What does the world look like if Gitcoin is maximally successful?

Gitcoin's mission is to Fund What Matters. We envision a world shaped by community-led positive change.

But what does that mean? Is it just marketing fluff?

Traction

The data says it is not. Gitcoin has had $50m worth of direct impact so far ( https://impact.gitcoin.co/ (opens in a new tab) ), and secondarily, it

1. has shown that pro-social, protopian, or mission-centric crypto projects are possible to a generation of builders.
2. is building protocols & products that others can use to increase the bottoms up coordination in their own projects.

Macro Trends

As humanity collectively evolves from the industrial age to the information age, the world is in the midst of massive change.

1. The internet revolutionized everything that was built upon information (newspapers, media, social media, entertainment) by allowing computers to send information across computer networks.
2. The internet of finance could revolutionize everything built upon value (investments, insurance, collectables, work, how we fund the commons) because we can now send value across computer networks.

Within the context of this civilizational scale upgrade to the finacial system, Gitcoin is stimulating action on the following high-leverage points:

1. p2p capital allocation - Gitcoin provides tools to enable community-led capital allocation with Allo Protocol & Grants Stack.
2. p2p identity - Gitcoin provides tools to enable sybil resistence & more a democratic DAO ecosystem with Gitcoin Passport.
3. p2p social movement - Gitcoin stimulates a social movement towards more regenerative cryptoeconomic ecosystem by channeling capital, talent, research, and memes towards other regen projects.

Over the last 24 months, we have seen Gitcoin copycats pop up in many other ecosystems. Why are these copycats popping up? Because funding your ecosystem's public goods is a sustainable competitive advantage.

The next stage of growth: $50m => $500m

Gitcoin has had $50m worth of impact so far ( https://impact.gitcoin.co/ (opens in a new tab) ). How do we leverage this momentum to get to our next stage of growth? What does the path to $500m look like?

Simple: We just give ecosystems the same tools that worked for Vitalik last cycle (opens in a new tab). We give everyone the tools to Fund What Matters to them.

Grants Stack & Allo allow anyone to do Quadratic Funding. But now that Gitcoin Grants is decentralized & modular, we can build for a pluralitiy of capital allocation mechanisms.

1. Quadratic Funding
2. Milestone based payouts
3. Quadratic Voting
4. Retroactive Public Goods Funding
5. Direct Grants
6. Many many more capital allocation mechanisms we've not yet dreamed up. more here (opens in a new tab)

Along with the ability to compose any sort of Grants program possible, Gitcoin delivers best practices to each community, allowing them to fund what matters in their ecosystem.

Last Cycle:                                          Next Cycle
                                                            ⚪️ ⚪️
                                                          ⚪️  ⚪️ ⚪️
 ⚪️ Ethereum Ecosystem Grants                          ⚪️   ⚪️  ⚪️  ⚪️
 administered by Gitcoin                             ⚪️  ⚪️   ⚪️  ⚪️  ⚪️
                                                       ⚪️  ⚪️   ⚪️  ⚪️  ⚪️
                                                         ⚪️   ⚪️  ⚪️  ⚪️
                                                            ⚪️  ⚪️  ⚪️ 
                                                              ⚪️  ⚪️ 
                                                                ⚪️  
                                                      Allo Flywheel
                                                      A plurality of EVM based communities
                                                      running their own Grants Programs + building
                                                      allocation strategies into their products & communities

In the 2019-2020 cycle, we were fishing for you. In the 2023-2024 cycle, we are teaching people to fish + selling them fishing poles.

As we enable more and more communities to Fund What Matters to them, that could power the growth of Gitcoin's GMV (Gross Marketplace Value) from $50m -> $500m.

The stage after that: $500m => $5bn

Once the EVM community is funding it's own ecosystems, we envision that this momentum could be leveraged to fund non web3 ecosystems.

To do this,

1. The momentum within web3 must be strong (eg. 100s of EVM communities using Allo-based tools).
2. Gitcoin's tools must be usable enough for mainstream users (eg. you dont need to know about private keys/txns, you can use fiat, can use the tools on mobile)
3. There must not have been a black swan event that destroys crypto (eg. it's regulated away from being useful, outright banned, or technical black swans like quantum computing which are all still threats.)

