Quadratic Funding for Colorado - Kevin Owocki

um how many people in this room love colorado all right we got skiing we've got nature we've got some of the best culture in the world in colorado and i'm so excited as a boulder native and a member of the colorado crypto community to commune with you in this venue for the next several days one of my favorite things is my global blockchain friends and my colorado community members coming together and just celebrating the possibility of what we can do in this space and um so for those of you who don't know me i'm kevin milwaukee i started get coin which is a place that you can yeah yeah thanks uh get coins a place that you can get coins um and we're hosting a one day mini conference about how uh crypto can regenerate the world on thursday so come to that on the 17th at the sports castle and i want to talk about one specific way that i think that crypto can regenerate the world or at least crypto native primitives can regenerate the world and how we used it in boulder colorado to help downtown businesses in boulder colorado adapt to the coronado virus pandemic and the lack of foot traffic that that caused to their downtown businesses and of course having a downtown business is a public good and public goods are good am i right yes and so uh what we wanted to do was use quadratic funding which is something that uh is used on git coin grants and has delivered about 50 million dollars worth of funding to the ethereum ecosystem and what we wanted to do was back port that into supporting our local downtowns in boulder colorado and that is what this presentation is about i'm gonna aim to do like five or ten minutes of talking and then i'd love to just have a discussion so if you take yourself back to february 2020 boulder businesses are in trouble and they're not getting a lot of support from the local government and they're not getting a lot of support from their consumers where the foot traffic has just gone down the 90-something percent and so um i got together with katie johnson and zach herring who are two of my compatriots at consensus where get coin was funded and uh we just basically started doing user research on how that was affecting people downtown i think that we may not be able to get the uh audio of this john i can just kind of talk about it if not let me play a minute of just hearing the depth of how much these people were in pain because of the current virus pandemic we are going on two years and my first month of profitability or at least breaking even was supposed to be march we've never experienced anything i mean there's nothing like this we've never experienced anything like this so we've never been closed this long um so john maybe we can we can cut it there i think people get the idea but um you come back to where we were in january through march of of 2020 with the pandemic and it was just very clear that our economies have been shuttered and the people who are not privileged enough to work in technology who work on retail businesses who are essential workers are the ones that are suffering and one of the things that we wanted to do was leverage quadratic funding which is a primitive that we have prototyped on git coin and it's vitalik and glenn's idea in order to support the public good the livable downtown in boulder colorado and this is really a big test of taking something that's been prototyped in the crypto environment and bringing it mainstream so why does quadratic funding apply to this use case to funding public goods both online and in the real world well basically quadratic funding is just a matching campaign in which you um in which uh you basically raise a matching pool in the case of the downtown boulder experiment we did 25 000 matching pool which uh gitcoin supported a local philanthropist brad feld supported and what we did was we matched contributions from the crowd uh to these businesses and the whole idea behind quadratic funding is that it optimizes for the preferences of the poor and the many as opposed to the rich and the few so the magic of quadratic funding as it was applied in the downtown stimulus was that if a business that has ten dollars in contributions from ten different contributors uh is is uh basically running a crowdfunding campaign and another business that is supported by people who have more money ten dollars from one contributor then quadratic funding allocates more of the capital according to the preferences of the poor and the many as you can see in this uh calculation right here so quadratic funding is a credibly neutral funds distribution mechanism for supporting public goods and we wanted to use it in um supporting downtown boulder businesses and the whole idea was that uh the same psychology that works on git coin grants where you give one dollar and you get ten dollars or twenty dollars or a hundred dollars of matching works outside of crypto and that's what we wanted to prototype um and so you know what what is really interesting is starting to look at get coin grants as a cohort over time of building up a signal preference of what people in the community care about during bitcoin grants round one we raised 38k from 200 contribute contributions and this is a graph of what those contribution uh that signal preference map looks like so each edge is a transaction and each user is a grant or a uh or sorry each node is a user or or a grant and over time as get coin grants grew it looks like maybe my gifts are taxing the wi-fi um you start to see a denser preference map of what the ethereum community cares about on bitcoin grants and so i bring this up uh so that as we talk about the boulder downtown stimulus program you realize that like we're running a cohort where bitcoin grants is kind of 12 rounds ahead of where this downtown stimulus round was but it's just in that starting that first round we can kind of play forward how deep the signal preference uh the preferences that can be aggregated by quadratic funding and how much it scales more than the local government uh deploying funds this is something that works at web scale provides a credibly neutral low overhead way of creating extremely legitimate funding is sort of the the theory so um the idea here was that we wanted to empower the community to signal what's important and we wanted to provide a stimulus from a central matching pool and match the impacts of private citizens donations and like just get rid of the red tape in supporting our public goods by taking this crypto primitive and and doing it so uh basically built a tool downtown stimulus.com launched a pilot over the course of a couple weeks and uh here are some of the stats we had 325 donors that raised 16 k so 16k from the crowd 25k from the matching pool and i think that like i just [ __ ] love the idea that crypto can regenerate the world and we can backport this mechanism that we prototyped in crypto and that the psychology just works exactly the same so um thank you to the businesses that we worked with in downtown boulder thank you to everyone who supports get coin grants and thank you especially to everyone who is changing the narrative that crypto is just a big decentralized casino towards one about crypto regenerating the world [Applause]