"All in all, Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support."
—Vitalik Buterin

Gitcoin believes that funding digital public goods have the potential to solve some of our toughest challenges now and in the future.

Empowering communities to fund, build, & protect what matters.

Public Goods are Good.

Like OSS— Open Source Software, other digital public goods that favor collaboration over competition can be used and modified by all. These are often neglected or unrewarded; including data sets, AI models, educational programming, and media such as articles, videos, podcasts, and images...

Open Source Software

OSS is an infinite game energized by collective intelligence, with a shared belief in continuous improvement and a shared culture: knowledge belongs to all of us.

Codebase maintenance for public use is a never-ending grind. The effort and resources needed to keep things running smoothly are often disproportionate to the rewards or recognition received.

But money is only a part of this problem, if the value of maintaining code fails to outpace the rewards, many of these OSS developers quietly retreat into the shadows.

Some developers handle user demand without financial compensation, eventually opting to work for siloed companies in hopes of better economic upside, often resulting in finite or 0-sum games; producing a 1-dimensional growth approach due to the need to compete to stay relevant.

There are 5 reasons to believe that Gitcoin could make a substantial impact on the status quo.

According to Tony Fadell, a company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:

1. It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t.

2. This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily. There should be an existing large market.

3. The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it.

4. Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs.

5. It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it.

Now, let’s explore those characteristics in the context of Gitcoin:

1) Gitcoin can be think of as a hyperstructure backed by the Ethereum Foundation, offering a sustainable way to grow and support the open-source software (OSS) ecosystem. Gitcoin's mission is to empower an open internet and economy by funding diverse projects, building community, and making learning resources accessible. Through incentivizing meaningful contributions to various OSS projects, Gitcoin ensures developers can meet their financial needs while maintaining their altruistic values.

2) Gitcoin combines existing technology in a novel way to facilitate a vibrant and prosperous future for all. Quadratic funding—the mechanism implemented in the Gitcoin Grants program—is described as the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community, this system gives more weight to projects with the most diverse backers, ensuring that a wider range of projects are funded, and that projects with a large number of small backers are not put at a disadvantage.

Gitcoin's Grants Program has always been focused on helping sustain digital public goods that the Gitcoin and broader web3 community care about. They are currently transitioning to a decentralized program, Gitcoin Grants Stack, that will enable anyone to launch and manage their own programs the same way we manage ours at any given time.

3) Gitcoin is solving a problem—a real pain point—The fact that many open source developers suffer from a lack of support is indisputable. The same is true for other types of knowledge workers that are not directly paid for their work; like writers, physicians, scientists, design thinkers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living” and find themselves in the absence of additional reputational or financial benefits, despite generating trillions of dollars in economic value. Gitcoin is on a mission to allow freelancers to make a living from contributing to the open internet.

4) These novel technologies can deliver on the organization’s vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it. Gitcoin is both an impact and protocol DAO that is curating and helping other impact DAOs, as a self-fulfilling prophecy of net positive externalities; not only building the narrative, but also providing the infrastructure to fund public goods, regenerative cryptoeconomics, and forming positive-sum relationships while helping other communities build and fund their shared needs via collectivized cross-pollination.

5) The leadership structure is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to the ecosystem needs. After 5 years of leadership, Gitcoin’s founder moved on to enable the DAO to become its own independent legal entity, and for it to be driven fully by the leaders within the DAO, who also believe in the value of public goods, and will continue to drive it forward to success.

In order to remain honest and encourage decentralization, inclusivity and diversity of thought; the DAO empowers Gitcoin citizens to co-create what they need from a web3 regen community and play a part in effectively deploying funds in support of their own community’s needs while continuing to innovate on Community Curation, Token Curated Registries (TCR), the Gitcoin passport and other initiatives that leverage wisdom of the crowd by aligning incentives among token holders…

From Gitcoin to Supermodular

Picking up where Gitcoin left off, @owocki unveiled more details about @supermodularxyz at @EthereumDenver, describing it as ReFi “incubator” designed to simultaneously help developers advance Web3 technology while protecting critical resources and global public goods.

Conclusion

Gitcoin's approach to incentivizing contributions to open-source software and digital public goods has the potential to significantly impact the status quo. By utilizing innovative technologies and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of net positive externalities, Gitcoin is poised to empower freelancers and foster a more collaborative and innovative future.

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#GAOA