Quadratic Funding and How #Gitcoin Raised $60M for Public Goods - Kevin Owocki. Ep. 547

Transcript

so basically what gitcoin is trying to do is we're trying to build the ultimate Capital allocation engine for these ecosystems and allow people to deploy these tokenized treasuries to allocate them to fund what matters in their communities we're seeing a lot of adoption by l2s and lsts and projects that want to use gitcoin grants the power of gitcoin grants in their own communities gitcoin Flagship product over the years has been this thing called quadratic funding and the reason why quadratic funding is powerful is is also one of its vulnerabilities as we increase the cost of forgery for attackers we accidentally increased the cost for real users to verify their identity with getcoin passport welcome

to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm freder ANS and today I'm speaking with Kevin aaki who is the founder of gitcoin and a ground distribution project originally on ethereum and now on a whole lot of other chains as well before we talk with um Kevin about gitcoin 2.0 let me tell you about our sponsors this week this episode is brought to you by gsis gsis builds decentralized infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem with a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like safe cow swap or nosis chain nosis combines needs driven development with

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using their API your assets always remain in your customer so you can have complete Peace of Mind start sing today at chorus. one Kevin you've been on epicenter before welcome back so glad to be back thanks for having me cool it's been a while since you've been on I think like two or three years so um G give us your and gcoins backstory in a nutshell yeah for sure well um you know one of the cool things about uh having been in the space for the last seven years and I think this is my third epicenter episode is that um I actually the first epicenter episode I did was uh within a month of the launch of gitcoin

Grants which has been the platform that has helped the ethereum Community Fund $60 Million worth of Open Source software and uh public goods for the ethereum community and um that was uh that was January 2019 that we launched getcoin 1.0 and uh that was about the time that I that I appeared on epicenter the first time um I uh o over the last over the last couple years we have been progressively decentralizing gitcoin and I here today to talk about the getcoin 2.0 white paper which outlines our vision for a decentralized gitcoin so hopefully taking the power of gitcoin Grants and that $60 Million worth of ethereum public goods that have been funded on the platform and putting in the power of any community that is based

on top of the evm so uh progressively decentralizing and progressively having more impact over time perfect we talk talk about all of that in just a little bit gitcoin leadership has kind of changed somewhat over the years so I know you were gone for at least a little bit so what's your current involvement uh so my current title is co-founder and I am acting CTO of Grants laab which is the organization that is pushing for the software development at the getcoin Dow um getcoin as I said uh in the intro has been progressively decentralizing over time in 21 when the getcoin Dow launched we launched the GTC

token and the GT and and that was sort of like a transfer of power from at at the time getcoin was a corporation and I was the CEO of it so all of the decisions sort of rolled up to me and when it became a DA the decisions transferred over to the Token holders who were ultimately responsible for the fate and as part of the transfer of power our legal team felt that it was necessary for me to disaffiliate from the project for leased a little while and um I think I was in total disaffiliated for 15 or 16 months uh during that time I was working on a project called super modular which um basically at the time we thought that we would kind of the setup would be uh similar to how the ethereum foundation

builds the ethereum protocol and consensus Joe Luben startup uh builds things on top of it things like metamask or or nosis um that was kind of the setup between the getcoin Dow and super modular super modular was building software in the getcoin ecosystem and getcoin was building the core protocols uh which makes me I guess like 1 1,000th of a Joe Luben but uh we were just building stuff in the in the gitcoin ecosystem for a couple years and um and after that time I ended up reaffiliation by l2s and LST and

projects that want to use getcoin grants the power of getcoin grants in their own communities so it's quite an interesting time to be helping people fund what matters in their communities because lots of people with tokenized treasuries that are trying to build active communities around them I have to admit that last time I tried participating in a funding round and I've participated in many many many funding rounds because you've had like 20 or something right um uh I I must admit I gave up I didn't make it I didn't not actually make any contrib contributions at all I think it was like in the late summer or fall last year and I failed at authenticating enough ways to kind of get a gitcoin passport or

