Our genesis

The absence of dignified conditions in the majority of Latin American regions has had a significant impact on the development of the region. Quality education, accessible healthcare, adequate infrastructure, and basic services are essential for fostering economic growth, reducing inequality, and improving the quality of life for the population.

However, in many Latin American countries, the provision of these goods has been insufficient or deficient due to a combination of factors such as lack of investment, corruption, and government inefficiency. This situation has perpetuated the gap between the rich and the poor, limiting development opportunities and leaving many citizens without access to essential services.

There is an exciting opportunity to leverage blockchain technology, particularly the Ethereum platform, to further foster the provision of public goods in the Latin American region.

The capability of Ethereum to enable transparent and secure smart contracts, as well as facilitate reliable and efficient transactions, could revolutionize the way public resources are managed and distributed. By implementing Ethereum-based solutions, governments could enhance transparency, accountability, and traceability of funds allocated to education, healthcare, infrastructure, and other essential services. This has the potential to build trust in institutions and enable greater citizen participation in decision-making, thereby driving sustainable and equitable development across the Latin American region.

Public Goods and ETH Kipu

When we decided to embark on a workspace to address Public Goods and Quadratic Funding issues, we were motivated by the QF rounds in Honduras, Buenos Aires, and Bogota held in 2022. All of these rounds taught us that empowering local teams are crucial for the development of Ethereum in Latin America, which translates into more technological innovation for the region.

As ETH Kipu was being born, several internal work verticals were also emerging, including ours. We had to refine our goals significantly. If you allow us, the major achievement in Q1 was being able to agree on which aspects to focus on in the first six months and not setting overly ambitious goals that we wouldn't be able to fulfill later.

As a work area, we were particularly cautious when establishing objectives and missions that we could accomplish in a nascent structure like ETH Kipu. We know that there is much to be done, but we are convinced that the best approach is to take one step at a time.

Our first approach: education

At Kipu Impact, we started with an educational focus. While there was a separate Education vertical led by Toño, we decided not to burden him with the responsibility that we should take on ourselves. It's worth mentioning that the Education team at ETH Kipu is conducting the largest deployment of in-person Solidity training in Latin America. It is a monumental task that is sowing seeds in different cities.

In our educational objectives, we set out to generate educational content on Public Goods, Quadratic Funding (hereafter referred to as QF), and Quadratic Voting for the general public. Our desire is to bring these concepts and tools beyond the Web3 niche and make them accessible to the entire community.

An example of this work is the upcoming Public Goods Course. In its first version, the course covers conceptual and funding aspects. The course will be iterated throughout 2023 and will serve as a starting point for those who want to take their first steps in this sector, as well as for those who want to solidify existing concepts.

As we embarked on the task of creating educational content, we realized that we could also document and share our experience as organizers of previous QF rounds in Latam. This educational material is aimed at leaders of different Ethereum communities in Latin America, providing them with a manual to organize their own QF rounds. Next week, this content will be released, and we will be happy to receive constructive criticism and suggestions. There is no existing Spanish material that summarizes this knowledge, so we are open to suggestions for improvement.

Our second approach: understanding our role within the global ecosystem

What is the current state of the Public Goods space in the world? Who is driving its funding? What narratives predominate?

For those who are not involved in the Public Goods space, it can be confusing to understand the jargon of the space, the logic, and the identity of the actors in the space. Although this niche is not yet as developed as the DeFi or NFT ecosystem, it has a particularity: the Public Goods space is transversal to all branches of Web3.

There are major players that are drivers of funding and promotion of opportunities for the creation and implementation of platforms and tools that are of benefit to the entire community.

These actors regularly organize open crowdfunding campaigns for initiatives from around the world to seek donations for their projects. In the first half of the year, we attended two major events of this kind.

Past funding rounds. Our role as Kipu Impact.

Optimism - #RPGF2 (Retro Public Good Funding N°2)

Almost by chance, we received an invitation to vote as Badgeholders in Optimism's #RPGF2. The initiative was unique in its kind, as it aimed to retroactively fund public goods that had contributed to the OP Stack. Although it was exclusive to that chain, it was important to participate and experience a large-scale social experiment.

