Panel: OSS and Funding Mechanism | ETHTaipei 2025

[Music] Hello. Uh, hi everyone. My name is Vivian and I'm the moderator of this uh, panel today. It's really nice that we actually have our panel following the introduction by Vitalik talking about public funding and open source funding. It has definitely been a topic that we've been contemplating a lot uh in yeah years right for people here act like definitely years.

Um so the panel today we're going to dive deeper into different project that are actually doing public goods or open source how they get their funding what are the mechanism that's created to support them and what are some dilemas that we can unpack within uh this area. Uh we have a very diverse uh group of people here on our panel. Uh I'm from Taiwan. Uh have been involved in the civic tech or open source community and also Ethereum community within uh Taiwan and Asia. And then we have Yuki from Japan.

Uh we have Kin from Hong Kong and we have Nidi from India. So it's going to be like a Asianwide open-source and public goods discussion and you'll hear different projects too. And before we start um to dive into the discussion, I would like to invite all of our panelists to talk a little bit about their projects. Uh what they are working on right now and how is it connected to public goods or open source? Uh would you like to start Yuki?

Okay. Hello everyone. Um I'm Yuki from Coder for Japan. Coder for Japan is a nonprofit organization which is uh doing uh civic tech and opensource software community. So civic tech is um local activity which is uh use we are using a technology to improve our um daily life with technology and we also um collaborating with local government and national government to um adapt new technology to their um daily um operation.

So and we have a 11 or 12 years history for the open source community in Japan and we are uh actually the um as my earthquake we are collaborating with them for the um like mapping project. So yeah we are building a lot of open source um in the DKs. Thank you. Yeah. So before we we go into kin I just want to mention that uh what cover kosh co Japan them actually started with earthquake and then just want to recognize uh like acknowledge the fact that last week we actually just had a really big earthquake across Asia uh mainly in Myammar and Thailand and that the earthquake actually happened when the four of us were having a cold and I was in Thailand so uh our hole got cut off our it was a whole power outage and we couldn't continue for a little bit but then we resumed the discussion and after that um co for Japan they actually volunteer to support uh the open source map building for myar earthquake um so these kind of effort it itself during crisis during disaster where human actually need support from other human is also where open source uh kind of uh public goods projects can can be of service.

Uh yes. Uh and then we have Kin. Uh I'm Kino who's mainly involved in two projects. One is uh Litecoin which targets to open uh I mean to decentralize publishing and in particular decentralized books and the other is DHK which uh which is to decentralize or defend Hong Kong. Um, I talked about it a little bit on the uh uh Dak day the the on the other day and of course it's all open source.

All of the things you do with uh liker uh likerland litecoin or dhk both very open source. Yeah. Uh I mean it's open source as far as like coding is concerned but DHK is not much about uh there's not much tech in it. We we mainly uh do civic education. We are trying to bring 7 million people uh on chain and uh we don't we don't do much development.

We we we are more using uh the open source tools to for for that purpose. But as far as content is concerned is all creative comments uh when it's data is open. Uh but then for Litecoin it's an open source project um 100%. Yeah. So what K mentioned about like having some part of the content being creative comments that al that's actually also another mechanism to support uh not fully open source but some part uh you need to be credited some part you uh want people to refer to sometimes you cannot let people use your thing.

So creative comments itself is also kind of a tool to support uh people when they want to open up uh their projects. Uh and Nidi yeah I'm just feeling really grateful and proud that to be sharing stage with uh Kin and Yuki and Vivian because all of these technologies that we're building is so rooted in real world communities challenges and that's what voice uh really stands for and voice was born out of that. uh my husband and I we worked as a journalist and I'm an urban planner. We worked in villages in India and uh we found that uh nonprofits in India um were having a tough time raising funds because their marketing wasn't as great. English is not our first language.

uh and so because of that funding uh to these organizations would happen only if you know someone who knows someone and you know how to speak the language and have a sexyl looking report to give. Uh so voice actually uh turns that around. Uh we fund organizations solely based on the impact that they have already created. So we retroactively fund that uh based on the outcomes an organization has created. Uh so um and we are open source as well.

In fact uh in some very good news we have another project called Gainforest that recently forked our uh repo and they are now funding environmental impact and they're run running an entire round in the GG23 community round now. So really standing for all of these open-source technologies that are furthering uh public good or real world addressing some real world challenges here. So really happy to be here. Yeah. I think what's really significant is that a lot of the project within public open source space uh is actually very deeply connected to local and real world issue.

