Henlo Gitcoin community,
I want to call the community’s attention to three big challenges that have been on my mind lately. I believe these questions are integral to Gitcoin’s evolution as we continue building a web3 ecosystem that supports open-source builders, fosters community participation and ownership, and thrives for the long haul.
These three questions are:
- How Might We Double Down on Going to Market Fast?
- How Might We Win by Our Community Winning?
- How Might We Build for Long-Term Thriving?
Preamble: This is a continuation of our ongoing evolution
I view solving these challenges as part of our continuing evolution.
Gitcoin was ahead of its time from day one, emerging as a platform dedicated to funding public goods before that concept truly caught on in Web3 (in fact, some might say we helped pioneer the category). While the straightforward path for many crypto-native projects was to launch an alt L1, L2, or DeFi token to tap into the abundant capital inflows, Gitcoin chose a different route.
We anchored ourselves in the belief that open-source developers and communities deserve meaningful support—a vision often at odds with the hype-driven cycles of the industry. Because of that, we’ve had to continuously adapt as the market whipsawed from bullish to bearish and back again. Through it all, we’ve been iterating on our structure, products, and community strategy to maintain our place as a pioneer in public goods funding on chain capital allocation.
Here is a light history of that adaptation. In 2017, we were a bounty platform started in my basement. We got investment from Consenseys. In 2018, we launched a NFT platform, quest platform, ethical ads platform, educational platform, and grants platform. In 2019, we launched quadratic funding. We iterated on that 22 times. In 2021 we spun out of Consnesys and launched Gitcoin DAO. We wander in the wilderness for a bit for a few years trying to figure out how to dao, and eventually launched Passport, Public Works, Allo and Grants Stack. KERNEL, Passport and Public works “spun out” to become independent, Then we evolved into supporting retro funding, dependency funding, and started to figure out how we could partner with other innovators. Through it all, we raised a matching pool and treasury worth $tens of millions.
Until we are default alive, this perpetual evolution will be just as critical as it was in our early days.
OK now Lets look forward to 2025.
1. How Might We Double Down on Going to Market Fast?
The pace of innovation in web3 is dizzying. Every day there’s a new protocol, a new DAO, a new NFT or game that’s capturing the public’s imagination. It’s amazing, but it also means we need to stay light on our feet.
I am sad to share that I do not think we’ve done a good enough job of this since the DAO launched in 2021. Despite having immense resources, we have fallen behind as the market moved from QF in 2021 to multi-mechanism and we were mired in figuring out how to operate as a DAO. I made this meme as part of 2025 planning that I think captures my sentiment (and pokes a bit of fun at ourselves).
As we digest the need to move faster in 2025, here are what I think the key considerations are.
Key Considerations for 2025:
- How might we enable Rapid iteration? When a new trend arrives… How might we be faster to market?How might we even pre-empt it? Even create it? How much upside is there here?
- How might we navigate Tradeoffs? How do we maintain focus on delivering value to our community at a faster pace without compromising quality?
- How might we enable Lean Experimentation? What if we test, learn, and pivot quicker? If it takes $150k-$200k and 2-3 months right now to pilot a new mechanism, how might we do it for closer to $20k-$25k? Gitcoin has often been a playground for experimentation. Let’s formalize that iterative DNA and embed it into every step of our product development.
- How might we enable Community-Driven Feedback Loops? One of the biggest advantages we have is YOU—all of you. How can we better integrate your voices so that we can fail fast, learn faster, and ship features that truly solve community problems?
I’d love to see more open discussions on how we can rapidly iterate, and RFPs from the community proposing experiments. Let’s challenge ourselves not only to build but to deploy and validate in market swiftly. A dynamic environment demands live players—your feedback on these new experiments is what will help us go to market fast and enable strategic agility for Gitcoin.
2. How Do We Win by Our Community Winning?
Gitcoin’s success has always been intertwined with community success, from growing Quadratic Funding to building out other new ways for devs to get paid. In web3, “winning” is not a zero-sum game. If our community thrives, we thrive.
I am a big believer in this way of thinking. In 2022, Auryn McMillan and I wrote an essay about what pluralism means in web3, which you can find here. In 2023 and 2024, I wrote about DAO to DAO partnerships, Category Creation, and how do we explore the onchain capital allocation space network-first?.
