EndGame Plan
The State of Gitcoin ←(𝟥,𝟥)
GG18 Community Feedback

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).

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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 Be aware that parts may be inaccurate or out of date.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 .

GG18 Feedback

Gitcoin has run a quarterly round every 2-3 months since Q1 2019.

You can view the growth of these rounds here (opens in a new tab).

The Program

As the project has decentralized from a monolithic entity to a decentralized ecosystem of workstreams, projects, products, and protocols, this quarterly round has evolved to be known as the Gitcoin Grants Program.

The program has a few purposes

  1. Fund Ethereum ecosystem public goods.
  2. Dogfood Allo Protocol & Grants Stack.

The program is divided into Core Rounds & Featured Rounds.

Core Rounds are those where the round's decision-making, coordination and implementation are the responsibility of contributors to Gitcoin.

Featured Rounds are those where the round's decision-making, coordination and implementation are the responsibility of program managers who are not contributors to Gitcoin.

GG18 Feedback

Gitcoin Grants Round Beta Round (17) and 18 came with a lot of feedback from the community.

Full feedback is listed at research/notes (opens in a new tab). Below is a summary of the feedback.

Some of the positive feedback is below.

You can read some of the more negative/constructive criticism below too:

In the below section, I will attempt to summarize the feedback and we will attempt to show that Gitcoiners took seriously the feedback and address some of the criticisms of the round.

Feedback high level summary:

  • GG17 was on a L1, causing very high gas fees.
  • GG17 DEI Round + a controversial community member on the review committee.
  • GG18 Shell Sponsorship is bad & is greenwashing.
  • Generally, Round Acceptance is unclear.
  • Passport is hard to verify + get above 20 points.
  • Generally, Gitcoin out of touch with community.
  • Generally, Gitcoin has gone away from it's roots (OSS Funding).
  • Generally, UX is bad.

We will attempt to address each of these below

GG17 was on a L1

This has been fixed. GG18 was on a L2. Currently Grants Stack supports

  1. Eth mainnet
  2. Optimism
  3. PGN
  4. Fantom

GG17 DEI Round + a controversial community member on the review committee

Featured rounds are run by the community. Gitcoin does not control how those rounds are run. It is up to the featured round funders and their communities to decide.

The controversial community member was a reviewer of the DEI featured round during the Beta round (GG17). They are not on the Gitcoin team and never conducted any reviews outside of that specific round.

GG18 Shell Sponsorship is bad & is greenwashing.

Shell, the oil company, has been one of the worst polluters on the planet. A $500k sponsorship is not enough to make up for that, and it was probably a mistake to put their brand next to the Gticoin brand on the main handle.

Meta Point on Public Goods Funding in the Web3 Era

The Shell & DEI Controversies highlight a fundamental tension in the work that Gitcoin is doing: Public goods are relative to the values of the communities they serve.

for example:

  • some communities will want a DEI round. some will think that is woke BS.
  • some communities will want to fund open source software. some just won’t care.
  • some will want to fund local public goods. some digital.
  • some are okay with an oil company giving them money. some are not.

It is impossible to serve all of the memetic tribes at the same time. This is a fundamental tension in what Gitcoin is trying to do.

Which brings me to a point about decentralization & credible neutrality. The recent controversy misses that gitcoin is now a DAO with several parts:

  • the dao contributors themselves.
  • its PGF workstream which runs the featured rounds (shell rounds + DEI round happened here)
  • products are credibly neutral protocols now.

By design, if u dont like the gitcoin contributors politics, you can still use the protocol...

You can fork it and make binance grants, avalanche grants, grants for people into knitting, grants for shiba inu sonic 69 fans, or any community u want.

All that said - was it ill advised to put gitcoin’s brand next to shells on the main handle? Probably yes. Do we need to do a better job of seperating out which grants rounds are owned by whom? And which parts are the credibly neutral protocol? Probably yes.

The gitcoin 1.0 brand was a branded house (gitcoin grants, gitcoin hackathons, gitcoin KERNEL). the new one is a house of brands (Passport, Grants Stack, Allocation Protocol)

Gitcoin has not really successfully transitioned over the legitimacy to their new sub-brands YET:

  1. Allo Protocol
  2. Grants Stack
  3. Passport
  4. PGN

The recent ecosystem-value-alignment scuffles live within the Public Goods Funding (PGF) workstream (the folks that raised the DEI round + shell round).

From the perspective of the recent controversies, maybe they should ratify which brands go through the main Gitcoin handle with GTC governance.

Or maybe they should have their own twitter id and brand, and they just run on the protocol like everyone else. there could be multiple PGF teams.

Perhaps one day there would be two PGFs.. lefty PGF and righty PGF. They can fight each other. show off how decentralized and credibly neutral the protocols they share are 🙂

Better yet... 15 PGFs. you'll have fortune-100 PGF and libertarian PGF and environmentalist PGF. knitting PGF, golf PGF, open source software PGF. the future has many decentralized entities funding on Gitcoin protocols (and other protocols too).

Generally, Round Acceptance is unclear.

The round acceptance teams are working on providing better comms here.

Passport is hard to verify + get above 20 points.

The passport team is actively working on finding more ways to get people to a passing grade for Passport.

Generally, UX is bad.

The reset from cGrants (the old centralized platform) to Grants Stack in GG15 has been hard to do, and its meant that the product is missing some of the features that it used to have.. But it also means that there is way less tech debt than there used to be.

From Kevin's perspective, it would have been worse if the team had not decided to descend the local maxima of centralized grants and rebuild the foundations of Gitcoin to be decentralized.

The old platform had 14 rounds to evolve forward, and the new one has had 3. It will continue to evolve and get better. It will continue to get better in the upcoming rounds.

Generally, Gitcoin out of touch with community.

Generally, Gitcoin has gone away from it's roots (OSS Funding).

It is true that the team has turned over since the early days.

  1. rounds 1-14 - run as a centralized company.
  2. we realized that a public goods funding tool did not make sense as a centralized company. we'd reached the local maxima of what was possible as a company/web2.5 app. the long journey begins. ** the DAO launches + long journey continues on and on and on**
  3. the Gitcoin Foundation is created.
  4. DAO governance mechanism is established.
  5. new talent joins the DAO + the old guard almost completely leaves the project. ** like climbing a mountain, this process is not linear, many of these move are 1 step forward, 2 steps back. sometimes 9 steps back. **
  6. new product (self serve QF for any DAO) is launched 👉👉👉👉** we are here ** 👈👈👈👈

The new guard is still learning to be more in touch with the web3 community, to work in public. They have been attending conferences to steep in the culture, using dApps, and ascending the learning curve to get there.

In the future, perhaps Gitcoin (the main brand) could focus more on it's roots (prioritizing Web3 Community/Education, Web3 Open Source Software, and Ethereum Infrasturcutre). The governance of which rounds are core rounds vs featured rounds (which has been traditionally driven by fundraising) could go through governance.

We are here → Where we are going ⤴