Well, like a lot of people has been looking for solutions for uh not solutions for looking for problems for your solution for your tech tools. These are people that are actually building specifically for a set of problem that I run into in real life and uh can can we talk a little bit about the the problem that you guys are trying to solve? Uh I think Yuki you mentioned that for Japan has been working on like civic tech civic uh specifically and also working with local government. uh how did that start and then uh what is the the problem the real world problem that you are trying to solve uh with all these open-source uh projects. So um fortunately the Japanese government are more um are interested in the civic tech and the open source software and they are actually supporting us.

But the hard part is uh how to motivate the citizens to continuely um joining our activities. Um to continue doing the same thing we need motivation and the power. But if there is no um uh no incentives their activity will gone like in one year or even in six months. So um this is a one big problem for the local government if they invest first six months but after that um their activity is not continuing. So we are making um um project called toban which is um little spective rewarding to the community um to continue if if the community continuing the project and make some value in the society the government can fund little respectively to the community and they distribute the livers to the each members.

Um this is uh we are right now we are really focusing on. Okay. So uh CO for Japan right now building this tool called Toban trying to see how uh government funding can be a funnel into these open source builder uh builders who has already been contributing to open source project public goods project on the ground with covert Japan solving real world Japanese issue and government if they see the effort they can retroactively fund uh the effort that these builder has been doing. Amazing. Uh what about uh Litecoin uh and DHK like what is the problem you're trying to solve and then uh is there any like similar problems that you run into uh when running your projects?

Yeah. So for Litecoin we are trying to decentralize books. So uh like although books has become like from from paper to electronic books but then uh some people may not realize electronic books are somehow even more closed than uh paper books because you when you are so-called buying an ebook you are not really buying you are just like renting the the platform can go away or the platform can censor your book and and you don't really get it. And so we are trying to build a a so-called deep book protocol. So and we are encouraging uh book publishers to use creative comments with rel to success because like everyone is trying to protect their IP so so to speak and um anyway we we're we're trying to make every book an NFT so that uh things go the metadata stores onchain and the uh and and the book itself stored on IPFS and Aweave.

Uh so that's uh Litecoin and for DHK uh let me call a few examples. So we do what we called a drifting classrooms which is the uh like somehow pop up uh classrooms in uh marginalized uh cafes. So people can come and create their wallet and get a DHK token. So that we we are trying to bring uh people on chain like one by one uh hand in hand and we do uh what we called Uber which is universal basic reader which is to uh collect the Hong Kong books which was uh banned removed it by by the uh Hong Kong public libraries. Um and we're trying to do that in a decentralized way.

So uh it's created by independent uh uh like a set of independent bookstores. So, it's not like created by a particular person, not not by me or not by the uh Hong Kong government and public uh publicly uh funded as much as possible because there there's a whole list of books that that's worthy to be uh kept and collected by uh Hong Kong which documents the Hong Kong history. So people see the list and they can help to buy the buy the books and uh we keep it in a public page so that people can it's essentially a library but we cannot call that a library like for uh for legal concerns. Got it. Can can you actually expand a little bit on the universal basic reader uh program?

What what does that mean and what is that project? So uh maybe I have to provide some background. So in 20 23, so uh 2 years ago, uh the media found that a lot of books are being removed by the uh Hong Kong library uh said they're being censored, but we we don't really have the full list because they it's not like they have uh a list of banner books. If they do have it, it would be easy, but but they don't really have. So all we can do is like uh I remember I once I borrowed this book from the library like few years ago but now that it's gone from the from the record and so the first thing is to crowdsource what books are being banned uh which is already hot.

So there are like 500s of them but I'm pretty sure it's the actual number is way greater than that. Uh so that's the start and then we try to find uh these 500 books and uh have them uh scanned it uh if the publisher allows us to do do that and afterward I think is it's too passive uh too reactive to just react to uh ban the books uh remove the books because books are not new books are not being uh removed by the public libraries anymore because they just don't collect it. So they don't have to remove it. So we just go ahead and buy uh try to buy all the Hong Kong books uh that's really published it since Hong Kong books is being defined by like by Hong Kong for Hong Kong or of Hong Kong. It doesn't have to be published in Hong Kong because a lot of Hong Kong books are published in say for example Taiwan these days for obvious reasons and um and it's hard to say all the books because like there are simply too many.

So someone has to create the the list and we have a set of independent bookstores to to come up with uh the books that they uh they choose uh like month by month and have the uh public help to buy them. Yeah. and the rest of them the outstanding uh books that are lot purchased by the public will be brought by uh the DHK DAO. So that's the uh project. Thank you.