I will recap the key considerations from these posts below.
Key Considerations for 2025:
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How Should We Be Exploring the Capital Allocation Design Space?
This post discusses how Gitcoin should approach experiments for allocating funding in more impactful, transparent ways. Key points include:- One of Gitcoin’s challenges is balancing depth vs. breadth in exploring capital allocation designs like Quadratic Funding (QF) vs Retro Funding vs other designs.
- Gitcoin fell behind projects such as Protocol Guild and Optimism, but still holds significant influence and resources in Web3
- Future exploration could focus on building interconnected networks, partnerships, and fostering a pluralistic ecosystem, potentially rethinking Gitcoin’s approach to embrace more experimentation and collaboration and enabling other projects.
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How might we integrate a “ Category Creation Strategy”?
This post outlines a strategic roadmap for 2025, focusing on how Gitcoin can categorize funding streams to better serve emerging needs. Key ideas include:- Allo Protocol could become the Capital Allocation layer of the post-tokenization internet.
- We can use category creation strategy to systematically pursue this north star.
- Category creation is the process of developing a new market segment for a previously non-existent product or service.
- Gitcoin helped created the regen web3 category: Gitcoin helped create the “regen web3” category by funding public goods and supporting open-source projects, emphasizing regenerative economics and positive social impact.
- Shift to Capital Allocation focus: Gitcoin is transitioning to the capital allocation category with Allo Protocol, aiming to lead in web3-era capital allocation strategies.
- Strategic Positioning: Gitcoin is leveraging category creation strategy to position Allo Protocol as core infrastructure in the post-tokenization capital allocation ecosystem.
- Number go up if we do it right.
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How might we implement Practical Pluralism at Gitcoin?
- Rather than compete with other capital allocators (QF vs other mechanisms), could we go up the stack and become an allocator to allocators, having upside in each?
- Doing so might enable us to double down on Credible Neutrality. Credible neutrality, as defined by Vitalik Buterin, is the principle that a system or protocol should be demonstrably fair and impartial to all participants, with no hidden biases or privileged interests. If we shift from competing in market for onchain capital allocation, to still winning when every allo tool in our portfolio wins, we can become a more credibly neutral category creator.
- Doing so might allow us to triple down on Practical Pluralism. The web3 ecosystem is beautifully diverse—different projects, tokens, ideologies, and even motivations. That’s what makes it robust, and its clearly what the market weants, but its also complicated. We need to embrace that complexity and ensure our infrastructure and governance support multiple approaches simultaneously, without fragmenting the community. Let’s keep pushing to create spaces where different approaches can coexist and cross-pollinate.
- If we are successful we will embed a (3,3) into each of our partnerships.
The idea of “(3,3)” comes from the concept of cooperative game theory —a scenario where the best outcome is for everyone to choose to cooperate. While the original web3-era version of this meme came from OHM, the spirit of (3,3) translates well to any community aiming to foster mutual benefit. We want to ensure that every step we take is a net positive for all of our partners—baked into the very DNA of Gitcoin’s product design and incentive structures. I think we can do that with systematic DAO to DAO partnerships.
The big question: How do we make sure our community is always winning alongside us? That’s our metric for success. If we can answer that, we create a positive feedback loop: the more the community wins, the more Gitcoin wins, and vice versa.
3. How Might We Build for Long-Term Thriving?
How might we ensure that Gitcoin remains a staple of the onchain capita allocation & public goods funding landscape for years—perhaps decades—to come.
Key Considerations for 2025:
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How might we become Built for Scale?
- As more developers, DAOists, and open-source communities discover Gitcoin, we need infrastructure that can scale. How do we ensure that our movement + products can handle exponential growth without losing the mission-focused and ethos that made us unique?
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How Do We Progressively Decentralize?
