wonderful speakers uh we do have lots of fun activities here including an art gallery uh there's the Zen Zone I have a grounding station if you need to discharge some extra energy please feel free to go up to the zenzone there's the DJ chill room which has had amazing music this entire time so please support our DJs there there's the podcast studio if you want to book some time um and there's the tabletop Gaming Arena so get your for uh table tennis on if that's interesting to you so again lots to do here in Denver it's a gorgeous day uh the sport castle and the Biddle Hub um today's the last day for hackathon so we will be announcing uh

winners tomorrow so if you have teams in that good luck to all of you and without further Ado uh let's present Mr Kevin aukee thanks hey everyone my name is Kevin aukee mostly known as the founder of gitcoin and we're going to be talking about public goods funding and why it is the next meta it is the competitive Advantage for your ecosystem and then I'm going to talk a little bit about gitcoin 2.0 which we just launched yesterday the white paper of and how it supports that Vision so has anyone in the audience used getcoin all right the faithful here at 10: a.m. how about you guys walking by have

you ever heard of have you ever heard of getcoin all right friendly wave that's cool if you want to come learn about public goods funding you can you can come join us all right so public goods funding is the next Meta Meta stands for most effective tactic available uh basically the idea here is that in crypto there's an evolving meta of things that you can do to be more effective in whatever it is that you are doing and uh the The Meta is always evolving part of the game in crypto is going from The Meta being icos to The Meta being veg ible coins to The Meta being loot I don't know if you guys remember loot but uh you know this cycle I think it's going to be about Dows allocating Capital to their

ecosystems public goods and that is going to be a way that DS compete for talent and compete for creating the best Tooling in their ecosystems so public goods funding is the next meta and uh I want to talk a little bit in depth about what that means at an object level so Justin Drake on Bank list in January 2024 so this is new information as of last month noted that l2s compete on tooling liquidity virtual machines tokenomics public goods security and bizdev and uh I think that this is a really important thing to lay out because there is a multi-billion dollar War uh going on competition going on to figure out who's going to get to consume

the most blog space get the most developers building on top of their their layer twos but I take a little bit of a frame uh an issue with the frame that Justin put out because I actually think that public goods is how you get all of the other things on that list so basically if you want to win the L2 Wars if you're polygon or if your arbitrum or your optimism or anyone else who has to deploy capital in order to compete in the market you have to figure out how to get to having tooling liquidity virtual machines tokenomics security BISD for your ecosystem and the naive way to do that is just to hire people but the scalable way to do that is to use the novel forms of capital allocation

available in the ecosystem to create growth for those things for your ecosystem so you've got a treasury with billions of dollars of capital in it and there's a political economy built on how you deploy that and if we can come up with the right Capital allocation machine in order to to issue grants that create growth then we can get all of these things with Precision in scale that has never been possible before what does the capital allocation machine look like I think that it basically at a high level just takes in money and it takes in data and there's some sort of function there's some sort of mechanism and it outputs money to the people who are building your tooling your liquidity your virtual machines and

it hopefully reinforces the best projects that are coming to your ecosystem without the overhead of of politics and gamesmanship that has typically been associated with Grant giving uh Grant giving ecosystems so I think that basically the opportunity space in bringing these funding mechanisms on chain is that we no longer have to deal with the gatekeeping and the power Brokers associated with traditional Grant giving mechanisms one way to make a lot of friends is to have millions of dollars of grants that you want to give out I don't know how many of those people that come around will be your true friends but um we can bring Capital allocation on chain which means less gatekeeping uh we can build more

scalable in precise Capital allocation mechanisms than have ever been possible so um I'm really excited about solving the problems of capital allocation in this space I think that uh web 1 and web two gave us massively multiplayer online role playing games I think that web 3 is going to give us massively multiplayer funding games the future of crowdfunding is going to be onchain and we're going to do some weird powerful Democratic and transparent and accessible ways of of Al hitting Capital so uh gitcoin just happens to be in a position to make this happen we've delivered $56 Million worth of funding to the ethereum ecosystem so far can I get another round of hands for

people whove received money from gitcoin all right hey you over there hey you have you ever got money from gitcoin Grants no all right not not yet you will eventually we allocate Capital to the people who are funding the ethereum ecosystem or working in the ethereum ecosystem we've done $4.2 Million worth of unique donations so far for 4,000 projects and we've learned a lot about how to do Capital allocation at scale to the ethereum ecosystem to how to do it on chain gitcoin is mostly known for quadratic funding and uh quadratic funding is really great for Democratic Capital allocation to your community but we're expanding out into providing a

