Gitcoin / Quadratic Funding (Introducing Kevin Owocki)

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Thanks for the intro @zooko.

Hi everyone, great to be formally introduced. I’m the CEO of the Gitcoin project - our mission is to “Grow Open Source” and provide economic opportunities for developers. We’ve done about $4.5mm in funding for developers on Gitcoin. (Stats here $69.1m in Results | Gitcoin )

While I’m primarily known in the Ethereum community, I have been following Zcash quietly for years. In 2016 I mined some ZCash, and I have been following Zcash since then because I am a strong believer in the individual right to privacy against surveillance, and Zcash is producing bleeding edge innovation here.

One of our products is Gitcoin Grants, which is being used to fund development in the Ethereum space in a way that’s decentralized + democratic + community driven.

With Gitcoin Grants, we raise a matching pool (the last one in ETH was $250k). We then distribute the matching funds along with the community.

But here’s the rub: the breadth of contributors matters more than amount funded. This is super powerful because a $1 contribution can yield up to $150 in matching funds (if the grant is popular with a lot of people).

I’m considering applying to a grant with the Zcash Foundation to run a Grant round for the Zcash community with native $ZEC support, and wanted to get some community feedback before I do.

Would you folks as the community support doing a $15k Gitcoin Grants ZEC experiment?

History of Gitcoin Grants on Ethereum, by the numbers

Gitcoin Grants Round 1, Q1 2019. 200 Contributions - $38k raised.

The social graph (nodes are users who contributed, edges are transactions ):

round1

Round 2, Q2 2019. 400 Contributions - $56k raised:

The social graph (nodes are users who contributed, edges are transactions ):

round2

Round 3, Q3 2019. 2000 Contributions - $270k raised.

Round 3 we built a UI that estimated how many matching funds your donation would get.
See Also: Vitalik Buterin’s Review of Round 4

Social Graph :point_down:

round3

Round 4, Q1 2020. 5000 Contributions - $344k raised.

Round 4 included a Media Matching Fund (and plenty of controversy):
See Also: Vitalik Buterin’s Review of Round 4
Social Graph :point_down:

round%204

Round 5, Q2 2020. 8000 Contributions - $475k raised.

Round 5 included a Public Health Matching Fund, Negative Voting, Flagging, Round over Round Subscriptions, and of course, more controversy:
Vitalik’s Review Forthcoming
Social Graph :point_down:

https://p200.p0.n0.cdn.getcloudapp.com/items/eDu6wWJB/round5.gif?v=b2c9df4467fd60f01475eba8b74343f1(image larger than 4 MB)

More Details / Background

Our work in administering Grants rounds has been an important part of scaling the Ethereum ecosystem because

  1. It’s proven: We’ve done $2mm worth of Gitcoin Grants already.
  2. Every round creates a signal about what projects the community cares about.
  3. It is more decentralized than running a centralized grants program.
  4. It is more scalable than running a centralized grants program.
  5. It serves as a marketing schelling point for people to make noise about, and support, each other’s work.
  6. It pushes power to the edges, because it, as Glen Weyl puts it, “Is the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods that a broad swath of the public cares about”.

You can read more about our work funding the Ethereum space below

PS - Fun fact about the history of QF - Quadratic Funding used to be called “Capital-Constrained Liberal Radicalism”, and @zooko was the one who suggested to Vitalik and Glen Weyl that we call it “Quadratic Funding” instead.

More about me below

If you’re in Boulder Colorado, you may recognize me as the organizer of the Boulder Blockchain meetup. I’ve been in the space for a bit, launching adblock to bitcoin and pytrader back in 2015. I’ve also done some mining, building a mining rig which I used to mine on the ETH Mainnet in 2017, and actually I ran it on the ZEC mainnet launch day (but didn’t actually successfully mine a block – wahh!).

In 2017, I started work on Gitcoin - A double sided marketplace that connects knowledge workers to people who want to hire them. Our mission is to Grow Open Source and create new economic opportunities for coders.

Find me online here:

More about Gitcoin Below.

Gitcoin’s mission is to Grow Open Source and help devs find new economic opportunities.

Gitcoin is a double sided marketplace that connects workers to people who want to fund them. Our mission is to provide economic opportunities in open source to software developers.

There are many ways to do this, and gitcoin offers a few different products to enable this:

  • Virtual Hackathons: basically a physical hackathon but online & worldwide. sponsors post prizes and people compete to earn them by building stuff to the spnosors specification.

  • Grants: a better way to fund innovation in your ecosystem. grantees can create a fundraising page for “the great work they’re already doing” in the space, then raise $$$ for that work.

  • Ethical Ads, CodeFund - An advertising network that respects your privacy - Codefund allows you to monetize your audience without selling them out.

For more info on Gitcoin, checkout https://gitcoin.co/townsquare![round2|674x398]

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