As a grantee in open source and web3 social round I can not really have a position on shell funding.
However, I strongly believe from now on Gitcoin is associated with Greenwashing.
I think Gitcoin has opened a Pandora box. And now we can expect all kinds of sponsors. I would not be surprised if we get an announcement that a dictator has personally invested into a matching pool.
I think Mars has really good points. Here is further information from the linked article.
Shell appears to have been the most prominent employer of influencer advertising over the last seven years.
In April, for example, the fossil fuel giant released a five-part YouTube series hosted by ex-BBC presenter Dallas Campbell, which touted the net zero benefits of hydrogen and featured one-on-one interviews with two Shell executives.
Oil and gas companies have been heavily promoting hydrogen as a green fuel, despite the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimating that hydrogen will represent at best 2.1 percent of total energy consumption in 2050.
“Shell has the ambition to make enough hydrogen from renewable power to kick-start this energy revolution,” Campbell said in the first video of the series, which has gained nearly 30,000 views.
The former BBC presenter has also promoted the series on his personal social media channels. On Instagram, Campbell encouraged his followers to watch his “Hydrogen powered adventure!” but did not tag Shell, nor mention his commercial relationship with the brand.
This was also not the first time that Campbell had partnered with Shell. In 2016, he presented the social media coverage of the company’s Make the Future London festival. “Dallas was fantastic,” Shell said in a testimonial following the event, adding that the social media campaign had fetched over a million views, which the company described as “absolutely huge!”
In 2022, a Harvard University paper found that a “green innovation” narrative was one of the key social media tactics deployed by fossil fuel companies. Analysing 2,325 social media posts from 22 major European polluters, the report found that 72 percent of posts from oil and gas firms tried to emphasise their spending on green technology.
As the study also pointed out, however, these firms invested just 1.7 percent of their annual capital expenditures in low carbon technologies between 2010 and 2018.