This document is version 0.1.0 + should be considered a "rough draft". The version numbers will increment to v0.2., v0.3., and so on... until an endgame plan is accepted by DAO governance (version 1.0).
Warning: This resource describes planned functionality and processes that has not been implemented and is not part of any official roadmap. Be aware that parts may be inaccurate or out of date. This document should not be relied on for financial, tax, business, or any other type of advice. This document is not legal advice, please consult your own lawyer .
Product Adoption
Gitcoin is several seed stage products:
- Passport
- Grants Stack
- Allo
- PGN
How do these products win?
Meta:Vertical integration
Each of the products are players in their niches, but they are not the biggest player in their niches.
- Passport is smaller than Worldcoin
- Grants Program will soon be smaller than Optimism RPGF.
- PGN is smaller than other L2s.
- Allo is inchoate.
The vertically integrated stack of these products can win via
- leveraging vertical integration to provide a seamless experience between the products.
- leveraging network effects to bootstrap each product individually.
- Leveraging Gitcoin's strong brand to move outside of web3 (UNICEF, American Cancer Society)
These network effects and vertical integration bring beneficial tail winds to launching and boostrapping the products. Things like user growth, brand reputation, capital to develop and build, etc. are all much more easier to make progress in. That said, the vertically integrated product suite provides its own challenges too. Each product could be it's own startup, and we often see diverging roadmaps and different market focus areas. Intention and continuous coordination will be key to making sure each team can focus on their own outcomes.
Meta:Waterfall marketing
Each of the products are should first focus on a small customer segment that is
- ready to love the product today.
- able to influence others.
From there it can waterfall into greater adoption. An example of this is an early adopter of Passport that then serves as a catalyst for others to adopt and expand on the use cases. ie, getting traction with a major L2 who uses Passport to prevent Sybil attackers from claiming the airdrop, then turns into another leading ecosystem implementing Passport to protect their Discord server and their Governance forums.
Grants Stack
Grants Stack is the top of the funnel for the rest of the products.
The target customer set for Grants Stack EVM based communities that allocate over $10k/year in grants to their communities. The adoption campaign should start with those who are able to influence others.
This is a crowded space with ClrFund, Giveth, Sablier, and many other emergents all offering solutions here. Lots of grants providers use notion, airtable, or charmverse to run their grants program, forgoing a grants-centric tool alltogether -- optimizing for speed and flexibility over transparency and rigor.
From our interviews with customers they demand:
- something that is stable, effective, gets money moving into their ecosystem
- to formalize how grants at their org flow, so that multiple operators can use the same flow.
- to create transparency and community involvement in how the funds are distributed
Gitcoin offers a product suite that offers
- credible neutrality
- a swiss army knife of allocation methods (QF, QV, direct grants)
- that can build an ecosystem funding flywheel
H2 2023 will be about growing adoption of Grants Stack with these communities + building momentum from there. We expect to make progress here because of the core primitives available via the Allo and Grants Stack combination. Access to the registry, multiple funding strategies to chose from (direct grants, qf, etc) and then multiple payout strategies (qf, milestone based payments, direct payouts, etc)
Grants Stack is being built as a tool that grows with your communities grants program. Early grants programs leverage simple and straight forward workflows, and as communities and grants program grows, the depth of Grants Stack is more eaily utilized. (ie, starting with a QF round when a community doesnt have 10+ individuals/projects to fund doesnt often make sense. Once a community has funded 10+ individuals/projects via the grants program, those projects serve as the basis for the first QF round.)
Right now Grants Stack is in conversations with the following teams to facilitate their grants programs:
- Metamask
- Linea (talking to)
- Zksync Era
- Polygon (Evaluation)
- Arbitrum
- BanklessDAO
- Coinbase Advocacy
- FWB
Top Tier Customer Wish list:
- Top L2s => DEFI => NFT => Any EVM based community
- DEFI => SNX, AAVE, Maker, Chainlink, Uniswap
Open Questions:
- how do we make the impact of QF rounds more measurable for communities.
