Composting Gitcoin 2.0

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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Composting Gitcoin 2.0

When gardening, there comes a moment when you recognize it’s time to clear away old brush to make room for new growth. This is where we find ourselves with Gitcoin today.

What is Gitcoin 2.0?

Gitcoin’s journey has unfolded in distinct chapters.

Gitcoin 1.0 [2017-2021] began as a centralized company with a simple mission: funding what matters. We built bounties, hackathons, an ethical ad network, NFTs, quests, and eventually grants – creating the infrastructure for $$millions to flow into Ethereum ecosystem’s public goods.

Gitcoin 2.0 [2021-2025] represented our ambitious experiment with decentralization. We decentralized into multiple business lines – Grants Stack, pgDAO,/Public Works, Passport, Allo Protocol, KERNEL, and more – all under the expansive umbrella of a DAO. We pioneered new governance mechanisms and decentralized quadratic funding. We stretched, we innovated, and we learned. But we never reached profitability and as a result, we spun out or shut down many of these business lines when the market turned (and stayed) bearish.

But now, it’s time to acknowledge that Gitcoin 3.0 requires a fresh start. One that builds on our core strengths while shedding what no longer serves our mission.

Why compost Gitcoin 2.0?

In nature, composting transforms decay into fertility. Dead leaves, fallen branches, and spent blooms aren’t waste – they’re tomorrow’s nutrients. The forest floor demonstrates this wisdom constantly: what appears to be an ending is actually preparation for new beginnings.

This is what we must do with Gitcoin 2.0.

By intentionally decomposing its structures, stories, and even some of its initiatives, into lessons and closure, we create rich soil for Gitcoin 3.0 to take root and flourish.

The multiple business lines that once stretched our resources can now return their energy to the ecosystem. The governance mechanisms that sometimes slowed our momentum can evolve into something more nimble or effective. The dreams that proved too expansive for our current reality can release their nutrients back into more focused visions.

How to compost it

Years ago, I visited a regenerative farm. The farmer showed me their compost pile with reverence, explaining that the health of everything they grew depended on the care they put into this seemingly unglamorous process. “Most people want to skip ahead to the harvest,” he told me, “but the magic happens in the breakdown.”

For Gitcoin, I think composting means:

  1. Acknowledging what worked and what didn’t, without judgment
  2. Preserving the essential while releasing what’s peripheral
  3. Creating space for stillness before new growth emerges
  4. Celebrating what Gitcoin 1.0 and 2.0 accomplished while being honest about its limitations.

The winding down of Grants Lab represents our first significant act of composting. While painful, it creates space for more sustainable approaches to serving our mission.

How not to compost it

Composting isn’t about assigning blame or finding fault. When leaves fall from trees, we don’t criticize the tree or the leaves.

Similarly, composting Gitcoin 2.0 isn’t about declaring failure or pointing fingers at individuals, teams, or decisions. Every aspect of this journey has contributed valuable lessons that will enrich what comes next.

This also isn’t about abandoning our values or mission. The heart of Gitcoin – funding what matters – remains unchanged. We’re simply shedding the old structures that attempted to serve that purpose and making room for the new ones.

Invitation to participate

The beauty of composting is that it’s a communal process. Each of you who has contributed to Gitcoin 2.0 – whether as a contributor, grant recipient, funder, or community participant – has insights that can help transform lessons from Gitcoin 2.0 into nourishment for what comes next.

I invite you to share your reflections on what elements of Gitcoin 2.0 should be preserved, what should be transformed, and what should be released. What seeds would you like to see planted in the rich soil we’re creating together?

The most regenerative ecosystems are those with diverse inputs. Your perspective matters as we move through this transition with intention and care.

Together, we’re creating the conditions for something even more aligned with our vision to flourish.

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Longtime contributor here!

As Gitcoin transitions, I encourage the new team to take a close look at:

  • core – a solid UI component library offering generic grant components.
  • grants-stack-indexer-v2 – a stable, foolproof indexer for on-chain data analysis and transformation.

Both were built to quickly spin up new allocation mechanisms without being tied to Allo or other dependencies. They’re stable, well-tested, and could either be used directly or serve as inspiration.

Not everything from 2.0 may fit 3.0’s vision — take it case-by-case. But these two are like strong cuttings from the old crop, ready to be planted into the new soil instead of starting from scratch.

Parting advice: whatever you build next, make sure it scales and lasts.