something something that wasn't necessary to kind of contribute earlier tell us about the gitcoin passport and why you felt it needed to be introduced um and I know this wasn't just me so basically I know lots of other people kind of seem to have the same problem on Twitter at least sure yeah well um certainly value your honest feedback in the road to Progressive decentralization has not been without setbacks and sometimes there have been many happy to talk about any and all of them so basically uh gitcoin Flagship product over the years has been this thing called quadratic funding and the reason why quadratic funding is powerful is also one of its vulnerabilities and uh quadratic funding

is a mechanism invented by Glenn W from Microsoft buin the founder of ethereum and Zoe hiig and basically the way it works is that frederique if you have a grant that raises $100 for a uh $100 from 100 contributors and I have a grant that raises $100 from one contributor you're going to get 99% of the matching pool because we're trying to fund what matters to a broad swath of the ethereum community so that's really powerful because it means that lots of people will come out of the woodwork to contribute to these grants because even giving a dollar can get matched with uh tens or hundreds of dollars from the matching pool depending on how big the matching pool is and how many other contributors there are to the grant okay so that's really powerful we're we're we're pushing power to the edges of the

ethereum community by funding uh with quadratic funding but that power is also a drawback okay so um the the vulnerability in this and uh since your listeners are in the ethereum community I'm assuming they're adversarial thinkers uh if if I have $100 uh to my grant with uh only one contributor in you have $100 to your Grant with 100 contributors and you're getting 99% of the matching pool I have a rational incentive to make up a 100 different identities in order to contribute to my grant and get more of the matching pool so that's what's called a Cil attack it's a sock puppet attack and um that's why we've introduced getcoin passport into the system to allow people to

verify their identity and increase the cost of forgery in so that your identity cannot be falsified now the problem that we ran into and and keep in mind this is all like live beta software we're we're kind of trying to figure it out as we go along is that as we increase the cost of forgery for attackers we accidentally increase the cost for real users to verify their identity with getcoin passport and not only do we have to we have to walk this line where we make the system not Cil like we have to make the system Cil resistant but we have to make it privacy preserving and we have to lower the friction for end users so um that that's a little bit about why

passport exists and the problem that we are trying to solve and um the thing I'll say is that the passport team has heard everyone's feedback loud and clear and we they are working on a no friction way of verifying silver resistance I can get into that if if it's interesting to your listeners but uh gg20 getcoin grants 20 is coming up in April and I would encourage everyone who gave up during getcoin 19 or getcoin 18 to give it another try because we've been putting a lot of work into making the friction way less for people and I'll be curious to hear if it paid off the nice thing about getcoin grants is that we've run 20 rounds and it's it's an iteration every single round we take the feedback from our our community and the feedback

from vitalic and other game theorists and try to fold it into the next iteration of getcoin Grants so it's a deeply iterative evolutionary experiment and we value your feedback because it helps helps us make it suck less next time te tell us tell us what you've changed to make it less painful yeah so there's two things they're both really data science heavy so we've been investing in some like PhD level data scientists to number one uh there's a there's a stamp called the eth stamp which basically goes out and uses a lot of uh complicated data analysis and machine learning to look at all the onchain signals behind your address and to figure out if you're a Cil attacker or not so like uh something that that

algorithm would find is that if there's a 100 accounts that are all funded by the same account that's probably a civil attacker that's probably someone who's just gassing up a bunch of different accounts so that they can uh they can Cil attack getcoin grants so for the end user that is a just oneclick connect and sign your message in order to get above the matching threshold on getcoin grants to get that stamp and uh you know before uh well you tell me what your experience was in in in gg9 or gg20 but before you would have to go through and click a bunch of stamps in order to get up to the threshold and now it should just be a couple of clicks uh using that machine learning algorithm and then the second thing that I just want to talk uh about

really quickly is this new algorithm that it was invented by Joel Miller who is a data scientist and uh on the getcoin team called cluster mapping and basically what cluster mapping does is uh it it it's a it's a way of clustering contributors who contribute to the same GR together and treating them as though they're the same identity and so basically if someone's Cil attacking a getcoin grant and they make up a 100 new accounts and they all those 100 accounts only contribute to the same gitcoin grant for the purposes of the qf algorithm they are just one identity uh and and basically if if I was a Cil attacker trying to attack gonin grants then I would have to contribute to a

