The Evolution of Grants From QF to Multi Mechanism Future

High School Musical and all of you are my parents where I'm like I know I just know all the they're the cool parents though all right final panel of the day but you guys are in for a treat we got Kevin Matilda and Reena from gitcoin here to talk about the evolution of Grants U from qf to multi mechanism future big round of applause for the panel thanks Adam wasney from the aash network thank you great work welcome everybody I am Reena O'Brien executive director at gcoin co-founder of Alo do Capital uh here today to talk about the evolution of Grants as so kindly mentioned um with Matilda and aukee uh gcoin grants has been a leader in funding me u in web 3 funding for years um and we're going to talk a little bit about the evolution of what that funding look like where we're going but first uh Matilda you want to give a little bit of an intro yes sure thing so my name is Matilda I am grants program lead at getcoin I have been at getcoin for almost 3 years and I've been involved since J 15 so quite a few rounds awesome um AE I'm going to have you introduce yourself next like you need to introduce yourself um but once you've done that could you actually walk the crowd through um qf why you and getcoin created it um and why it needs to evolve yeah sure happy to so hey I'm Kevin auki one of the founders of gitcoin and Reena and I have also just uh started working on a venture together called Alo do Capital uh which is all about onchain Capital allocation and maybe we'll talk about how that fits into the multi mechanism future later but you asked about quadratic funding and what makes it so magical um and how we've been working on it we actually did not invent quadratic funding it was invented by Zoe hitzig and Glenn W and vitalic Boer in and um basically what they wanted to do was find a more democratic way to fund public goods things like open- Source software the things that ethereum relies on and the Really magical thing about quadratic funding is that you have a matching pool and PE when people fund grants in a grants round they'll be matched by that matching pool on the basis of the number of contributors to the grant not the amount that's given so basically that creates this Dynamic where you can give $1 in the project gets $100 if it's democratically supported enough and so it's this really amazing mechanism That decentralizes Power from these Grant administrators who are kind of like power Brokers for their ecosystem into the edges of the network the people that just have a dollar and want to give to their favorite causes are now the ones who are deciding what projects to be funded and so quadratic funding uh you could call it Democratic funding it's it's it's a very Democratic way to fund what matters in web 3 and gitcoin grants has been qu quadratic funding from January 2019 gg1 to G22 which was at the end of last year so uh about six years of quadratic funding under our belt and it's it's been a real journey we are so thankful to Glenn and vitala and Zoe for inventing quadratic funding awesome thank you um curious to you both do you think it's going to continue getting us where we need to go in terms of Grants and capital allocation I think that there's a plurality of different ways to fund what matters and doing it in a more democratic way is one way to do it uh I think optimism in vitalic boin have been inventing uh retr funding which leverages the fact that it's easier to fund what matters with the benefit of hindsight than trying to speculate on what will do good in the future so retroactive funding is another mechanism out there that's doing a really great job of funding what matters I think protocol Guild has done a really great job of creating a very simple mechanism for funding ethereum core infrastructure and um I'm also really excited about deep funding which is vitalik's new idea about how to fund dependencies in web 3 so I look at um this as uh we need multiple Tools in our toolbox to solve this problem and we shouldn't be a maximalist about any tool when I'm trying to fix something in my house I'm not like oh I'm only going to use a screwdriver because I'm a screwdriver maximalist um I take a right tool for the job and the tools all complement each other and I kind of think of what we're doing now with gitcoin being multi mechanism as now we have a toolbox we have a multi-tool if gitcoin 1.0 was a screwdriver it was quadratic funding getcoin 2.0 is a multi-tool it's it's got a bunch of different tools that that fund what matters in in PL in in ways that are are different and complimentary from each other so it's really a very exciting design space and I think that when we talk about Alo Capital later in the panel we can talk about how we're really pushing the boundaries of what's possible there and gitcoin will be the place that we showcase the coolest stuff that we invent yeah to kind of touch on that as well that's exactly what rooted off decision within gitcoin Grant to evolve the program into multi