So now you can see that uh with these public goods projects there's actually kind of a pattern of how decentralized how by people it's actually uh like it's it's the it's basically the way it's formed and in contrast to the very centralized way either big government, big tech company or whatever bigger authority is doing. It's like actually a contrast of people versus the power and people actually gaining the power again through the process of having open source as their tools having public goods supported so that they can continue their action. Uh Niti with that can you also explain uh like give us an example how do you support like journalists or any project that through voice like is there any success story that you can share with us? How do you or mechanism like voice stack can support um the the actual real world people doing their their project? Right.

So uh voice check actually solves for two major challenges. One is like what I call the banker teacher value problem that is in our societies a corrupt banker is paid much more than a teacher in a village. Why? Why is that? because the value given by a teacher is you can't quantify that you can't have any value to that but it is very useful.

So uh what voice does is solves uh for that value problem in the sense that public goods are goods that capture um a lesser value than they give. And so we're trying to uh through voice check our funding model is basically bridging that uh gap between value capture and value given. And secondly in our work with nonprofits we also felt like u there is a need to create new impact in any society. Whereas the nonprofits we were working with were we were recycling the same impact like if we were working with slums uh 10 years ago that same project was being u sold to like uh Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or another philanthropy. So um there is no incentive to produce new impact because you're just churning that uh uh the same impact out and that's why model of funding is uh basically very it closes that uh wheel like uh Vitalik just mentioned in his talk now that self- sustaining flywheel of raising money creating some impact with it and that impact generating uh more revenue to create new impact.

So that flywheel of impact is what uh voice check is uh doing. So for example uh on our platform now we have uh listed um a a story by citizen journalists in uh central India. Um for example um women were not allowed to enter a particular temple in central India because it was they were women are considered impure because of menstrual cycle and so on and so forth. And this woman in the village reported this issue went like you know didn't leave any stone unturned in reporting it. It uh took the it got the attention of um uh the local government and police and everything in the area and now because of her reporting largely the women are allowed to enter that temple.

So we list that on our uh platform and you can buy units of that impact directly. You know, that's a very different experience of donating. Uh because right now, if you want to donate and go to any organization, they'll probably just tell you, okay, whatever you see fit, if it's $10 or $500, you just give us anything. We are having a different model for that. We feel like uh the impact of a story should be priced at a fixed cost like a t-shirt.

It's like buying a t-shirt. You pay $500, you get the t-shirt. In the same way you pay uh say we we have a fixed cost for each of these impact reports and once that cost is reached you can't fund that organiza uh that that particular report anymore which incentivizes people to just move on to the next to creating the next impact. So that flywheel of impact is really important. Thank you.

So uh creating sustainable uh s self- sustaining file flywheels for uh different projects is actually how these like funding mechanism has been trying to achieve like how do we design different mechanisms so that people working in real world on the ground can actually get funded. Um that's actually how uh like for a lot of us um how we got into uh say Ethereum or like blockchain in general uh with the design of Ethereum there's like already incentive design within the mechanism to support people to contribute to the ecosystem and that itself is a very fascinating model where um actually a lot of the project on the ground has been trying to see how they can either duplicate or learn from the Ethereum model to see how that can be duplicated in the uh in the real world. Uh I would like to ask all of you since what you're working on is so impactful and so important for the ecosystem, how do you your organization get funded? So um yeah, I think we have um three model. Why is um this is a main our organization is kind of job like we are supporting local government and organi u national government to um adopt new technology as a consultation.

So we are making money uh as a business for the that part and we invest all the money to get from the um the job to the community activities. Uh this is one part and second is um we are um getting fund from the um uh foundation in Japan and we apply um we called for Japan doing a lot of things like a climate change um to survive the uh um disaster and also the disinformation misinformation and maybe um how to use the technology to local. So we have a lot of project and we are um submitting the fund with each project. So we don't submit other code project but we put the every uh single project. So this is the second thing and the third one is we are fostering to collaborate with the um um uh Asian countries like we have um uh facing ocean which is um hackon event um we are hosting with code for Korea and Gabzel in Taiwan and the each nation have a motivation to uh engage the international collaboration.

So we can um not only the uh Japanese government we can uh collaborate with the other countries to get fund from the other countries. So this is the third one. So what co Japan has been doing very interestingly is been working even though they are almost sometimes replacing the government as in doing the job government should be doing but also they are collaborating very closely with the government so that government has an alternative way to also support uh the effort on the ground. Uh Kin how is uh your project funded? Yeah.

So, uh we had a round of token sale in 2018. Uh we we don't have VC and but and the money of the token sale has been like of them has been used it for for for a few years actually. So, uh I I'm mainly funding it by myself for now and a little bit with uh uh GCON grant. Uh not much. So uh sometimes we jokingly that it's uh sponsored by uh Satoshi because I I'm mainly selling the the Bitcoin that I have to to fund it for now.