bunch of other grants in order to make my identities unique and unclustered and basically what this does is it takes the energy of the attackers the uh funding of the attackers and makes sure that they're funding a bunch of uh public goods on gitcoin in order to attack the system so it kind of takes like Karate Kid style takes your opponent's momentum and uses uses it against uh uses it against them in in a way so um yeah in some cluster mapping and the eth stamp are the two ways that we're really reducing friction using Cutting Edge data science behind the scenes in order to prevent Cil and collusion attacks on qf but also keeping the user friction low I totally understand the approach is

there a way to kind of escalate this if I feel misclassified so say for instance I told my 50 friends that they should definitely give to say roty um and uh they they do but they only give to roty so basically there's like 50 people who only give to rcky because I told them this is a fantastic project please give to it can I then kind of escalate the fact that kind of uh they were kind of so to say disqualified from the matching pool yeah so I mean the first method of of feedback is is contacting the getcoin support so in the bottom right of your browser window you can chat with someone on the getcoin support team and just say

hey I don't agree with this or hey here's my feedback your ux sucks in this browser combination web 3 login combination that's the first ler the second layer is that you can go to gov.co.uk gitcoin is like I said iterative and

evolutionary and your complaining helps makes make gitcoin grants 21 better so please tell us uh through any of those channels when you when you don't like what you're seeing perfect so maybe let's back up a little bit why is capital allocation a difficult problem that kind of needs this level of infrastructure to tackle I I think that what we're seeing in 2024 is really quite interesting we've got thousands of dows or tokenized communities that have tens or hundreds of millions sometimes billions of dollars of capital in their Treasury and they all want to build ecosystems around their software stack and so you know

Justin Drake was just on a bankless episode in which he was talking to David about how like the L2 meta how l2s are competing with each other and he said that l2s are going to compete uh for liquidity and on infrastructure and on sequencers and and on tooling and on public goods and um you know like the one change I would say to to what Justin said is that is that public goods are are the way that you get all of those other things in your ecosystem so if you can solve the problem of capital allocation you can invite the builders into your ecosystem to build tooling to build infrastructure to build to build uh liquidity and um so basically what gitcoin is trying to do is we're trying to build the ultimate Capital allocation

and engine for these ecosystems and allow people to deploy these tokenized treasuries to allocate them to fund what matters in their communities so basically the problem of capital allocation is is how do we fund what matters in in these communities how do we run quadratic funding rounds that that help incentivize the outer ring of builders in your community how do we run retroactive public goods funding rounds in order to incentivize uh communities in in order to add value value to them so um I I I think that like the immediate answer in the crypto space is like the most effective tactic available uh if you're competing as an L2 or an LST or an LRT or a defi project is to build a community of of hackers that are in the

orbit of your ecosystem and so you know that's the near-term goal for gitcoin Grants is to help these communities fund what matters to them in the near future now I think in 10 or 20 years we're going to take the the tools that we have pioneered in the crypto space we and others have pioneered in the crypto space um and we're going to take them mainstream and in 10 or 20 years I would love to live in a world in which local towns uh in cities and states are running retroactive public goods funding rounds and quadratic funding rounds using tools that were pioneered in the crypto space I think we can do better Capital allocation using blockchains than was possible in the Old World We Now can do scalable and precise Capital allocation without intermediaries we can do more democratic Capital allocation

than was possible before and to me that's the true purpose of crypto is removing intermediaries and help PE helping people get funding for doing good in their communities so uh yeah near-term answer we're going to help uh arm arm people who are building evm based communities but longterm it's it's about helping the world fund its public goods and helping the world allocate capital in a democratic way cool you talked about quadratic funding earlier where kind of the the impact your vote has depends on the square of how much you're giving you also mentioned retroactive public goods funding right now can you briefly explain what that is yeah sure so um but just to zoom out

