Funding the Commons | Quadratic Funding on Gitcoin

[Music] [Applause] [Music] our next speaker kevin ovaki he is the founder and self-described quadratic spokesmen at git coin as well as a general open source supporter and evangelist kevin will speak to us about the history of quadratic funding on one of the most mature public funding platforms in web3 welcome kevin hey hey carol can you hear me yes okay i'm gonna go ahead and get started all right and i hope you all can see my screen now as well yes okay great thanks so much hi everyone thanks so much for having me and thanks so much to filecoin for hosting this really amazing event my title uh the title of my talk is reimagining the future of public goods with quadratic funding on bitcoin grants so i'm going to tell you a little bit about bitcoin grants and quadratic funding gonna tell you about bitcoin grants history running 12 rounds of quadratic funding and then we'll end with some thoughts about the future of quadratic funding the mechanism what we've learned and also how that intersects with bitcoin's mission so our mission is to build and fund digital public goods we want to empower communities of builders to work together to create future of the open web that means supporting the open internet with open economies and if we are successful we will create many quadratic freelancers people who have just quit their job and are working on the open internet or just come out of school and working on the open internet so what we do at get coin is we build web3 ecosystems we have a suite of products that help you onboard and retain builders into your web3 ecosystem so primarily a tool called bitcoin kernel which is one of the top accelerators incubators in the space for web3 talent we've got hackathons and we've also got git coin grants um and over time we have deployed about 40 million dollars worth of funding for open source software accelerating in the last few quarters to about 6 million dollars per quarter mostly through get coin grants and that's what i want to talk about with you today so bitcoin grants is a way to get community support and match funds for public goods projects and it's just basically a crowdfunding platform that its superpower is quadratic funding so uh i did not invent quadratic funding glenn wile vitalik buterin zoe hitsig it was their idea i like to think of us as just kind of like the b2c hipsters that have put in front of people all across the web in the ethereum ecosystem and it's really quadratic funding that is this really special mechanism that allows bitcoin grants to thrive and i want to break out of my presentation really quick in order to talk about what is quadratic funding and i want to show off this little calculator that we built at get coin called wtf is qf because we think that the paper by glenn vitalic and zoe is really amazing but it a lot of people don't want to read a 30 page paper and our goal is to explain what is quadratic funding using this site as opposed to having to read the whole paper so what makes quadratic funding really powerful is that on git coin grants we're doing about a million dollar matching rounds every quarter and deploying them contemporaneously with a crowdfunding campaign wherein inside of the crowdfunding campaign uh if one grant gets a thousand dollars from a thousand contributors and another grant gets a thousand dollars from one contributor then what's going to happen is that the first grant will get way way way more of the matching pool and that's because a broader swath of the community is supporting that first grant and what's really powerful about this is that it creates this incentive to get over the free rider problem because for every dollar that you're giving you're giving you're getting between 10x or 300x matching for every contribution that you're giving as a everyday member of the community and so what this does is the the the number of contributors matters more than the amount funded and this pushes power to the edges away from wales and other central power brokers and it creates more democracy in public goods funding which is what we want we want public goods funding and we want more democracy so that is why quadratic funding is such a magical magical mechanism and that is why we are so thankful to glenn vitalic and zoe for inventing it so that we can deploy it on bitcoin grants which i want to tell you a little bit about the growth of bitcoin grants over time next so um we started off running our first experiment in quadratic funding in q1 of 2019 ethe had just hit the bottom of its bear market and we were able to raise 40 000 through 200 contributions at that time on the right-hand side of my screen over here is a view of the what i call the matching contribution graph for that round so basically every node in this network is a user or a grant and every edge is a transaction on the system during that grant so you can see the preference map the whole point of quadratic funding is measuring the preferences of the community in which public goods the actual community cares about and when you get that preference map you can see how densely and from what parts of the community the each public good is funding so i'm just going to roll through a little bit of a of of the history of the rounds so that you can see the growth of that preference map and how we're supporting public goods to round two where we raised 60k in q2 of 2019 to round three in which we raised uh not we but we in conjunction with the community raised 300 000 and you can see the preference map here is getting denser round four um oh and the thing that we did in round three what that i think was like a really important ux thing was we built in the ui a little thing that did the math for you in quadratic funding so instead of you having to say oh i'm giving a dollar how much will this grant get we would say oh you're getting giving a dollar and you're going to get 100 from the matching pool which just allowed the users to see the power of quadratic funding and that was a core breakthrough for the ux of building quadratic funding um round four we did 350k and you can see the preference map is growing uh vitalik came up with this idea in round four of adding a media matching round so up until round four we were only doing open source contributions and when we added a media matching round it stirred up all these interesting conversations like our twitter accounts creating public goods if they're fighting disinformation or creating journalism but the really cool thing about the media round was that it pulled more contributors in to the quadratic funding round which supported more of the open source software developers open source software developers do great work but they don't