mechanism we realized after 22 rounds like auki mentioned you know quadratic funding is a really powerful mechanism but it's not a one-size fits all and what we started noticing within our quadratic funding rounds is that um we've we got the same builders that came into each round and they became really established and they became really successful but they there was this competition that started happening with the early stage projects that were up and coming in the rounds that were struggling to compete for matching caps and for the matching funds against these really established projects so what we did at the end of last year we we had to look at the program we had to look at our past 22 rounds and we we realized we need to evolve this you know we need to take it away from just quadratic funding but how exactly are we going to do that and what is that decision making going to look like so we went really to the Builder level so we're also moving into a much more builder Centric mindset so what we decided to do was and this is what we're going to experiment with in G23 which is going to kick off early April so it's w yeah so it's coming up really fast but basically what we're doing um get Point grants what it looks like now if you're not familiar with what it looks like these days uh we have we return to our roots of funding open source software so we have our OSS program which to dates has been quadratic funding rounds and we also have this decentralized part of our Pro program that we have given to the community so this allows any Community to come in fund their own ecosystem that we also partly fund so what we're doing with our multi mechanism future is within our own OSS program we're separating our Builders out between early stage and mature and the early stage Builders will be pushed through quadratic funding rounds and then our mature Builders will go into a curated retro round so this just allows for a fairer funding distribution and it just makes a lot more sense with the goals of our program can you talk a little bit um and this goes for I suppose some of the the round operators in the audience like what were some of the challenges and where do you think this is really going to impact the builders that you're trying to fund do you mean challenges just within the program and why going multi mechanism baby um I I was there for the record so I know it wasn't necessarily the easiest thing um and or even a better way to frame it what are some of the considerations that people who are who might be looking at going into doing multi mechanism uh should should uh consider yeah that's a good question cuz it's kind of a twofold question because multiman multi mechanism has been a solution to a lot of problems that problems or like you know it's been a solution to what we've been seeing but it does also come with a lot of complexity you know how do you communicate it out to your community where they should funnel into I think it's it's really important to create very clear funnels for your Builders as well as your donors so you need to understand where your Builders are showing up where they're coming from and how you're communicating to them I mean Communication in any grant program is one of the most important things as we know and I mean even to this date we've learned so much about how that communication breakdown has happened even just with quadratic funding rounds so I think that is that's one thing but then I mean it's going to be a massive experiment so one of the things that I have been really proud of being involved in getcoin Grants has been how we take Community feedback back how we iterate and evolve and we're really stepping into this new age of like let's go out and try you know let's not be scared to risk it and if it's not going to be perfect that's okay but let's get feedback let's hear from the builders and then let's take the community along with us so to kind of wrap up and answer that question it's communication it's making sure that all the funnels are really clear and that the community also knows what we're trying to achieve with our program and if they are a good fit to participate from a donor or a builder perspective nice thank you um aaki I know that you've got a few posters in terms of the evolution of many different things hanging in your office in the regen Hub um but can you talk a little bit about what you've seen in terms of the evolution of funding outside of just like even qf and what some of these experiments that we're doing um or anyone could be doing in both Capital allocation could mean for the ecosystem yeah um well I'm glad you got to check out the regen Hub which was our co-working space in Boulder that we run as a dow so go to regen hub. XYZ if you want to hang out there next time you're in Boulder and we do have a bunch of posters on the wall that are cool infographic maps of different things in web 3 and I think you asked about the resource allocation overtime poster which is this really viby poster that you can get at store. gin.