a little bit um one way that we describe gitcoin 1.0 is like gitcoin 1.0 is like a screwdriver it only did quadratic funding getcoin 2.0 is like a multi-tool it's going to do quadratic funding it actually already does quadratic funding it does retroactive public goods funding it does direct grants it does all these different flavors of of funding so um Talk us through all of the flavors that you support now sir yeah yeah yeah well you asked about retroactive public goods funding so I'll I'll start with that um getcoin has uh I I I I've been working with the optimism uh community in order to build a tool called easy retrop pgf doxyz and that's basically the same voting interface that optimism uses for

retroactive public goods funding in their Community um retroactive public goods funding as as your listeners may know is based off of the idea that it's easier to fund things that have had an impact in the past than it is to speculate about which things will have impact in the future because you have all the data available about what's actually done good in these communities so basically using retroactive public goods funding you set up a system of badge holders who are community members who are uh highly regarded in the community have good judgment and have about 3 to five hours per quarter in order to uh allocate Capital to to what has done good in the past and so um optimism has been pioneering the retroactive public

goods funding space within the ethereum ecosystem and we've partnered with them to make their flavor of capital allocation available to any other Dow in the uh evm space that wants to do retroactive public goods funding so uh we've got our first pilot of easy retrop pgf doxyz available coming up in the uh in the next month that'll be in in April and we're working with I I think I can say this on air but uh filecoin pocket cell uh in order to earn retr pgf rounds in their community so yeah just just I just want your listeners to like I just want to like drill in on this point getcoin 1.0 is just qf gitcoin 2.0 is is many different flavors of uh of capital allocation and qf and retr pgf are two

two of the ones that we're most excited about right now happy to go into the others or to take questions about retro pgf yeah one question about retal pgf before we kind of go into the others um so you said that you have to define a set of people who are allowed to kind of make um allocation or kind of vote on kind of what should receive funding why do you have to do that for for rpdf and not for not for quadratic funding yeah so um we're we're kind of like almost mixing two things um the the pr ECT of retroactive versus prospective funding is is just like sort of like a spectrum of are you funding things that

were only good in the past are you funding things that are good in the past and in the future so that's like that's like one spectrum and then another spectrum is the allow list who gets to vote and in quadratic funding there's this almost it's actually pretty radical to think anyone in the community can vote with their dollars or or their eth that they bring whereas retro retroactive public goods funding is a little bit less Democratic and it's a more a little bit more technocratic so basically you assign a badge holder someone in your community that's well regarded and well informed that gets to vote and um I I kind of think of this as a spectrum of like on the on the left-hand side if it's just the core team and the founders that get to decide who allocates Capital well that's completely technocratic and sort of like

insular and and no one gets to decide and uh badge holders are just a way for for uh communities to slowly Dole out that responsibility to their most Trust Ed community members and and what I think we're going to see with retroactive public goods funding is communities that have had Direct grants programs and maybe there's a grants administrator who's become a Power broker in their Community start to be able to Dole out and progressively decentralize that that responsibility but also that power to their community in until you start to reach out and have what optimism has which is hundreds of badge holders who are making decisions and then you know I think the destination looks a little bit more like

qf where maybe you'll have thousands of bad shoulders that are making decisions about funding what matter it's about progressively decentralizing that power so um when we talk about the difference between qf and retr pgf I think people get a little bit tripped up because we're actually traversing two different spectrums of the design space the first is retroactive versus proactive and the second is how technocratic versus Democratic is is the vote and um you know Capital allocation is a design space there's going to be many dots along this design space those just happen to be two that the community is exploring right now yeah super interesting um and what are the other Capital allocation schemes that you have integrated into gitcoin

