Impact Summit 💥 Grants at Scale

[Music] really honored to be able to be able to do the work that I do at gitcoin and so I'm going to tell you guys a little bit about the past present and then also hopefully future of what we're looking to do at gitcoin so first off I'm aim I'm the head of impact at gitcoin uh it's a funny title to be really honest uh but it really just means that I help lead BD sales and Partnerships for the Dow we have five separate products and offerings one of which includes the the gitcoin program which is what I would say that we're most well known for to date uh and so I help raise money for the gitcoin program I help lead the grant stack and the aloe protocol the gitcoin passport and then we recently launched a layer two uh called the public goods Network and so I helped to do you know BD sales and Partnerships for everything there I've been in and out of crypto now now for close to a decade uh which is a seems like a really long time I started writing about Bitcoin a little bit in 2013 uh and that photo that you see there is the only time uh that I've worn a suit in a very long time so what is gitcoin uh many people in the at least ethereum ecosystem tend to be quite familiar with it but we've done some deals in the past where it's with companies who know nothing and so my assumption is always that it's best to talk to people about who is gitcoin what is gitcoin as opposed to assuming we're we're far from True mainstream adoption so uh gitcoin was founded in 2017 the goal was to be able to enable open source software devs to be fairly compensated for their work it was started by Kevin auke and it was essentially a bounties platform uh the name actually comes from GitHub and sort of getting coins uh it you know get coins was sort of like the the play on words as to how it came to be uh for open source software devs and we started doing grants themselves in 2019 so Glenn W vitalic and Zoe hitzig put together a paper on this idea of something called quadratic funding and using quadratic funding you know we put together a platform that would allow us to be able to distribute grants to individuals in a way where instead of there being internal Council that gets to decide exactly where those funds go it ends up being community-driven allocation for Capital uh which it it is it's a really interesting concept for most people who haven't heard about it considering you know top- down decision making on where money goes is something that all of us have always been accustomed to our entire lives and the idea that communities would get a chance to decide where funds go is something that's quite novel and has been what's allowed us to work with with UNICEF uh one that was quite contentious earlier this year was Shell Oil and uh there's a large NGO that we're hopefully announcing that we're doing something within the next couple weeks but you know we've worked with some of the most successful companies within the ethereum ecosystem but it's also been really heartwarming to see how the work that we've done has been considered credible enough for you know people like the United Nations and UNICEF to work with us so what is qf uh like like in the simplest terms I I explain it as the most democratic form of capital allocation that exists it's crowdfunding campaign where the number of contributors matters more than the amount that you funded and it's what allows for this bottomup or community-driven decision for Community Driven decision- making for for Capital allocation so uh here's just like oh it's not working here usually this uh this actually moves and shows you an example where normally your donation uh what's the best way to put this uh there's going to be another slide for it but essentially if you can get 10 people to donate a dollar to your project you do better in terms of the matching funds and I'll explain what matching funds are shortly uh but you'll do better in terms of the matching funds that you will get than if another project gets a $10 donation essentially so what's qf uh we you know we feel optimat optimal way to be able to help fund public goods and this this gives you a little bit of that example is if Grant one received $100 and Grant 2 received a bunch of $10 donations then the one that got multiple $10 donations ends up getting more money from the matching pool and more total available money at the end of the grant round than the one that gets a single $100 donation what are public goods okay so this is one that I'd say even people within gitcoin would end up being reticent to say that they actually agree on you know the traditional definitions are around you know what I've written here is commodity and service provided without profit to all members of a society either by government or private individual or organization very normal examples that we're accustomed to or like clean air we feel open source software is one of them privacy is one of them a16z I would say has had a a pretty good definition of what public goods are and so you know I'll I'll read it here real quick but the classic challenge of decentralized networks is that they are public goods without a central entity to control decisions and capture profits it's hard to incentivize their maintenance and development crypto helps to solve this problem through decentralized coordination and providing economics incentives for development uh web 3 will put the power in the hands of communities rather than corporations and so that's exactly what we've been doing over the last couple years or attempting to do uh humbly you know I don't think that our work is by any means done and so continuing to try to do that is is the work that we do uh I'll I'll provide some of the numbers about gitcoin I'd say that's one of the things that ends up impressing people the most even myself to be entirely honest so this number actually I needed to update this um uh this was we have now distributed over $56 million I was actually told to open source and just software developers around the world since 2019 in the grants that in the grant rounds that we have done between matching pools and Community donations so we launched in 2019 as I mentioned it was a quarterly initiative that we still do our next grants round is going to be on November 15 uh the open application period for that we haven't announced it I think we're going to Tweet about it later today but applications are