have huge audiences media in journalism is also a public good but they have huge audiences and that spillover effect of them entering the round created way more uh for for public goods funding on quadratic on git coin grants round five playing it forward q2 2020 uh we expanded into experimenting with a public health matching fund herd immunity is a public good and if you remember q2 2020 we were all trying to figure out the coronavirus pandemic and uh expanded into a health matching round that was moderately successful raised 500k all in for open source media and uh public health round six um we created this tool called bulk checkout and basically what that did was it allowed us to go um for you to add a bunch of grants to cart and then check out like 40 of them at a time and that was a really important part of the user experience for getting people to contribute to more grants during their shopping experience um round seven was the introduction of uh layer two which is basically a cheaper payment mechanism uh for for bitcoin grants the average contribution on bitcoin grants is a dollar and when we moved from layer one to layer two now we could do very very cheap transactions to all of the the grants on gitcoin again you see the preference map and the amount funding continuing to grow um continuing through rounds eight nine and ten we're getting into 2021 at this point and you can see that the preference amount map is absolutely massive now we're raising over a million dollars for quadratic with quadratic funding for the ethereum community every quarter and contribute continuing to focus on scalability usability and also civil resistance which is basically one of the attack factors of quadratic funding and this is all culminated in round 11 with raising 2.5 million dollars in the ethereum community and 25 000 contributions our uh yes 25 000 uh contributions so um really really proud of the uh of the growth of of get coin grants from when it started in january 2019 and how it's going in 2021 where we've basically got uh 25k contributors and 2.5 million dollars being raised so this is some of the stats and the growth of bitcoin grants over time the red line is the number of contribute uh contributors the green line is the crowdfund amount and the blue blue is the number of of contributions round over round so we've seen pretty solid growth as people have discovered that this is a mechanism that actually supports the infrastructure that they depend on in the space some of the grants that i am most proud of on get coin grants are obviously the big hits the greatest you got to play the greatest hits uh uniswap and urine finance during uh round two three and four of bitcoin grants received between 20k and 130k from the community super proud that we supported them before they came the massive supernovas that they are today uh i have as a developer myself i have a special place in my heart for open source clients so that's eth2 clients like prismatic in nimbus but also also front-end clients like ethers js that have managed to raise tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from bitcoin grants and then there's just the hearts and minds projects for me guys like austin griffith who are just doing a bunch of cool stuff and are well respected by their community and wallet connect i just think is this amazing protocol that i use almost all the time and having them raise money from bitcoin grants has been a real pleasure for me uh we've also released a mechanism through which you can browse grants by what we're calling collections some of the causes that i care about are anti-civil technology public goods other public goods funding mechanisms and then funding the journalists like bankless daily guay camila russo those type of projects in the space that help fight disinformation and help get out the create more understanding about what's going on in the ethereum space so um you know i think that like those are the quantitative stats qualitatively i think that what we've heard from people like david hoffman at bankless is that the biggest thing that bitcoin did for them was give them validation and to go full time on bankless um we have seen um spencer newton call git coin grants an underrated experiment in in web three and i'm really super proud as someone who really looked up to vitalik uh to have him call get coin grants uh establishing itself as a significant pillar of the ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support but i don't i i want to come here sort of like everything on the table talking also about the unsolved issues that we have with with git coin grants um so there's a problem of civil and collusion resistance which is basically like if i can get more matching funds for my grants with more people contributing to them why wouldn't i just make up identities so there's kind of like a cat and mouse game where we're building new identity verification mechanisms to make it harder to make up new accounts and also making it harder for people groups of people to collude with each other in order to get more of the matching pool we do have a fraud and defense work stream in the git coin dao that has managed to estimate the fraud tax as fraud tax being the amount of money that goes to fraudsters that are civil attacking the system uh over the amount of total that's raised in the in the projects the fraud tax is about point five percent right now between point five and one percent over rounds ten and eleven um there's a problem of kinesian beauty contests which is basically like if you only fund the things that you see that are beautiful then we're never going to fund the deep plumbing in the space that sits behind the things that we see that we know and love there's an ongoing question about credible neutrality and decentralization which bitcoin is paying down at centralization debt i'll talk about that in a second here and then there's an ongoing question of where do the matching funds come from so basically you have to have a match pool to kick off the party every quarter and where does that money come from tldr is that through rounds one through six it came from the ethereum foundation this is the bear market no one was funding public goods rounds seven through ten the market's turning around you have alumni of bitcoin grants like yearn giving back to the matching pool andre from urine gave us 100k uh and then everyone in d5 the cool thing to do was to give 100k to get coin grants multisig and so we saw a bunch of community funding for bitcoin grants around 7 through 10. and now we're experimenting with funding bitcoin grants matching pool with nfts bitcoin dial recently did a three million dollar nft launch which funds us roughly for three rounds for the matching