2.0 so um I want to be very clear about what exists right now and then what exists in the future because I I think a lot of like one of the radical things we did with the getcoin 2.0 white paper is like we didn't write the getcoin 2.0 white paper and then say hey we're going to build it over over the next 5 years this stuff is live already so we've we've got direct grants which is just plain simple vanilla grants you can go out and a grant administrator can run an onchain grant program um we've got quadratic funding which is what gitcoin is historically known for uh we've got retroactive public goods funding that's already live and then we've got conviction voting pilot that we were working on with uh onehive so basically conviction voting is is is sort of like an interesting way of doing Capital

allocation in which you stake governance tokens and then you can remove money from the treasury the more governance tokens have been staked and the longer they've been staked and then um we've got a capital allocation mechanism called streaming quadratic funding which is uh which is a partnership between geow web and superf fluid and getcoin in which basically instead of funding public goods quadratically for two weeks per quarter you could have an always on stream of Revenue that is being continuously allocated to different uh grants in your ecosystem so those are the five that exist right now direct grants quadratic funding conviction voting retr pgf and streaming qf we've got a road map of around a dozen other

mechanisms that we want to build into the get cooling toolbox into the future and um you know like I said this is all in service of helping communities fund what matters we see a future in which uh communities are going to be funding their ecosystem in a plurality of different different mechanisms and we think these mechanisms are all complementary with each other I I think that the The Meta the most effective tactic for someone launching an evm based community in the next cycle is going to be not just having a regular grants program but also doing qf and retr pgf and conviction voting all all together and um and and yeah so the the vision is basically to to have an Eco system of capital allocation that uh

funds your community in complimentary ways to uh just your existing direct grants program can you give examples of where you think each of these schemes will be particularly effective because if they're if they're all about the same you wouldn't need so many right yeah sure I I'm happy to um the word scheme makes me feel a little bit dirty uh because a lot of these things are deeply rooted in in Game Theory but but yeah just to to answer your question um uh quadratic funding is really good at Democratic Capital allocation it invites people in the outer edges of your community to fund what matters to them retroactive public goods funding is really good at progressively

decentralizing the responsibility from a centralized Grant administrator to to a group of trusted community members and then eventually many more of your community members to fund what matters to them conviction voting is really good at creating Bottoms Up momentum in your community to help people fund the the public goods that matter to them and uh you know if if a normal governance proposal or process takes I don't know hours to write the grant proposal and then it takes all of the token holders to vote on it and in some it spends 100 hours of of token holder attention conviction building is really nice because you you you you're not doing um million dooll grants with with hundreds

of doll hundreds of hours of attention you're doing uh like a a $500 SL fund for a party that someone in your community wants to host and they only have to stake thousands of their of their governance tokens in order to pull it out so it's like a very Bottoms Up way of doing Capital allocation so I think these are all these things are all good at like it's simp the analogy of of of a multi-tool I think really works like for the same reason that uh scissors and a Phillips head screwdriver and pliers solve different problems around the house each of these Capital allocation tools solve different ways of doing Capital allocation your community that are all complimentary to each other so I think of it as like a multi-tool or like a toolbox of different tools that

complement each other cool you you were just talking about staking the token that's relevant for that Community you guys also have your own token that you pre briefly alluded to earlier what is that used for yep so uh GTC is the uh is the gitcoin token and GTC stands for gitcoin or I like to say that it s it stands for govern the community um it's a governance token and basically uh it's a fork of uni which itself is a fork of compound uh using GTC any token holders can delegate their governance power to a member of the community that's more active uh than

them there was uh the getcoin token dropped in 2021 and there was around 14,000 holders at that time who are delegating to about 100 150 key decision makers in the community and um yeah GGC is is basically a governance token that allows you to govern the gitcoin smart contracts on chain and uh the gitcoin smart contracts are basically the treasury and then there's also aloe protocol which is our Capital allocation protocol that um you know there's there's a fee switch within the protocol that is governed by the GTC holders and then there's the the treasuries that are governed by the GTC holders and there's active discover discussions on gov.co.uk

where I'll start is that uh we built getcoin 1.0 totally wrong and I just want to like raise my hand in front of your your audience and say I built it centralized and monolithic and I have seen the light and modular and decentralized is the way to go so so gitcoin 1.0 was a centralized monolith it was uh hosted on a AWS server in Oregon that I set up and getcoin 2.0 is hosted on ethereum and on ipfs so hooray our public goods funding mechanisms are decentralized network we're eating our decentralized vegetables so um basically uh this is a Alo protocol is a modular Suite of smart contracts that allows people to basically it's easily forkable so anyone can Fork getcoin grants and build their own Capital allocation