technically open are ready uh for some of the rounds and the idea was to be able to have people in the community empowered to figure out where they wanted to allocate funding towards and we started very small as you can see in the year 2019 we distributed $7 million I think that the first grants round that we had had a matching pool that was less than $40,000 and in 2022 uh 2023 is not done yet so we don't have the exact figure but the amount that was raised was you know 3,000% higher uh than than when we started in 2019 and so we've been very fortunate to be in a position to help fund developers working on the important highways roads and bridges of of the public web 3 infrastructure uh some more numbers to date this has probably gone up we've done probably over 4 million unique donations at this point the $56 million towards public goods we've run over 105 of these quadratic funding rounds this is a number that I found that tends to be one of the more exciting ones for people to hear but we sat down and tried to do a little bit of an understanding of what has been the impact of the funds that we have distributed to date and using that we looked at private valuations of grantees who went on to be able to successfully raise private rounds and then we also looked at this was from all-time Highs but put together market caps of organizations that were once grantees have since gone on to launch tokens and looking at those we've seen that we had a all-time high you know Global Financial impact of 28.2 billion why this tends to be super interesting to me is that I don't think that there's a venture firm alive who would be able to compete with the numbers I can't be fully quoted on it but I I have seen you know in general we actually have a really good relationship with a lot of the Venture funds in the space because they have been using gitcoin grants rounds for some time now as a way to be able to understand how to get access to some deal flow we've all we've actually been trying to understand how we can productize that deal flow I was on the phone with a billion doll Venture fund yesterday who was telling me just by chance that they end up looking at getcoin Grant rounds every quarter to be able to take a look at the sentiment of the community voting on where they feel funds should be allocated and using that as a way to be able to understand you know if a thousand people or 5,000 people have voted that this project is important then there must be something there to be able to take a look at it's a super interesting note notion that I'm looking at trying to understand how we can really further because in many ways I I found that we almost act as like a prey combinator because we're not exactly a y combinator we're not an accelerator we're just here to be able to help fund what matters which is our our tagline these days but the fact that we sit at this Central node in the ecosystem to be able to help projects get access to funding and then we have the additional resources that they might need in order to you know actually succeed with their projects is something that we've been thinking quite a lot about as you can see you know uh I think this number now is also another one I wasn't able to get some of these images changed in time but over 4,000 projects have been funded to date in the last couple years which is astounding uh over $3 million in fraud prevented uh I'll talk a little bit about that when we talk about what getcoin passport is but uh but if you can imagine the simplest way to put how these grants rounds work is let's say we're running a climate round and we have a quarter million dollars that we've raised from a handful of organizations that care a lot about Distributing funds to orgs in the climate solution space and if we run grants rounds that if you get more individual donations that you're more likely to receive more of this matching pool of a quarter million then you can imagine that there are many people who are incentivized to be able to take $100 and split it across 100 separate wallets to make 100 separate donations and for us to be able to find a way to help counter that is one of the most important things that we've been working on and have since found the product is actually quite widely applicable in terms of use for a variety of projects in this ecosystem uh here's where I get a little into the protocol and products I won't go too too deep into them I'm actually more excited to talk to you about some of the case studies of some of the work that we've done so the gcoin program this is the one that you know we've been talking about now it's a quarterly initiative that gcoin Dow has been running we've been doing this since 2019 we have distributed quite a good amount of money we don't intend to stop running these I would say that in many ways this counts as sort of the heart and soul of the ecosystem today and it's why it's such a pleasure to be able to be in the position of uh being a steward to help help that happen I think that the best part of this role is that every single conference that I go to or even if it's not going to a conference when people find out the work that I do invariably at some point there's a massive thank you that's given to me for the work that we do because either it's been instrument m al to their own success or to something that they use as success to a friend success something along those lines some of the rounds that we've run so far open source software ethereum infrastructure we do one web 3 community and education and so Bank list Dow came out of this another podcasts have writers have been funded I believe this is the round that Zack xbt uses who does a bunch of amazing work in the community and isn't necessarily being paid for it and so this ends up being way that we get to give back to some of the I mean maybe he's not a guy so I don't want to say guy uh you know since he's Anon or Anon uh We've also done climate rounds I'd say those have been weirdly one of the most successful not weirdly though because there's such you know such an emphasis on what's going on with global warming these days and a lot of people with a lot of money are very interested to see how we can help fund that that's where the very contentious shell decision came about where shell helped to fund gcoin climate rounds over the course of a couple rounds and honestly when I have conversations with any of the larger