pool and i'm happy to say that we are funded for the next two and a half years of matching pools and so we will be around we will be around to be the pilot light of a pilot light of the ecosystem and public goods even if there is a market downturn and i think that that stability as vitalik said is a very important thing for the ecosystem to be able to expect that there will be a bitcoin grants round so i want to talk a little bit about the future of git coin grants and then we can break for questions the future of get coin grants is decentralized bitcoin grants increasing our civil resistance experimenting with taking quadratic funding mainstream and then i want to talk a little bit about grants around 12 which is coming up so on the first topic uh we are decentralizing bitcoin we released a token called gtc and launched getcoindao which is the vessel through which we are decentralizing the governance computation development and maybe one day if we have it economics of the network to a dow from a company we are experimenting with liquid democracy which is basically we believe that consent of the governed is the only legitimate basis for governance in any space but especially the ethereum space and we wanted to be governed by our community um but we recognize that most members of the bitcoin community will not vote and so we let them elect a representative who is well informed and will vote for them and i am proud to be working with linda zee austin griffith and trent and many other ogs of the ethereum and get coin ecosystem in order to govern get coin grants in the future item number two that we're working on is civil resistance basically we have aggregated a bunch of civil resistance tools from across the ecosystem proof of humanity identi bright id we're also experimenting with using poeps as civil resistance and so we're kind of creating this like proof of personhood passport that we're using initially on git coin grants and are planning on building a decentralized version that anyone that has a civil resistance problem in the ecosystem can just in one one line of code be able to integrate all of these different civil resistance tools and be able to like sign in with ethereum and then the d-app knows that you're a unique person or that you're not a unique person and i think that would be such an interesting thing for the ethereum ecosystem for us to help knock down that civil resistance problem in partnership with of course all these other great civil resistance projects i imagine moving from a web that is one token one vote a web three token one vote uh to one person one vote and i think that's fundamentally more democratic to enable that wave of innovation in the space and i want to i want bitcoin to pay it forward and and build more civil resistance in the ecosystem we are experimenting with taking quadratic funding mainstream we have done quadratic funding experiments in partnership with open collective in a project called fund oss in june 2021 where we raised 50k for web 2 open source software quadratic funding works outside of ethereum it's not just an ethereum thing and then we also did in may 2020 downtown stimulus a quadratic funding experiment for downtown boulder colorado comic book shops coffee shops restaurants getting supported with quadratic funding and we had a successful experiment supporting boulder downtown using quadratic funding it doesn't and it scales outside of tech quadratic funding works on main street we find it a comic book store using quadratic funding so cool um and then i want to leave you by talking about grants around 12 which is the next quadratic funding round that we are going to be doing it is december 1st through december 16th we are going to be running a main round of about 800k we're going to be building git coin dao with bitcoin with 25k uh round uh we're doing side rounds with uniswap probably polygon maybe algorand and and others and then we're starting to do thematic rounds around climate change advocacy and longevity research and so um i'm just really excited to be funding public goods using uh culture quadratic funding and get coin grants if you're interested in being involved in grants around 12 or want to run a side round for your ecosystem we build crypto ecosystems and we'd be we'd love to talk to you please send me an email at founders at getcoin.com if you're interested in getting involved um thank you so much to juan binet and to filecoin for having me today would be happy to break for the last few minutes and take some questions thanks kevin for describing a grant program operating in the wild today so we have a few questions from the chat um and i think i will go first they centered around the the question of civil resistance which you described and your approaches to combating it one of them is the proof of personhood passport and dave mackey asks how does this passport work for individuals who may need to maintain anonymity like individuals and dictatorial regimes right really great question um so proof of passport uh personhood passport is something that is in alpha right now it's only being used on git coin and one of the things that we believe is a non-negotiable as we move this forward is that it needs to be something that is privacy preserving um and you know i think that the case for that is is self obvious you know you you pointed out the risk of identity mechanisms and dictatorial regimes and um basically what we see ourselves doing is is taking the civil resistance mechanisms that already exist across the ecosystem uh and like so things like poep where it doesn't know your identity or any personally identifiable information stuff like bright id also doesn't know your personally identifiable information identa also doesn't know your personally identifiable information um and then we aggregate them into one passport that basically like derives civil resistance from all those downstream mechanisms and then only exposes your personhood score to the d app that uh wants to know whether you're a unique human or not so i think it's really important to build this in a privacy preserving and decentralized way and we haven't like quite heavily we haven't figured it out yet which is you know why you don't see me on twitter really promoting this project all that much but we're working on doing it in a way that's self-sovereign and privacy preserving and if you have any questions please reach out on twitter or an email happy to dive in on specifics great thanks a lot just a reminder we'll be collating a lot of these questions and sending them along to the speakers in case so you can still continue to drop questions in the chat and now i'd like to thank kevin again for a very interesting presentation [Music] [Applause]