mechanism into it but if you don't care about coding uh you can just basically use this tool called getcoin Grant stack which is the web application that allows anyone to run a getcoin grants in in their community so basically uh what we're allowing everyone to do is run a qf round permissionless wi without any help from us so gitcoin 1.0 was all about fishing for you getcoin 2.0 is teaching you to fish we've now got a community of 50 to 100 round operators that are trained to run getcoin grants rounds in in your community and that's what we call the program layer it's the social layer people who run understand how to run qf rounds in in various evm

based communities and uh they building they are building these programs on top of gitcoin Grant stack which is the application that anyone can use to run a qf round and a retro pgf round and then that's all built on Alo protocol which is which is sort of the the development layer under underneath of it so um yeah I think this architecture is quite elegant because it allows us to go deep on each of the capital allocation tools and build the best tool for for that design space but it allows us to go Broad and build many different types of capital allocation tools into the community so that's a little bit about the architecture of getcoin 2.0 can I add modules to that so basically if I feel like a particular

distribution mechanism is definitely missing can I build that and have it integrated into that stack yep so um if you don't have coding skills you can go to uh getcoin dogr stack click on the GitHub open up a new issue and make a suggestion for a capital allocation strategy um if you are a software developer what you can do is you can Fork aloe in Grant stack and you can augment the capital allocation strategies and then PR it back into grant stack so um what I think is really one of the most powerful things about open source is the ability to accept contributions from from all over the place and and my goal for getcoin 2.0 is um I want to do for Capital allocation

what op Zeppelin has done for erc20 tokens and and what I mean by that is this when I was a software developer who was was just entering the space and wanted to mess around with something at of hackathon for a weekend I would just pull erc20 solidity contracts out of open Zeppelin's repository and I knew they were well documented and they were audited and I could just take that money Lego erc20 token and pull it into my app and then that way I could build what my app actually needed to do instead of Reinventing the wheel of rc20 for every app that I'm that I'm building we want to do that for Capital allocation I imagine a future in which anyone in a hackathon uh at eath Global hackathon in the future can pull the power of getcoin Grants into their into their application

for that weekend and they can instantly have a quadratic funding strategy or retroactive public goods funding strategy that they know is documented and audited and and and I think that what this is we want to build the money Legos for Capital allocation in uh on on the evm based stack and and what that's going to do is is Propel the community forward in Distributing the capital that that exists in all of these different tokenized treasuries uh across across the space and so yeah setting the shelling point for for for Capital allocation contracts and and making those those contracts available to any hacker in the space who wants to build qf or retrop pgf or conviction voting or

whatever it is into their application in the future so that's the final Northstar uh we're not quite there yet still working on making the docs good still uh making the contracts really understand understandable but uh but yeah we believe in a future in which anyone can take the power of getcoin Grants and put it into their application and that's enabled by this new modular architecture uh that we presented in getcoin 2.0 you said that the fee switch for the Alo protocol is triggered by the gitcoin token tell us about the fees that you may introduce yeah um I I'd say that right now we're really just focused on providing as as much value as possible Alo protocol is being used in dozens of

places right now we think that there could be hundreds thousands of dows that are using Alo protocol and could benefit from these Capital allocation tools right now and uh right now we are accepting payment in feedback uh because we just want to make sure that these tools are adopted and helping as many people as possible there are no active plans to turn on the fee switch I think uh it's really up to governance whether that's going to happen or not and I I think keep an eye on gov. gitcoin doco but uh you know my constraints for actually activating the fee switch would be that it has to be done in a way that is positive some with the communities that it serves and I think that we're still exactly figuring out the path to financial sustainability for getcoin and

how to how to balance the tradeoffs with with uh what that would mean for turning that on so I guess that's a long way of saying it's up to governance I don't know keep an eye on gg. gin. What's the sentiment about gitcoin token holders because I mean in principle it's like if you look at the market cap it's kind of like probably on the order of 100 million or something so to kind of have that kind of float people probably believe that it'll uh it'll be able to capture some of the value that it provides to other communities right I mean I I I I think the the the sentiment that I see expressed on gov.