corporates climate is one of the ones that ends up really perking them up we also have run I didn't put it on here but decentralized science rounds I think to date we've distributed over $800,000 in the last calendar year to over a hundred projects that have been working in the decentral ized science space I'm personally someone who has a bachelor's and a masters in biology a bunch of research in genetics and genomics and so the d space has been one that's been super interesting to me and it's been cool to see how we're helping early stage scientists get off the ground into what I really believe is going to end up being a very integral part of the crypto ecosystem with the decentralized science space next is the aloe protocol there's a lot written here what I'll basically say is it's a protocolized version of quadratic funding would be the easiest way to put it uh where it it acts sort of as an engine of being able to use qf there's a lot of orgs we've been having conversations with that would love to be able to understand how they could use qf without using the white label software that we have for Grants programs uh so think of some web3 social companies uh that we've been having conversations with to do things I think we actually launched something some months back with lens uh to be able to do something called quadratic lener and and we're looking at hopefully running rounds to use qf not just to help software developers but to be able to help artists that are looking to you know see how they can get access to funding in new and exciting ways the grant stack easiest way to put this one would be for years while we were running our grants rounds we used to run what were supplements to Native grants programs for organizations like polygon and we did a greater China round between planker down and scroll we did ens we did gaming rounds where game seven and other organizations we did ZK rounds and so they were outside of the exact you know OSS or eth info rounds that gitcoin was running and what we contined to find was that orgs would come to us because anyone who's running a grants program in this space is running it on Google Sheets at worst and air table at best and we kept finding that they were asking how they would be able to use the same software that we're using and at the time the crants platform that we were on was something with quite a bit of tech debt and was a centralized software that we couldn't use and so in the spirit of you know supporting open source software we ended up open- sourcing and creating What's called the grant stack and so it's just a white label software that we use to run our own grants rounds but that any other organization of which we have actually a handful I think they'll be launching early next month to this uh to this point now taking a little longer to get them out but a lot of the E organizations in the ecosystem have been very excited to have what would just be a robust solution to be able to have a program manager sign in and to have grantees to be able to apply to be able to put this out on multiple chains at the moment it's evm only hopefully we're able to move into a nonm world for this platform at some point but the grant stack has been something that we've been seeing grow quite a bit and has been the software that you know we continue to use for our own grants programs are continuing to improve improve on hopefully round on round uh so that you know people can be satisfied with the experience next up is gitcoin passport uh it's a web 2.5 solution for anti-il and so as I was mentioning before our grants rounds have an incentive to be able to game them where you can say that an individual sets up a 100 separate wallets and using the 100 wallets they donate $1 each and using that they end up getting way more money from the matching pool than they should than if they were doing things fairly and so we created a solution where you sign in with your ethereum wallet and you use different web 2 apis and some web three like you know do you have an ens do you hold eth do you hold GTC and some of those kinds of solutions to be able to give people a score for proof of humanity essentially so a score from zero to 100 to be able to try to best understand if the person behind the wallet is an actual individual or if it's a bot and it's been really fun honestly we're at almost a million users with this product now because while we originally invented it for our own Grant rounds it's been something that has been something you know whether it's crypto gambling whether it's airdrop farming or preventing airdrop farming uh gamei there's been some trafi defi things but a lot of people are interested in figuring out how do you do anti-il and then online reputation so it's been fun to watch getcoin Passport evolving case studies and use cases uh so this is the part I'd say I have the most fun with one of the rounds that we did a couple years back was called the Oakland local round where we brought seven nonprofits and brought them together to bring them on chain we only had a $155,000 matching pool and close to 4,000 in money was Crown funded but because we were able to explain to people who are not nearly as Adept at all honestly in the crypto world to be able to see what it would be like to do this uh and to be able to do what is really democracy in action when I speak to you know I've had some times in the past couple months where I've had to go speak with lawmakers in the United States and I explain quadratic funding as democracy and action to them but once we had these nonprofits of people who are not interested in crypto or not were interested in crypto at all doing it they have since deployed a local stable stable coin Commerce Network for uh a farmers market that goes on on the weekends over there and so to be able to see that there are ways to get people to understand that this industry has more to it than just scamming and selling expensive jpegs no offense to anyone who has expensive jpegs that that there's things that you can do that help people has been one of the cool ones uh in terms of our case studies next one up is the UNICEF Alpha round I was particularly proud of this round that we did uh it was in December of last year year it took almost a year for this to come together UNICEF came to us and wanted to understand what it would be like to run an experiment with you know the idea of quadratic funding