- We all know what happened with the wave of DAOs in the last cycle—some thrived, some fell into oblivion. I think Gitcoin is somewhere in between. We’re still alive and kicking, but we pissed away our lead in the market over the last 3 years. Internally, we fell to what I like to call “DAO Hunger Games politics”, basically workstreams competing with each other for resources and clout as our treasury declined - creating a negative sum environment where workstreams wouldnt collaborate. A lot of this is my fault for being naive in how we set up the atomic unit of work at Gitcoin as a workstream, but there are other factors too: not diversifying the treasury in 2021, not shipping good software in 2022/2023, being naive about HOW TO DAO. Some things that I think are a consideration from here:
- Progressively decentralizing (while still being successful in the market) will require an evolution forward from where we are now.
- This might include intentional governance structures, clear roles, and well-thought-out incentives that keep the community building together instead of fighting for control. It may include having more balanced power dynamics, prototyping cap allocation models that encourage meritocratic contribution, not just token-weighted battles.
- I am mindful that some people prefer the form factor of a trad job, and some people wnat to be more free and loose. We may need to have structures that accommodate both.
- Let’s keep it real, keep it fun, and keep it experimental while avoiding the traps we’ve seen elsewhere.
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How might we enable “Number Go Up”?
- “Number go up” can be viewed skeptically or as a degen-only thing: it’s a shorthand for hype cycles, speculation, and quick pumps.
- But let’s redefine “number go up” to mean that impact goes up, user engagement goes up, social capital goes up, treasury goes up, and community well-being goes up. I call this the upward spiral.
- Our focus on long-term thriving means building systems that create sustainable value—financially, socially, and ethically.
- The elephant in the room here is the declining size of the treasury, specifically the portion denominated in GTC. While I stand by the launch of GTC in 2021 given the constraints we had then, I am interested to see where other leaders step up and figure out what the future of GTC is in a new era. Like for example @peth’s recent post on Regenerating GTC. Hopefully we will see a committee of leaders pushing this convo forward.
- Financially, I am happy to say that Gitcoin (with Grants Lab leadership) is well on the way to sustainability financially. Grants Lab made nearly $100k/mo in revenue on $400k/mo in costs. That’s 1/4 of the way to sustainability. Of course, there is room to grow here. But we are almost within striking distance!
- I continue to think the path to financial sustainability loooks like this:
- TLDR - the path to market viability and then to financially sustainability in our multi-emchanism future is
- launch new mechanisms
- get new mechanism to PMF.
- get it growing exponentially via network effects
- monetize that surface area with services (10% fees) or proltocol fees (<1% ) or my tokenizing the mechanism
- steps 1-5 are not strictly linear! there will be setbacks along the weay. we should plan for that!
- read this book or this book and this book for more on the strategies we may employ.
Next Steps: Let’s debate, build, and iterate together
If you made it this far, congrats, you have a longer attention span than anyone complaining about GTC on twitter!
Suffice to say, building a category leader isn’t easy. We are being exposed to constant evolutionary pressure. 2025 will be no different. We have an opportunity to respond to this pressure or ignore it. I choose to have a bias towards action. In the coming weeks, I am going to propose some big initiatives and structural changes that are meant to wholesale address these three points, and position Gitcoin for the 2025-2030 cycle. I hope that this post has done right by the Gitcoin community by “bringing you along” in my thinking. And I welcome your constructive input on how to evolve forward.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my HOW TO DAO era, it’s that meaningful progress comes from the community aligning on a shared vision. That alignment only happens through communication and collaboration.
- Join the Discussion: Please drop your thoughts in the forum, on Discord, or Twitter.
- Propose Experiments: Whether it’s building micro-grants, new governance modules, or new ways of enabling (3,3) in product design—get your ideas on the table! I want to see a new batch of GCPs funded based on your ideas.
- Contribute & Co-Create: If you’re a developer, jump into the repos. If you’re a designer, propose UX improvements. If you’re a community organizer, spin up a working group. If youre a memelord, help us meme about this evolution. We all have something to offer.
I’m incredibly grateful for your energy and input as we keep iterating on Gitcoin. And to the Ethereum community for blessing Gitcoin with a special place in their ecosystem. I hope we can pay it forward massively in the next cycle. Together, let’s rise to the challenge of shipping faster, ensuring we all win, and constructing a thriving ecosystem that stands the test of time. Thanks for being on this ride with us—let’s continue to build the future of public goods via onchain capital allocation, one block at a time!
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”