And for DHK I we have a newsletter weekly newsletter which is uh in creative comments. So we don't have a pay wall but we encourage people to subscribe it and uh become a uh one pay subscriber and fund the uh DHK initiative and also uh as well like uh GCON grant as well. So um which is probably around 20% of our income. Oh. Um, just wonder I'm not sure if everyone here is like familiar with the Gitcoin mechanism.

Kin, would you like to explain a little bit how Gitcoin works? Uh, so Gitcoin grant is like for for funding the uh public goods. They still call it public goods. So or and I I'm I'm not sure if they require uh the projects to be open source. I think they prefer but uh probably not a hard requirement.

So they have different tracks say the latest track uh the latest campaign is Kcoin grand 23. So it's the 23rd round and with a focus on say open source project oss project and litecoin is one of them so that uh people can uh do micro donation and have their donation matched by uh some uh matched fund sponsored by sometimes uh vitalic or sometimes other uh bigger projects. Yeah. Uh so I sorry uh forgot to mention so usually calculated by QV yes uh so we've actually just uh we we hosted around uh our our community the Asia community pakoda last year hosted around Asia it's called Asia round basically supporting all of the open source public goods uh related project within Asia and the way we do it is that we collected matching found from uh GCC global Chinese community there are community supporting uh public goods projects across all uh Asia around the world and focusing on the Chinese speaking community. So we have funding from them and we have another funding from Gitcoin itself and formed a pretty uh pretty great like 75k matching fund and people can put their projects on Gitcoin platform and when people donate to each of the projects they just they don't only just get the donation directly from the people they also get matched with the funding pool that we already prepared the 75k.

So each of the money like all of uh like say donor donated to the the the value is actually extended because it's on the gitcoin platform because it's using uh the quadratic funding mechanism so that uh it can be amplified and uh this is like one of a very classic uh funding mechanism that's being used uh within uh the space. Uh niti what about voice? Yeah, I mean uh Gitcoin for us was the introduction into like uh blockchain in one way. I mean we also use hyperserts to create those impact certificates and generate that flywheel so that blockchain use of blockchain was there but uh really like gitcoin grants uh and even the GCC I mean rounds I'm very grateful we were recipients of a grant from them and we really uh appreciated that because you quadratic funding gives you some nonzero amount of money you know like it's okay even if it's like $100 or $200 dollars. It's like worth it.

Uh but right now, yeah, um um we get like 70% of our funding from Gitcoin rounds and we have recently also uh started expanding this uh funding mechanism of ours to other um ecosystems like uh um of funding open-source software uh like deep funding. Uh there's going to be a talk on that right now. basically anything which requires you to fund u any organization any project based on the value they give uh that's what voice tech stands for and we're doing that with uh deep funding uh as well and now with uh the new community round in GG23 there's a gain forest round it's hosting around especially based on this funding mechanism so those sort of contracts give us some funding as well yeah So funding mechanism there's like it's like a complex system right. So uh for stack toban or uh litecoin they fund like the projects that are related to their sphere but also them themselves they need to be funded. So like in a bigger like ecosystem who support them so that they can support like the uh on the ground people and if they support organization they also need to support like downstream like actual people working on the thing.

So it's like uh the free will actually need to consider all these different cycle all these different level of people uh organizations involved in the mechanism. uh when we were having our call actually Kin put up a pretty valid point I think within this uh uh within our prep call uh a part of it is definitely about creating this self- sustaining flywheel it has been very challenging for many of us because you can you can see like Keen basically use his pocket money to support the continuation of his project and we rely so much on grants or government funding or different things and that makes people feel like we are nonprofit and but the the framing of being nonprofit associated with open source or public goods is actually not that healthy, right? Yeah. Um Kim, do you want to explain a little bit on your concern? May I mention one thing?

Yes. Right now actually the Gitcoin grants 23 is happening right now. Um I think uh tonight we'll start the new round. So if you are interested in please go explorer.gkitcoin.

co then um maybe you can find uh support you can put the one door or two. Oh I guess all of our projects are are on gitcoin. Yes. So go to gitcoin support them. Uh yes, coming back to our uh our question, Kim, do you want to explain like what is the dilemma you are facing between the self-sustaining flywheel and nonprofit?

Yeah, I um I I had an issue like uh people tend to have a binary will between uh profitm projects and like public goods. So they expect public goods to be nonprofitable and uh not self- sustaining which which makes sense but which also means if you are trying to create a business model for public goods or you you are trying to create a so-called firewall substaining firewall for your public good people would like kind of don't know what you are people or they would see it so so you uh profitm uh entity. So, I'm not going to donate to you. Uh which makes it very um embarrassing. So, uh and and and you don't know who you are.