and so after quite a bit of negotiation we came to the fact that they would put up a matching pool of around $50,000 and it was done in ethereum it's actually pretty interesting that UNICEF is able to custody ethereum and Bitcoin they have a UNICEF crypto Venture fund even they're they're quite adep when it comes to being involved in the crypto ecosystem and so they put up a $50,000 matching pool and they also gave us 10 separate projects they wanted to put into the grants round for Unicef these were all ones that the UNICEF Venture fund had invested in Prior and and they were part of the digital public goods Alliance and in that we did this round for about 11 days and had close to 16,000 unique donors and those 16,000 unique donors ended up Distributing or contributing close to 100,000 additional dollars and so through this small experiment we were able to create a situation where we distributed $150,000 across 10 projects and for me personally since then I had the IMF reach out I had the World Bank Reach Out change.org reached out the World Wildlife Foundation reached out other arms of Unicef reached out because everyone saw this new and exciting way to be able to distribute Capital that hasn't been done to date and was being done using crypto technology that was one of the most interesting and exciting things to me the the round that we're looking to hopefully announce just like contract negotiations uh in the next couple weeks for g19 is one that came about after we announced this and there was some inbound that came of it and so especially last year when g capital happened and Celsius happened and Genesis happened and FTX happened especially towards the end of the year at least for me personally this felt like a very big ray of sunshine that the crypto ecosystem really badly needed and that ended up proving to be something that I think has really at least in private conversations helped us quite a bit I had a conversation with a really large NGO today who was interested in this round that we did in being able to do some interesting things with us in the future optimism uh just to speak to some of the past successes of grantees everyone here I'm assuming is well aware or familiar with optimism they join grants round one uh to date they have generated over three billion dollar this probably more than that now in gas fees saved for users there's billions of dollars in chain uh in onchain value locked on optimism and these were one of the grantees that graduated into being funders of the program and the team at optimism has been honestly always extremely gracious of of some of the like the help that we were able to give them early on and it's awesome to be able to see like successful projects some of the others include like Unis swap optimism nosis maker doubt Bank list wallet connect ether's JS hard hat po app uh like there's so many the list goes on and on and on and so I couldn't name all of them but I wanted to just mention some of them to you uh I think the last one I end up mentioning here is 1 inch but 1 inch is another you know Unis swap competitor I guess uh but you know from gitcoin Grants ended up raising over $660,000 do to date have done hundreds of billions of dollars in trading volume have hundreds of millions of dollar market cap millions and millions of total trades and you know if you speak to the founders over there they're repeat funders literally every single round give us money to be able to help continue to watch the web 3 ecosystem flourish because of how thankful they are and how you know gitcoin was as they mentioned you know played a huge role in shaping their Destiny and so for us you know it's amazing to be able to see that getcoin grants has been able to help so many of these projects get to the place that they that they're at now and we've been trying to see how we can ah the stand with crypto I forgot about this one yes we've done a lot of crypto regulatory advocacy rounds as well uh we've done millions of dollars donated to organizations that are supporting the you know the fight for being able to do crypto fairly if you live in the United States or even if you don't I'm sure you've seen just how hard it is to get some sort of regulatory Clarity with the the SEC chairman that we have today and the regulation by enforcement that's been going on but a couple months back we did a really fun grants round where we partnered with coinbase and gitcoin and Zora came together to start with what was the stand with crypto campaign we deployed a custom nft Shield that people were able to Mint on Zora and Zora donated $1 for each of the mints using that we did over 150,000 Shields at that time had been minted it's probably close to 250,000 now at one point the campaign or the mint from the campaign were accounting for 27% of all the nfts that were minted on ethereum for a specific day and we ended up being able to distribute you know well over a 100,000 $150,000 to a handful of projects that are working on you know the blockchain center coin coin Center blockchain Association and some others and in the middle of that round ndow was so happy about the work that we were doing that they came and voted to donate an additional $100,000 that is now sitting in the matching pool for when we run the next grants round so outside of just doing things with individual projects we're also fortunate enough to be able to help try to fight the good fight to keep crypto you know not only in the United States and in Europe and other places to continue to flourish so yeah uh key takeways I know I have about a minute left uh we want to be able to continue to empower talent and positively impact not just the US economy but everywhere productizing qf is going to be something that's going to be interesting and gitcoin grants has distributed a ton of money created a ton of value and we're hoping that we get to continue to keep doing that so yeah thank you anyone who wants to get in touch with me wants to learn more my email address is just AK gitcoin doco I'm as Kore on Twitter my DMs are open I respond to there a little bit less uh so if you want to reach out to me also feel free to ping me on telegram ever since Elon took over X or Twitter or whatever I found it to be a much more polarizing place to spend my time and so I don't have it on my phone anymore and while I do still check my DMs I just check them way less often now and yeah thank you