um that shows the history of resource allocation over time and it's if you've never thought about it it's kind of surprising but resource allocation has evolved through human history from the hunter gatherer age when we were small tribes to the agricultural age which we started to form around small towns and then the Industrial Age in which we did it at scale and then the information age you now have giant technology companies that are serving millions of people and over time we've seen the changes in how resource allocation happens from things like rotational labor systems or commitment pooling in the hunter gatherer age uh to more Co-op type models in the agricultural age and now the information age we have you know nation states and companies that we use to to Resource allocate and so once you see the history of how resource allocation has evolved over time and how it's been evolving as human governance changes over time it kind of opens up your eyes to the possibility of what is possible in resource allocation and governance in the internet age how do you pay your rent and do it in a values aligned way we can design better systems because we now have the internet and we have onchain mechanisms and so the thing I really think is very powerful about this is that we're moving from the Industrial Age into the information age and we're building this parallel Society where we can fund public goods and we can fund what matters in a novel way that's never been possible possible before blockchains give us transparent um corruption resistant programmable money and there's a it's it's Global in nature and so I I think that we can invent new mechanisms to fund what matters in the 21st century and um by the way one of the things you learned from the resource allocation mechanism poster is that for most of humanity the groups that were resource allocating all knew each other they had FaceTime with each other there wasn't a lot of hierarchy like you have in these Fortune 500 companies with 10,000 people working at them and they have served a million constituents and so you have these hierarchies that started to arise and would start to Channel all the resources towards the Executive Suite and towards the you know like the more uh like in a plutocratic way and I think that there's an opportunity for us to go back to decentralized organizing in small groups leveraging the coordination mechanisms that are on chain and in a way I think that if our industrial era institutions are declining in legitimacy maybe we look to what existed before them you know instead of insurance companies like United Healthcare systematically denying claims because they just have are full of bureaucracy at at at best or at worst they have a financial incentive to deny claims what if we look to the way small towns would fund each other's Health needs in the pre like pre-World War II era and build in Insurance stals what if we find Democratic ways to do commitment pool Cooling and bring that kind of mechanism on chain so I think we're relearning how to rely on each other instead of having to rely on the nanny State and there's something really beautiful there and it's just it's always moving over time as as we've evolved humans have evolved new ways to coordinate resources and we're just at this place where we're about to crack into what's truly possible with blockchains and I think that Alo Capital we want to be that tip of the spear that's that's really pushing what's what's possible forward in this new design space and that's why I've been pushing out so many books books and research reports and ship posts because we got to discover the New Frontier together and um it's it's just such an exciting design space so Alo do capital is our new Venture where we're doing research on this stuff issuing reports and then briting software and then the cool thing about being gitcoin alumni is that we can go pitch that software back to the gitcoin grants program take it for a ride and you're going to see some wild stuff in getcoin Grants in 23 through 27 because we're just surrounded by people pushing boundaries of what's possible and um it's a convergence of talent and capital and intellectual capital and financial capital and uh I think we're going to demo some cool stuff over the next cycle thanks auki U bringing it back to Grants actually Matilda I'm going to throw you a curveball yeah I'm not going to hold you anything but I mean you've done some amazing work for G23 super stoked um for the multi mechanism uh funding but I'm curious in terms of the opportunities that you see ahead of ahead of us both as an experimental version in the grants program and what we can do for Builders um in the community getting more Builders into the program itself like is there anything that you're like next up is going to be like Road Wars know I like whatever that's the new funding mechanism write that down AE thank you um yeah that's a big question and it's one that I've been thinking of a lot um I think one of the things that I've thought of a lot you know with the evolution of gitcoin Grant specifically is when GG started we were kind of the only funding program in town and now we've got an entire ecosystem with so many funding programs in the space which is incredible but it does add also complexity for Builders on how to navigate that so one of the things that I've always thought of with getcoin grants is how do we support Builders um Beyond just funding and it's not something something that you know has been super baked into the program at least you know not since I've been involved with the program um and part of this looks like how can we engage our Builders not only like yeah show up every quarter or three times a year now and you know come get some funding and cheers see you next time how do we create more sustainable spaces and resources for those Builders to keep engaged with us where we can grow grow our own Community but also allow them opportunity to go and you know succeed within the space as a whole because the goal of the program is you know to fund o OSS within the ethereum ecosystem so we have this kind of responsibility to not just keep it within you know the getcoin ecosystem but also allow them to innovate and flourish elsewhere so I've been thinking a lot about this and you know we are planning on we're looking this year at launching a mentorship program you know we have onboarding programs coming up but that's just the beginning and