menu of complimentary Capital allocation mechanisms for your ecosystem direct grants happen to be really great for Simplicity set out a pot of money say apply for it and we will give it to you if you are doing good things for the ecosystem and then retroactive public goods funding anyone an OP retrop pgf recipient Humpty is okay all right I won't pick on anyone in the periphery now that we have an actual audience here but uh um optimism is crushing it I'm so proud of optimism the whole meme of ethers Phoenix of retroactive public goods funding is really cool we have partnered with them to build a tool called easy retr pgf doxyz that allows anyone to allocate Capital the way that optimism does to uh summon ether's Phoenix in their own Dow and um so

gitcoin is focused on building software that allows you to bring this Theory into practice we've got a tool called gitcoin grants stack which allows anyone to run a quadratic funding campaign a direct grants campaign or a retroactive public goods funding campaign and uh We've also got easy retr pgf which is going to allow people to to run retroactive public goods funding rounds so uh we are taking this uh these this theory of capital allocation and actually putting it in practice and I'm really exp excited to explore the design space speaking of the design space one of the cornerstones of our exploration of the design space is this thing called

aloe protocol can anyone guess what aloe is short for all right someone's had their coffee this early in the morning all right so um basically there are a couple components of aloe protocol which is a capital allocation protocol for those of you who are just catching up you ingest in data and money and outcomes money to the recipients of your ecosystem that are supporting your tooling and your liquidity and your evm uh compatibility and all the other things that you need to compete in the marketplace okay so you put money in from your Treasury and you we build a registry of projects along with your community you put it into Aly and then there's this component that is

called a strategy and the strategy what it does is it decides how to allocate Capital to your community the beautiful thing about Alo protocol is that it supports multiple strategies for Capital allocation okay um and the way that we're going to explore the design space is that we're going to is is that we're going to basically do like a parameter sweep of all the different configurations of these types of modules okay so getcoin grants has a registry called the Alo registry but uh we also are building interfaces with the gith registry in the clear fund registry and the optimism registry to abstract those Registries in a way that makes them comprehensible to Alo protocol which

will allow all the strategies in getcoin Grants to talk to all the Registries out there um and then what we're going to do is we're going to keep innovating on making better quadratic funding retroactive public goods funding we've got some weird Capital allocation mechanisms that we're also going to build in here and you're going to be able to sub out all the different strategies for uh for Capital allocation in your ecosystem and then what we're going to do is we're going to build new ways to fund these projects with not only your Treasury and governance proposals but uh we're imagining that there will be superf fluid streams and radical drips type streams that go into this uh this this uh trustless Capital allocation

machine so you can imagine constructing a dow in such a way that you don't have to make all the funds go to a treasury and have a bunch of governance in order to distribute it you can just trustless push it into Alo protocol and Alo will automatically uh have summon people to run quadratic funding rounds and for ecosystem so a governance minimized way to allocate Capital effectively for your ecosystem okay so this is the entire design space of capital allocation okay as capital allocation moves on chain there's going to be lots of massively multiplayer funding games that we are going to invent and we are doing a parameter sweep of all the possible ways that you could get money

into that system what tokens you could put into that system how you could represent a registry and what kind of capital allocation strategies are possible within this design space okay so we're building all these different types of capital loation machines and now that gitcoin is decentralized in modular it's really easy to sub these parts out for each other oh man gitcoin 1.0 was a centralized monolith and oh it was so we were just stuck with one mechanism and one registry and we couldn't explore the design space but now that we're modular we're following the Unix philosophy we can have each of these components do one thing and do them well and we can just sub them out as we explore the design space for each other and so I'm really

excited about exploring the search space of possible Capital allocation mechanisms and finding the ones that create the most value for ecosystems and we're going to reason a priority which means through Theory by talking to the big brains like vitalic and Glenn wild and we're going to also reason empirically which means in practice about how these things actually work and what we're going to do is we're going to iterate towards the local Maxima of the best possible quadratic funding tools best possible retroactive public goods fund funding tools the best possible conviction voting tools the best possible I don't know stuff we haven't even invented yet try to explain to someone in the 1990s what Twitter what