- Which capital allocation tools are the best?
- Do Gateway drug rounds (opens in a new tab) convert?
See Grants Stack S19 Strategy (opens in a new tab).
Allo Protocol
Allo Protocol’s vision is ambitious: be the foundational resource allocation infrastructure for digitally local communities. Modern resource allocation is a large, nascent category that we’re in a unique position to define. Given how broad and undefined this space is, we’re using a vertical go-to-market (GTM) strategy. We want to identify verticals with specific resource allocation needs and systematically bring targeted use cases to those user bases.
Our initial focus is the web3 ecosystem growth vertical, as we are closer to the problem space from our history with Gitcoin Grants and have a healthy pipeline of interested web3 ecosystems. We have signal that web3 organizations tend to have ecosystem growth funds, which can be deployed through a variety of channels, including:
- grants programs
- improvement proposals
- hackathons
- bounties
- rfps
- investments
We want Allo to be the backbone for all of these channels, with an ecosystem of products serving these use cases. You can learn more about our GTM plan for this vertical here. Other potential verticals that we plan to explore include:
- Web3 governance
- Foundation grants (i.e. web2) funding
- Ephemeral fund allocation
Per Allo Vision/Strategy (opens in a new tab)
Current Integration List
- EnDAOment
- Sablier
- Impact Stream
- Hats protocol
- Privy/Celo
Passport
Passport is a flexible, easy-to-use API for protecting projects against bots and bad actors.
Target Audiences
- Integrators – community leaders wanting to protect their community activations from Sybil attacks (i.e., airdrops, governance votes, discord participation).
- Platform integrators – ecosystem leaders looking to protect their community activations from Sybil attacks and/or wanting to provide Sybil protection options for their users. Would act similarly to a traditional channel partner.
- Stamp providers – apps looking to integrate a proprietary stamp to ensure usage of their product can be reflected in a Passport-holder’s Unique Humanity Score. These apps also benefit from new exposure to Passport’s holder-base
- Passport holders – community members wanting to gain access to community activations and other projects protected by Passport
Our integrators need an effective & easy platform to prevent Sybils and bots from draining their communities resources. They also need a platform that helps with identifying real humans that want to actively participate in their community – to increase authenticity and trust between participants.
More about the passport GTM strategy here (opens in a new tab)
PGN
In a world where public goods funding is not abundant and bountiful, many organizations who believe in the importance of public goods are often looking for novel ways to fund them. Gitcoin, Giveth, Clr.fund and others are no different. After years of raising and deploying capital based on community sentiment (ie, Quadratic Funding) we all recognize the need to grow the pie from which we can fund public goods.
The Public Goods Network (PGN) is a L2, launched by an alliance of public goods maxis who believe in funding public goods, and who have internalized the importance of sustaining Public Goods in our world. The vast majority of net sequencer fees from PGN will go to projects that are funding, and supporting public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond. PGN is a rollup run and operated by Gitcoin (and a 3rd party vendor) that offers discretion in how the sequencer fees are allocated. The vast majority of net sequencer fees will go to the alliance, using a newly defined governance model. PGN is a digital schelling point for those who want to support public goods. PGN is for those who want to establish sustainable, legitimate and deep revenue sources for public goods.
PGN has grown to nearly $500k in TVL since its launch. Growth of this network will continue to depend on novel use cases and support from public good supporters like Gitcoin and the Alliance who have pledged to “deploy by default.” We all need a default chain to deploy our dApps to, by selecting PGN as the default chain, developers have access to a growing community of regen focused users who have proven their commitment to funding public goods and projects that are doing good in the world.
PGN will become a digital schelling point with scale from the following key next steps:
- Infrastructure deployment and enablement (stable coins, liquidity, DEXs, etc. are all coming online to bootstrap funding use cases)
- Definition on governance and clarity on key role participation (ie, what is rewarded and how are sequencer fees distributed)
- Novel use cases of the network (leveraging Gitcoin's network effects to bootstrap adoption, and then expanding on that base of usage)