it's it's a it's a tricky it's not tricky but it's you you need to be able to understand as well those funnels and where to engage your Boulders um as well and also how they're showing up for your program and why so there's like a lot of pieces to that um but I also think that what I'm really excited about this future with what we're doing with G23 um you know going multi mechanism it's not something that is simple it's not something that is easy but I really think that it's worth it it was really time to like to evolve you know to take that step and to make some really big changes and how I see it evolving is exactly what auki mentioned earlier as well you know like bringing in other experiments into the program as well wherever it makes sense and it's we're doing this with a community rounds as well we're really encouraging our community rounds to also experiment with mechanisms um I actually was speaking to a round operator the other day and he asked me okay well which ex which funding mechanism would you recommend and I was like the one that makes sense for the goals and kis of what you're trying to achieve with your program we're not sitting in a position anymore where we are dictating you need to run qf rounds because that's what we do it's like if you want to go and allocate capital in your ecosystem the way that makes sense that's what we're going to encourage um but kind of what I see as well is getting a lot more granulo with the categories within OSS that we also fund and how we can allow the community to also maybe make those decisions moving forward um with other centralized baby what she said was decentralized baby there I'm back thank you thank you um thank you for that Matilda absolutely um I would encourage this group as well to check out um go.get coin. um and see what some of the things that we're baking both for the program and for gitcoin as well as um research. allow. Capital we've got a ton of interesting mechanisms that I'm really excited to work um with on the program with Matilda uh and we welcome voices like we are here to experiment on the program and if that means keeping Builders supporting build Builders and that's part of the grants program like that's any evolution of a grants program and that's the tricky part right like how people will will go Grant hopping and continuing to evolve um and we want to hear from the community and what would get more Builders into our our grants program um so that we can Exemplar it for other people's programs um and with that being said like AE like how do we how are we looking at building the next like generation of funding infrastructure where do you where do you see the opportunity ities there well the incredible incredibly humbling thing is that it's going to be invented in the ethereum ecosystem and not just a gitcoin so I'm excited about going from doing gitcoin grants the community rounds on Grant stack to starting to use things like Grant ships and uh easy retro pgf and uh there's a plurality of many amazing tools that too many to name out there that I think that we can weave into our infrastructure and you know there's a real three three here with mechanism designers and and capital allocation infrastructure Builders and um I think that with Alo Capital we can publish research that helps Builders figure out what's going on and what to build um we can build technology that allows them to start on third base as they're building it it's just an American baseball way of saying that we're going to accelerate the builders sportsing yeah um and then uh so we could be the first capital into Capital allocation Builders we can be the like their initial seed check so first money into into new mechanisms First Technology into new mechanisms first Research into new mechanisms and so it's about accelerating that network of builders that are building cool stuff and you know we can give them uh in addition to Capital technology and um uh we can give them distribution through the gitcoin grants program and so I'm seeing gitcoin becoming a shelling point for The Wider ethereum ecosystem and mechanism Builders to deploy their mechanisms and we have a $16 million matching pool that we can deploy about a million dollars per quarter towards the most interesting ideas it was $16 Million last time I checked I think it might be around 14 now because that's denominated in eth but um I I believe in networks and I believe in their ability to produce uh intelligence at the edges and so these network of Builders are going to deliver us a lot of really cool stuff and Alo capital and getcoin can accelerate those Builders by giving them what they need so uh lots of really cool stuff on the frontier and can't wait to see how it goes in G23 and then evolve towards doing more cool stuff in gg24 getcoin is very prot toopan which means that it gets better every single quarter is every single quarter is better than the last and we have this iterative approach to the program and um we optimize for a local Maxima a global Maxima of what's possible over time and so I want to set expectations that G23 will not be perfect and we're and uh I think that we're gonna iterate towards Perfection over time uh and the team that's working on it is amazing Matilda included so uh can we get some snaps for Matilda and the GG program okay I had to get you snaps cuz I said that it wouldn't be perfect this time but the truth is like oh L pressure we can only iterate towards Perfection yeah I I think that's like I've mentioned it before and that iterative approach is really powerful you know because and it's okay that's what I love about the the work that we do and the step that we're taking it's like we're being vocal about yeah come along with us it's not going to be perfect but this is why we're doing it and this is why it's important and we've gotten a lot of really positive feedback with the changes that we're making you know now it's just our responsibility to make sure that those funnels are super clear that our communication is super clear and you know of course that the round goes as smoth as possible but um there's always there's always um something that you know comes along but that's that's part of it and that's the beauty of what we're doing you know if it was perfect I would say maybe we're not doing something right I don't know we on a quarterly grants program and a quarterly show in case anyone was wondering you can just check our Twitter feed for what's been going