More on this here:

• https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/a-vision-for-a-pluralistic-civilizational-scale-infrastructure-for-funding-public-goods/9503 (opens in a new tab)
• and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V5J4FjOMDQ (opens in a new tab)

Zoomed out Web3                    Civilizational Scale
Allo Flywheel:                     Allo Flywheel
                                          🔵 ⚪️ ⚪️ ⚪️ 🔵
                                         🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                       🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵
⚪️                                   🔵 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
                                   🔵 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢
                                  🔵 🟢 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢 🟢 🔵
                                🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵  🟢 🟢 🔵
                                🔵 🟢 🔵 🔵 🔵 🟢 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                  🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵 🟢 🟢 🟢 🔵 🟢 🟢
                                   🔵 🟢 🔵 🔵 🟢 🟢 🔵 🔵 🟢
                                     🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🟢 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                       🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                         🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵 🔵
                                          🔵 ⚪️ ⚪️ ⚪️ 🔵

Passport: also a billion $$$ opportunity

Because Gitcoin Grants has always needed sybil resistence in order to function, Gitcoin has put a lot of work into the sybil resistence ecosystem, by way of integrating with top providers like: Idena, BrightID, Proof Of Humanity, etc. But Gitcoin has never wanted to rely on one sybil resistence provider, so it has built a tool based on a plurality of providers. There are dozens of "stamps" integrated into Gitcoin Passport, enabling sybil resistence to come from many places.

The end result is that Passport is like Kirby from Super Smash Bros: it can inherit the powers of everyone else.

Symbiosis

It's important to remember that the relationship between Gitcoin Passport and these providers is symbiotic. Many of these providers got their first set of users from integrating into Gitcoin Passport, and Gitcoin Passport derives its sybil resistence from these providers. The ecosystem grows together.

Plurality

Because Passport relies on a plurality of providers, it is not locked into any of them. There are many different ways to prove your humanity on Passport, which means that Passport is not fragile or capture-able to any one provider.

Market Opportunity

Once Gitcoin Passport has accumulated enough sybil resistence, it can then abstract the complexity associated with keeping the social graph sybil free, and export it to other dapps.

Basically the opportunity for Gitcoin is to do for sybil resistence what twilio did for SMS or SendGrid did for SMTP ( abstract the solutions to all of the hairy problems behind an API + bootstrap an ecosystem of developers that leverage the superpowers of an API)

In this way, I think that Passport is to Gitcoin as AWS is to Amazon.com (opens in a new tab) - something that was built to solve a problem we had, but could be opened up to others.. eventually driving much more business value than the original product.

The billion $$$ opportunity on Passport looks like this:

1. Bootstrap Gitcoin Passport with Gitcoin Grants.
2. Abstract the solutions to all of the hairy problems* of sybil resistence behind an API. Allow devs to integrate with Gitcoin Passport & get sybil resistence in a couple lines of code.
3. Boostrap a marketplace of other dapps that need privacy preserving sybil resistence.
   • Lead with marketing to the JTBD (Jobs to be Done) for each party:
   • dApp developers: Passport provides easy to integrate.
   • dApp developers: Sybil resistence opens up many meaningful new use cases: UBI, Quadratic Funding, Airdrops from governments, democratic DAOs, etc.
   • dApp developers: With Passport, your identity is not owned by one protocol + therefore benefits from plurality/anti-fragility of Passport.
   • end-users: You get $$$ (or some other reward) for proving you are a real human.
4. Repeat until network effects kick in.
   • The TAM for identity mechanisms is (right now) 1.5 million web3 users, but eventually it could be everyone on planet earth.

The Hard bits

*Abstract away the "hairy problems" of sybil resistence?

Easier said than done :)

This is a hard problem space. There is a reason why sybil resistence is not addressed or solved so far.

So when we say "Abstract the solutions to all of the hairy problems behind an API", we are really hand waving away a lot of important things.

Those things are:

1. preserve privacy
2. preserve user sovereignty
3. avoid plutocracy
4. avoid collusion attacks
5. enable network effects
6. design the system to be decentralizaed, modular & forkable
7. embrace the infinite evolutionary nature of sybil attacks.
8. make the system systemically defensible
   • this means keeping the total size of the Gitcoin Passport supported economy below the total cost of forgery of all of the passports.
   • and likely also enabling a data driven economy of sybil hunters to root out collusion/sybil attacks.

We've put a lot of thought into how to architect this system & you can learn more by listening to this devcon talk (opens in a new tab)

PGN

TODO: Kyle can talk about how PGN scales here.