Twitter was like that's what trying to explain to someone like what capital allocation will look like in 2035 in the year 2024 we don't know what's Over the Horizon but we're building a machine to Traverse the design space okay and the one thing that I want to be really clear here is that it's a plural design space there's a reason that I wear rainbows everywhere that I go and it's not just because we love the the rainbows and unicorns it's because we believe in the plurality of different Capital allocation mechanisms okay so you can imagine the design space actually more as having multiple local Maximas which we're going to discover and um I think that it's important not to try to build one big monolithic Capital allocation

mechanism for everyone what we want to do is build small components that reach their local Maxima and do one thing and do it well so direct grants is going to be really good at simple Grant giving and doing rfps and quadratic funding we're really looking at finding the local Maxima of how do we do Democratic Capital allocation that your community funds along with you retroactive public goods funding is going to be really good at retroactively rewarding contributors okay so this isn't a design space where there's going to be one winner we're going to have a multi-tool of capital allocation mechanisms that each achieve their own local Maxima of what's possible and we're going to make that available to everyone in the Dow space who wants to allocate Capital to

themselves or to their to their ecosystem at scale and again funding your public goods is a competitive advantage and this is the most effective way to do it because we're exhaustively searching the design space and making those tools easily available to you so that you can compete in whatever the it is you do and we'll handle the capital allocation with these with these uh with these strategies I think this is a trillion dollar market okay as more and more assets go on chain as evm eats the world as everything gets tokenized more and more ecosystems are going to have to fund their public goods because funding your public goods are a competitive advantage and so this isn't this like cute hippie dippy side project uh and like public goods funding we do

it just out of like the altruism of our heart this is a competitive advantage and as more assets go on chain this is a I think this is a huge Market uh right now gitcoin does direct grants quadratic funding retroactive public goods funding there's a couple mechanisms that we haven't even really talked about yet conviction voting and streaming quadratic funding I can get into what those are if you're a mechanism design nerd like I am later but um I'm really excited about building in delegated domain allocation private voting systems Angel Investing 2.0 I imagine a future in which we're all funding the next upcoming projects in the ecosystem not just inre and Horwitz although I I like Chris Dixon I like his new book read WR own is cool

um gift circles self-curated Registries direct to contract incentives impact attestations you probably don't know what these are and you don't really need to know until you can use them on Alo protocol but in 10 years you're going to be receiving rewards for having impact in ecosystems from these mechanisms so you know if you want to front run that you can maybe learn about what they are getcoins final form I think becomes an attractor attractor is basically a dynamic social system that changes the behavior of the agents in the system okay so gitcoin is an attractor that builds better Capital allocation uh and basically it's got a social layer so if you've read the green pill book or if

you've shown up to my talk then you're a part of the social layer we are meing about public goods and creating a regen culture around public goods funding in the ecosystem there's the technology layer which I just told you about we're building Capital allocation machines and hopefully one day there will be really well documented audited plural ecosystem of tools and then the economic layer in which eventually we'll have a revenue engine for getcoin and we'll probably be doing token swaps with other Dows in order to uh build a 3 three between ourselves and our partner DS okay so we're building an attractor for Capital allocation and it's got three layers and every new partner that integrates with

gcoin and uses that Capital allocation mechanism to fund their own ecosystem strengthens getcoins a tractor every new integration every new capital allocation mechanism that we build into gitcoin 2.0 also strengthens the attack uh the attractor every time you build a meme about regen and public goods you're strengthening the attractor and because these are these things are reflexive momentum begets momentum the attractor gets stronger over time as more people allocate capital in their ecosystems we get more data about what allocates capital in these ecosystems well and then we're able to iterate the design space and build more effective Capital allocation machines so basically I think

this is like kind of like what the final form of getcoin looks like is that it's an attractor for people who want to build their own ecosystems and do it more effectively than they could with a grants program and you know bear in mind there's hundreds of dows that have tens of millions of dollars of capital there's tens of dials that have billions of dollars of capital okay so if we can build the better Capital allocation machines then this is only going to get stronger over time eventually we hit escape velocity and we're funding the world's public goods and not just ethereum's public goods okay so in summary if you want to win the L2 Wars or the LRT Wars or the defi Wars or whatever ecosystem you're in you need grants to power your growth getcoin has

the best Capital allocation machines and also a plurality of capital allocation machines maches to fund what matters in your ecosystem we're going to build a world in which we not only have client diversity at the ethereum based layer but we've got a diversity of public goods funding mechanisms and there will be uh there will be quadratic funding complementing retroactive public goods funding complementing direct grants complementing things that we've never thought about and it's all going to be available through getcoin grants um funding your ecosystems public goods is a sustainable competitive advantage and that's why I'm so passionate about building these tools to make all of you more effective in building crypto values and making them actually usable in the

world right now we have direct grants we have quadratic funding we have retroactive public goods funding if you're interested in building those into your ecosystem come find myself or anyone that's in a gitcoin hoodie around here we will get you set up on gitcoin grants and we'll run a pilot round with you and uh public goods are good thanks for coming to my talk [Applause] I have I have 40 seconds so if you have a short question you can ask it go ahead yeah and so this is all built on the evm any erc20 token can be used yeah when Moon dude the N the Market's

going straight up like have you looked at your phone yeah yeah me too I never check prices either but number go up all right this has been fun thanks everyone