gitcoin doco which is where at least in theory people are supposed to be expressing their sentiment about gitcoin is you guys need to get product adoption so so basically gitcoin gitcoin Dow launched in 2021 and we're now in 2024 it took two years to rewrite the centralized monolithic stack to be decentralized in modular and I and I think that in know in a space where attention is fickle and we're going to chase meme coins on the order of hours not days I think a lot of people have forgotten about getcoin and you know that's fine we we didn't execute and uh and you know there was a pretty hard reset between 1.0 and 2.0 so um you know

I I think that the Focus right now is is on building tools that are actually useful to people and getting those adoption and uh you know what a I I think like being a leader again in in capital allocation I think like in a lot of ways getcoin 1.0 pioneered quadratic funding at with the help of you know obviously we didn't write the paper Glenn balic and Zoe wrote the paper but we're pioneering the actual practice of using it and um you know the game has changed there it's not just quadratic funding anymore it's retroactive public goods funding there's a bunch of different Capital allocation Tools in in and um and the reset from centralized in monolithic to decentralized in modular has necessitated a different approach in

a in a new era of leadership so um you know I think the honest answer to your question is that getcoin needs to lead again and it needs to and it needs to Pioneer the space during a new era in which the game has changed and and the sentiment that I hear that I really want to respond to is making gitcoin a a market leader again and and that's that's what you'll see me pushing for at go. gin. that's absolutely fair so you recently deployed to a whole bunch of chains how did you determine where to deploy to I mean obviously it's clear that ethereum main net was not the place to fee anymore in in in light of the fees

but yeah how did you decide where to you know place your bets yeah uh well anyone can take Alo protocol and deploy it wherever they want so uh that's the nice thing about being forkable and permissionless is that you don't have to rely on Kevin aaki anymore you know uh gitcoin is going to deploy to any L2 that's legitimate and wants to fun what matters to its its community so right now we're seeing the most traction on optimism and arbitrum Alo has also deployed to uh too into ZK sync into base and uh wherever the communities that wherever there's money that is going to be funding public goods and funding what matters to these

communities I I think that we'll make sure that there's an allo deployment to those chains so I think we're all we're all waiting to see where l2s are going to shake out but it's it's pretty cheap to deploy the Alo contracts to a new chain in terms of time and gas costs so uh we're going to go to as many l2s as there are communities that have treasuries that want to deploy them yeah makes total sense you heavily rely on kind of like the future being Dow heavy for gitcoin right because kind of like allocating treasuries kind of like in a decentralized manner this is very much a dow mandate how do you see the recent evolution of Dow are you

happy with where we are right now with Dows or do you think um we we we we need to push for getting to another place I think Dows are a fascinating design space I I think Dows are are basically crypto in multiplayer mode what do we do when communities have to govern something together have to push forward a movement together and I I was like when said the word organization in in decentralized autonomous organization I think these are Networks in a way and that's just a totally different way of thinking and it's going to take time for them to evolve the corporate form evolved for 3400 years something like that from the East India Corporation to what we now know is the Delaware Sea

Corp or you know I'm not sure what the equivalent is in Europe but uh I think it's going to take it's going to take Decades of evolution for us to figure out the final form of dows and I think that that we can't rush it um I really like I really like mullik Dows I really like compound Dows I I I think that there's a that nosis safe is just an incredibly simple but powerful tool for for helping communities work together I'm excited about New Primitives like hats protocol and um you know I I think we can't force the evolution I think we have to go through the painful Parts but also the beautiful parts of of dalls happening and you know get what getcoin tring to solve is like a very small

