Gitcoin

= funding for individuals and communities developing digital public goods, using the Quadratic Funding methodology

URL = https://gitcoin.co/

Status

Listed on the main page on 28/8/2021:

• "We've helped thousands of projects and teams grow their open source ecosystems.

• $29.2M funded

• 311,668 active developers"

Governance

"Gitcoin is a crowdfunding platform that, in 2021, became controlled by GitcoinDAO, an entity governed by holders of the GTC token on the Ethereum blockchain (Owocki, 2021). Users could obtain tokens either by purchasing them on cryptocurrency exchanges or through the initial ‘airdrop’ process that issued tokens to early users, contributors, and investors. Since its inception, the DAO’s online user-interface encouraged GTC holders to delegate their voting power to ‘Stewards’, or holders who nominated themselves to be active, volunteer participants in governing the DAO. Participation involved following intensive proposal discussions on an online forum and casting votes on proposals. This delegation strategy implemented a concept known as ‘liquid democracy’, in which voters can assign authority to trusted others, and withdraw that assignment at any time (Blum & Zuber, 2016). Liquid democracy represents a blend between direct democracy (in which all voters have a say in all decisions) and representative democracy (in which voters nominate representatives to carry out governance labour on their behalf). One way of describing the purpose of liquid democracy is to organise attention so that a minority of motivated people can commit high levels of attention while remaining accountable to the low-attention majority. Over time, however, GitcoinDAO encountered attention-related challenges. The DAO has had to continually adjust its technical and organisational practices to incentivise and support Steward attention for necessary governance activities.

GitcoinDAO is a complex organisation with numerous employees and a far larger number of people who use the Gitcoin platform or hold its tokens. In addition to the DAO’s own forum and chat space, much of the conversation about its governance occurs on public social-media platforms, drawing attention and input from people who may not be DAO members. Yet many of the proposals that go before its token-holders, and particularly its Stewards, require the comprehension of significant context in order to make informed decisions. Proposals may represent funding allocations for projects or ongoing activities that are only part of a larger budgetary picture, or treasury-management decisions that would normally be the purview of financial professionals. Other proposals involve software modifications for which an informed decision may require reviewing source code.

Early on it became clear that the Stewards, to say nothing of all GTC tokenholders, lacked the expertise to contribute effectively to governance. According to a leading participant in the DAO, Scott Moore, ‘The Stewards that were most active weren’t necessarily prepared to address these decisions’ (Moore, 2023). Adds another leading participant, Simona Pop, ‘It became a key move to ensure we didn’t just focus on token weight but on actual engagement’ (S. Pop, 2023). Consequently, an informal group of GitcoinDAO members undertook efforts to augment the delegation system with a series of social and technical adjustments.

Within a few months of GitcoinDAO’s launch, in 2021, it introduced ‘Steward Health Cards’, a website that ranked Stewards according to certain metrics of participation in governance (Fred, 2021). This model has since been adopted more widely in the industry. On the operations side, the DAO divided activities into ‘workstreams’—a kind of rebranding of corporate departments or business units for a fluid, virtual workplace.

The following year, GitcoinDAO created the Steward Council, an entity that invites Stewards to participate in a structured governance experience, including regular ‘sync calls’ and other interpersonal activities to more intentionally organise the attention of leading Stewards (Pop, 2021).

Members of the Steward Council are compensated for their extra attention to governance labour. At the beginning of 2023, GitcoinDAO began issuing the Gitcoin Outstanding Steward Award to further incentivise Steward initiative and compensate reputationally for Steward engagement (Gitcoin, 2023).

Taking steps like these was not universally popular in the DAO, as members perceived the reforms as centralising power and eroding collective governance. But, according to Moore at least, the attention-management reforms were necessary and effective in at least mitigating the challenges of DAO governance.

Notably, Gitcoin’s practices have been copied by more recently created DAOs.

Liquid democracy is intended to bring efficient attention allocation to a direct democracy. It assumes that commanding additional voting power provides the incentive necessary for delegates to contribute unusually high levels of attention to governance. This attention economics proved insufficient for GitcoinDAO. The organisation had to augment that system with additional provisions to support Stewards in directing adequate attention to their roles, as well as to more intentionally coordinate operational attention through workstreams.

These provisions included issuing reputational capital (scorecards and awards), establishing tight-knit groups (a board-like Council and workstreams), and providing direct financial support. For the computational and economic governance mechanisms to function properly, they needed buttressing with social structures."

Source: Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies. Nathan Schneider, Kelsie Nabben Ronen Tamari, and Michael Zargham. Metagov, 2025

(metagov.org)

Discussion

"In May of 2021 Gitcoin released GTC in order to decentralize Gitcoin governance to our community. Much has already been written about why this is important, including in our announcement post here, but in general we believe decentralization is the best way to fulfill our mission to build and fund the open web. By turning governance over to the community we increase Gitcoin’s legitimacy, getting not just consent but also administration from those we serve.

The launch of GTC simultaneously created a DAO with a treasury governed by Community Stewards. The DAO shares our mission and has the resources to empower the community to build for the public good. But part of their commission is to be inward looking, to create the systems and tools necessary for Gitcoin to decentralize. Of course, the process of decentralization is complicated, so the DAO created a special “Decentralize Gitcoin” Workstream to garner the human-power to make it so.

The first place the Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream will concentrate their efforts is Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin has several live products users interact with, but Grants is our most powerful mechanism for funding public goods. Like all Gitcoin products, Grants is built like a Web2.5 app — somewhere in between centralized and decentralized. To give you an idea of what it looks like, Grants incorporates Web3 technologies like smart contracts, but it’s hosted in a centralized manner like a Web2 app.

What we’re looking to do is turn Grants into an open source protocol, one which anyone may fork and build on top of (dGrants). That way projects may benefit from using the Quadratic Funding algorithm and related technology to run their own grants programs. Users may freely create and fund grants without being censored. Once the Grants protocol is available projects may build their own UX and curation model on top of it as well, giving their communities a unique experience. The workstream will provide working reference implementations of a Grant Explorer UI and curation module which can be forked and modified if desired.

Workstream Lead Philip Hutchins has proposed and is moving forward on the first phase of the decentralization process with the help of two expert organizations, ChainSafe and ScopeLift. On behalf of the DAO, Philip has contracted both organizations to submit design proposals for a fully decentralized Gitcoin Grants protocol.

As of the publication date of this post, both ChainSafe and ScopeLift have submitted their proposals to the DAO. The Workstream is evaluating which proposal is the best fit, but it’s likely that parts of both proposals combined will provide the best path towards decentralization."

(https://gitcoin.co/blog/decentralizing-gitcoin-grants/)