on there um thank you both for that I think that's great um there's there's a lot to be we learned in terms of the evolution of Grants and and how you how you support both your community the people that you're trying to get the funding to the donors and whatnot and I love that we're we're taking the initiative to to try and see what that could look like with the multi mechanism uh we've got a few minutes left but I'm going to ask auk's favorite closing podcast question is there a question that you wanted me to ask that I didn't ask I actually have two closing podcast questions and the first is in a world where you're maximally successful in 10 years what does the world look like and then after that I ask is there anything I didn't ask you want to say so you're just being ordinary now pick a question pick one of them just one of them and answer the question um I think in 10 years if we're massively successful we are going to fund what matters democratically and emergently and at scale so uh that's what we're iterating towards and if you do the math four rounds a year times 10 years is is anyone good at math that's 40 years 40 seriously we 40 quarters so in 10 years if we could just have 40 iterations 40 40 iterations towards funding what matters at scale democratically and so that's what the world will look like three rounds a year now so not four oh no but you let me do all that math now we have to redo it it's okay so 30 iterations can we do it in 30 iterations some of our developers are sitting in the front seat nodding yes so we can do it we can swag band says yes all right uh mlda same question it sounds like you've got two options to pick from if we are successful in 10 years what does that look like or is there a question that you wanted me to ask that I didn't ask you yeah I mean I agree with auki that's kind of what I see as well um one of the things I kind of that came just came into my my head as well was around there's a lot of talk around impact you know impact Creation in the space and a lot of gr programs are evolving to be a lot more specific with tracking impact and tracking the impact of your program and I think that's also something that we're going you know that we are busy starting to improve within getcoin grants and that's part of that long-term goal you know cuz that is the impact that we want to get to eventually but what does that look like at scale what does that look like you know right now um and sometimes we need to do a few iterations of the round to actually understand the impact that we are creating so the the beautiful thing about getcoin grants is that we have so much data we are sitting on like a mountain of data from 22 rounds that we've ran and now we're going into this multi mechanism future which I'm super excited about so really just um making sure that that we are learning from each and every round we're looking at the impact that we want to create is that in line with the goals of the program and you know what the wider ecosystem within ethereum um needs and then kind of just iterating from that so that's kind of just something that came into my head so I don't even know if I answered your questions but or either one but I mean just from working with you and knowing from the grant Evolution and what we we do see for that that 10-year future um being able to have impact measurements as well as experimentation I I do think that we should continue evolving and for those that don't know we are mostly like we're a two-sided Marketplace at gitcoin we've got our grant stack technology um that is serving our partners that are running their rounds but then we also have our community and so there's a delicate balance between what we do with that technology in order to serve two very different types of customers um and I will say Matilda has spearheaded this beautifully and worked within the organization to get some of these features out um and we are always looking for ways to experiment because it's the front door to our technology um that technology is what brings in the revenue which keeps us funding public goods and funding what matters um so with that being said I I I think we've gone through the mechanisms oh you can see your prepped for something can I have my second final question you have you have a twom minute warning please begin wrap up but yes you can do your second question aaki is there anything Reena didn't ask that you want to say yes there is thanks for asking um I just wrote a book it's called how to Dow it's all about my adventures in building Dows and getcoin becoming a DA and I kind of think of every quadratic funding round as an ephemeral Dow uh it does Dows don't need to exist forever a quadratic funding round takes uh a couple months of prep couple weeks to execute and then a couple weeks to do a retrospective and do the payouts and that's kind of like an ephemeral democratized distributed autonomous organization and so um I'm really excited about this design space of dows in Democratic resource allocation and going more peer-to-peer in the onchain world and how to is your guide to that Revolution uh you can go to how to dow.

XYZ how to dow. XYZ you can pick up a copy of the book and learn about our Evolution and also get equipped for mastering the future of Internet coordination um I believe that there's going to be a lot of abundance and opportunity online for the next generation of hackers and Builders and uh you know for time in Memorial people have gone to the frontier looking for riches and abundance and resources and our generation's Frontier is the internet and I think Dows are going to be sort of the vehicles that we go forward in the internet and so uh by teaching more people how to Dow in a way that equips them for that Journey I think more people will get onboarded into crypto and they'll get onboarded and equipped to be successful this isn't like influencers onboarding you through a YouTube channel and and selling you their coins this is actually giving you the skills that you need to participate in the revolution so uh tldr bu my book how to dow. XYZ and two more seconds thanks Reena for being our moderator thanks MAA oh and any if anyone wants to find out about get grants and G23 and dive more into what we're doing there go to grants. getcoin doco okay last thank you for bringing it background to Grants to land the plane Matilda oh is that what we're talking about Grant thank you everyone have a fantastic weekend [Applause]