I mean, you you know who you are, but pe people don't know who you are. Uh people don't know uh it's actually a good thing. I mean uh if uh public good projects, open source project can find a business model but on the way of doing it, you would kind of lose your um identity. You would kind of lose your attraction for people to support you because you are a public good because people would see it as a commercial project and uh they don't see why they they have to donate to you. But at the same time, you are not as competitive as 100% commercial project because you have uh double bottom line.

You have to take care of other values other than just making money. Do you have similar problems when you're running your uh project? Uh I mean that's the challenge we uh start like we began solving for with voice. uh because most of the nonprofit media outlets we worked with um had to like raise uh grants through the normal process. Had to apply for it and had to know English and do all of those things.

But voice really is trying to bridge that uh that dilemma in some way. uh because you all you have to do is basically just focus on your work and create impact and do impactful work and just rest assured that the funding will be taken care of and you can move on to the next impact. So uh in fact deep funding is also another um like offshoot of this and in it because it takes into account the dependency graph as well. So like what you were mentioning about us depending on other forces to fund us and we funding these other organizations. If uh basically deep funding will just map all of that on a graph all the dependencies and then you algorithmically just uh distribute funds according to what value each project has uh given.

uh and so um I feel like voice uh is basically an attempt to uh bridge that dilemma in uh by just funding the value by just funding the impact from the Toban or Kofford Japan perspective anything you want to add to this specific dilemma oh yeah for quickly um so for the um large number of people uh I think in Japan it's enough to do for the open source software but for the local government like small number of people they not enough. So how we can um not how we can care about the small communities we are in the decreasing of population and we are seriously to taking care of the problem. So in that case um how we can support small group for the large number of people we can support as a business but how about small um maybe it's like a same um like saturation of the entire ecosystem in the um nation for I think before we close this uh this panel uh this whole discussion here uh is actually a reflection uh I would like to encourage urge everyone to reflect with us like why is it so difficult to support project that are actually beneficial for the public? Uh why do commercial like quoteunquote commercial projects get so much funding? Well like people on the ground are actually facing problem being self- sustained when they are doing the work that are actually open source.

They can have legacy. They can have like really good impact on people but they are struggling. This has been kind of a dilemma that we've been talking about. Maybe that's a problem with what the the framing of business. Maybe it's the overcommercialization of our social structure.

But with Ethereum, coming back to like our our topic and uh basically our whole day is that Ethereum itself it create possibilities or these mechanisms create possibilities for people on the ground people like actual contributor not just coder but also the mechanism can be duplicated to real world system. It's a possibility for underground people to get funded to get supported through like very direct uh value distribution and that's what many like all of our panelists bas basically are doing uh right here. Um so we have like two minutes left. any last word uh you wanna like last piece of message you want to send to the audience regarding this uh funding mechanism open source and the dilemma and everything I think um the flywheel is not only for the sustainable funding it's also the population of the um the people of the project so if you are interested in let's join the opensource software and let's join or the public good stuff. Yeah.

flywheel not only for financial resource but also human resource different kind of resource only it's val uh it's flywheel to to to to actually have people have resource to continuously contribute kin any last message well uh like you kind of conqu well so I I can only like encourage uh everyone to to pay more attention to all the open source and public goods projects and involve them as much as possible. Thank you. Uh I'll borrow this from my husband who is also the co-founder of voice check. Jesus said that you know uh punish the sin and not the sinner and we should fund the impact giver. I mean the impact and not the impact giver.

So yes, beautiful. Thank you. And before we go, uh last thing since like our call happened when the earthquake between uh like Myammar and Thailand happened, uh that's also like a funding mechanism issue like a lot of the funding people are donating to through government or through larger nonprofit. Uh they don't really go to people on the ground doing the actual rescue work or really providing supplies. So if you're donating for uh the Myamar or Thailand uh earthquake any relief uh activities or effort please support on the ground nonprofit verify when you donate so that you can make sure that money actually go to the people that uh are that really needs it.

Uh I think that kind of concludes our sorry using this for uh little promotion on the the right thing to do. Uh thank you and then thank you all of our panelists, Yuki, Kin and Niti. Amazing projects. Continue the good work you're doing. Uh this is our panel.

Thank you for staying with us. Thank you. And uh please um drop in a penny or two for all our projects in the Gitcoin. Yes. Go to Gitcoin.

[Music] Thank you Vivian King. Hi Yuki. [Music]