portion of the D stack which is capital allocation and and you're right it does sort of depend on on people having tokens that they want to deploy to from their tokenized treasuries to to the outer orbits of their communities but you know getcoins kind of a bet on the evm eating the world and tokenization eating the world and on top of that I know that people are going to want to fund what matters in their communities and and we just want to build the best stack for for doing that but uh maybe I could tease a little actually a little bit um I'm actually writing a book right now called how to Da which will be published with penguin uh with penguin random house as a publisher in September October of this year so really excited to explain the

design space of dows to hopefully a more mainstream audience coming in the fall and uh I think it's a really fascinating and exciting design space I had no idea about the book but I'm going to push on this now so what do you think is the single thing that should be changed for da that would have the most impact right now um it's it's a hard question to answer because asking about Dows is is like asking about it's it's an extremely wide aperture asking about Dows is like asking about organizations are we talking about a family are we talking about a nonprofit are we talking about a for-profit corporation are you talking about an NGO like it it it's just like

too wide of an aperture to even give a useful answer so I'm sorry not to answer your question but um I I think there's a bunch of little things that need to be made better yeah okay I specify um so in my view the one thing that would do a lot if it were to be solved is kind of like the attention bandwidth problem right kind of right now when you actually look at the snapshots of D often um it is votes on things that shouldn't be voted on there's like people basically quorums are not met uh left and right because people kind of disengage do you have an idea how to to to deal with um the

bandwidth problem for different decisions kind of on different scales for D yeah I I mean my response to that would be hey what if there was the capital allocation tool that respected the voters attention instead of instead of assuming that they're spending tens of hours every day on on the governance forums um so I I think that like quad funding in a way sort of is that um with quadratic funding you're you're taking a look at all of the grants in a community that are doing stuff within that community and loading up your cart once per quarter it takes 10 or 15 minutes it feels more like an Ecommerce experience

you check out and then you're done once a quarter and so there's not a bunch of like governance proposals to really spend a lot of time debating back and forth on and um any know by the way I'm sorry there was so much friction in your gg9 experience I hope that gg20 is is more uh is better for you but you know my response to that is we need a capital allocation Swiss army knife and we need to have more tools that respect the the users attention the voters attention when when they're allocating capital in these Styles yeah and Kevin I kind of I I I I want to make clear that kind of I've I've given through gitcoin through most of the rounds I'm a huge fan I think it's super it's it's I I just wanted kind of I was frustrated because

I think it's a really important tool and I want to see it just work yeah um well I I I am back at gitcoin I was disaffiliated for about a year and a half and I think the getcoin was in the messy middle between 1.0 and 2.0 um but if you have complaints about gg20 please tweet at me I'm at aaki on Twitter and I I read all the feedback and we take it seriously uh sometimes even if you don't see it and um and and know that we were working hard to make the user experience better um we have made missteps it is a hard design space but G each getcoin is deeply protop in with and by that I mean it gets better every quarter um sometimes it's two steps forward and one

step or one step two steps back and one step forward uh you know especially between getcoin 1.0 and 2.0 but uh we are still here we are still grinding and we're going to make each getcoin GRS round better than the last one fantastic so um tell our audience how to get involved with gitcoin governance if they want to do so how to contribute um how to I I know there's an approval process for projects kind of be WID listed and so on you rely heavily on volunteers for that so if people kind of if this resonates with people where do they head yep so uh you can go to getcoin doco which is where you can find all the other good stuff if you check out impact. gitcoin doco that is the ticker

for the amount of impact that gitcoin has had from the beginning uh of of gcoins entrance in the space I've always been very focused on let's actually show the numbers the tangible impact that gitcoin is H is having and I wanted to stand out from all the projects that were promising the world but not actually delivering much and um impact. getcoin doco is where you can go to see our latest impact numbers as of as of uh 2024 March 2024 we've done $60 Million worth of funding to public goods in the ethereum ecosystem you can go to getcoin doco Discord if you want to join our Discord and get involved gov.co.uk [Music]

it and let me know if it sucked then tell me it sucked if you thought it was great then tell me it was great I'm twitter.com aaki fredrique thank you so much for having me on the epicenter podcast I really enjoyed the conversation thank thank you for coming on Kevin I I'm looking forward to uh round 20