The so-called "badgeholders" (95 publicly recognized profiles for participating in Public Goods initiatives) voted to allocate the substantial sum of 10 million $OP tokens among 195 projects. It was a kind of collegiate body that evaluated, according to their criteria, which initiatives had provided value to the ecosystem in the past. The role of "badgeholder" came through the Latin delegate 0xJoxes to Romina Sejas (Cryptochica), who extended her role to the members of the Kipu Impact unit of ETH Kipu. The group consists of pioneers in Latin America in the creation of QF rounds.

This activity was one of the first we undertook as a group and was crucial in standardizing selection criteria. You can see our analysis in this Mirror article and our intervention in the forum. Interaction in governance forums is also crucial. Not all conversation flows happen on Twitter, Discord, or Telegram. Forums are crucial in making decisions that impact all of us.

We voted for 95 projects around the world. We identified 13 projects from Latin America. The total funding amounted to 250,000 OP tokens. At the time of writing this article, the OP token was trading at 1.33 DAI, indicating an equivalent of over 330,000 dollars. This is a positive outcome, but we must continue to grow in terms of participation and quality.

Our biggest learning as jurors was that the pre-filtering of initiatives is crucial. While Web3 is known for being open and no one needs permission to interact on-chain, programs like #RPGF2 can be vulnerable to fake teams with false profiles. Another valuable lesson is that there is no subsequent monitoring of teams, so all that money can be used for other purposes and there is a risk of dissipating the real impact in the region.

Gitcoin Beta Round

Gitcoin has positioned itself as a leading platform in Public Goods, social impact, and funding. Since 2017, it has been iterating its platform. Less than a month ago, we experienced Round 13, the first round executed in a decentralized manner.

As a working area, we tried to be as proactive as possible, generating content and inviting different teams from Latin America to apply. If you had the opportunity to participate as a donor or as a builder, you probably noticed the high gas fees when donating or submitting a project. This is because the organizing team chose the Ethereum mainnet for donations. Many teams not only did not receive donations, but some ended up with a negative balance due to the application fee for the round. Transacting on the Ethereum network can be very expensive at times. That is why different scalability solutions are more suitable for these types of initiatives, especially for people in emerging regions.

The biggest learning as an ecosystem that this round has taught us is that we need to carefully consider which network to choose when organizing the flow of on-chain transactions in funding rounds. Approximately 57 ETH was spent solely on applying and voting (excluding the donation amount).

Over $100,000 was dissipated in transaction costs. That's twice the bonus of 50,000 DAI from DEI, Gitcoin's latest innovation in an attempt to incentivize diversity in teams.

Source: Own elaboration. Thank you 0xLengo and Isaac: Thank you for your contribution.

Creating educational content is good. Exploring and sharing financing options is good. But it's not enough. The public goods space requires a much more comprehensive approach. And that's what we will tackle in the next semester.

The new approach: a regional observatory

While working on educational content about these topics, we gained a new awareness of the space. There is a whole spectrum of intertwined concepts. "Solarpunk," "ReFi," "Public Goods," "Impact DAOs," and the human groups contributing to initiatives framed under these labels are part of a complex ecosystem, not only in Latin America but worldwide.

The life cycle and real impact of public goods initiatives vary depending on the team members and the resources they have. Understanding and gathering data about the realities of different teams will help us design better mechanisms for local rounds and provide our suggestions and contributions to already established teams such as Gitcoin, Giveth, Foundations, etc.

Providing clarity from an educational standpoint about these concepts is the first step in developing more comprehensive ideas about what the region needs, how to design a public good as an initiative or product, how to make it sustainable, and how to measure its impact.

Separating these concepts, defining them, and characterizing them (as traditionally done in university settings) is a task that our core team at Kipu Impact in ETH Kipu can undertake. However, we believe that having a discussion forum is much more fruitful, and the definitions that emerge from there can be adopted through consensus.

That's why we invite you to participate in the Public Goods Forum on our Discord server.

So far, we have created some topics to start with, but feel free to request new topics. We also have #hashtags to navigate the forum quickly.

We look forward to seeing you on our Discord to continue learning together as a community.

For now, we bid farewell until next week. Here's a mantra for you:

Sincerely

El equipo de Kipu Impact en ETH Kipu