Cheering you on from the sidelines! :slight_smile:
Good luck

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If we’re going to be a Software Shop, we need to Make World Class Software people want.

My biggest lesson from Gitcoin 2.0? Product-market fit trumps everything. We built impressive governance structures and community engagement, but struggled to ship working software that people genuinely needed. We’ve learned that the market in 2024-2025 didnt just want Quadratic Funding software anymore like it did in 2021. I’ve learned that you can innovate on product or governance but not both at once. By trying to revolutionize both simultaneously, we excelled at neither.

Once we locked in our complex multi-workstream structure, the entire system became incredibly rigid and frustrating to navigate. Decisions that could have hours days took months. We celebrated decentralization while users just wanted tools that worked reliably. Moving forward, I’m carrying this hard-earned wisdom: listen to the market and build valuable products first.

Refocusing on Open Source / Ethereum

In our quest to define Gitcoin in the decentraliezd era, I believe we drifted too far from our roots. We became enamored with regenerative economics, theory-heavy governance models, and abstract visions of systems change—while our core competency was always connecting open source developers with funding. The “regen” ethos, while inspiring, diluted our focus and confused our users, and it dragged us into the culture wars.

I value our time exploring regen, what we learned, and the friends we made, but imo Gitcoin 3.0 needs to return to its foundation: supporting open source software and addressing Ethereum’s biggest problems. That’s where our community started, that’s where our expertise lies, and that’s where we can make the most impact. Regen is still revolutionary, but we need to narrow our scope, build tools developers actually need, and solve real problems in the Ethereum ecosystem. The most regenerative thing we can do is deliver working solutions to the community that birthed us, not chase abstract ideals that sound good at conferences or in books but don’t ship code.

What are DAOs even good at anyway?

Looking back, at the inception of Gitcoin DAO, I see that we fundamentally misunderstood the different strengths of companies versus networks. Companies excel at execution, focus, and hierarchy - getting specific things done efficiently. Networks thrive through permissionless innovation, emergent coordination, and collective intelligence.

Instead of building systems that amplified these network advantages, we essentially transplanted a traditional company structure onto the blockchain, but worse. We created workstreams, and within them, reporting structures, and centralized decision-making - we treated contributors just like full time employees, just with DAO-ish governance and different titles. We got the worst of both worlds: the overhead of decentralization without its benefits.

Recruiting Web2 engineers who weren’t culturally aligned with Web3 values compounded this problem. They brought valuable technical skills but often approached challenges through a company-centric lens rather than a network-native mindset, and often they were not involved in the communities that Gitcoin served or understood the “why” behind the what they were expected to deliver. We delivered worse software at a much higher price and much slower than our competition, which was web3-native.

For Gitcoin 3.0, I’m committed to building truly network-native systems - I’m think that might mean focusing on minimal viable governance, open contribution models, and creating fertile ground for permissionless innovation. The future isn’t about building a better company on-chain; it’s about enabling community-driven coordination that traditional companies could never achieve. The magic of DAOs happens when you design for emergence rather than control.

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My notes as donor, voter and very occasional contributor. I don’t have inside view, so it is mostly surface level stuff.

Worked:

Grasroots Funding - Results may vary, but Gitcoin is still one of a few places where someone completely unknown can start fundraising and turn 1$ from five friends into 100$ dollars from sponsors. Tiny amounts won’t change the world, but giving some motivation to keep pushing can be a difference between onboarding new EVM developer or losing them.

Grants Stack Indexer - It was nice to have access to “official” datasource that ecosystem is using. Transparency is very important for grants so knowing (almost) exactly how you count votes and such really helps to build trust in the process and outcome.

Spinning out Passport - I was skeptical if this would work (as in how would it benefit GTC holders or Foundation in the long run?), but given that Gitcoin is supposedly going to recieve something from the sale, it could be a win after all.

Didn’t Work:

Over-planning - A lot of effort that went into byzantine frameworks (especially DAO/Ecosystem design) that didn’t serve any purpose because no one really showed up to participate. In later stages things got better Gitcoin started running some “pilots” to make sure new course/service or whatever will actually attract enough people to be worth a bother.

Yanking the chain - There are a few times Foundation promised something to contributors, market conditions changed and the promise did not materialize. I don’t feel personaly affected - but some excellent contributors left with sour taste. Promises of future “retroactive-rounds” really need to be treated with extra care if rules can change mid-play.

Internal Decentralization - there was a brief period of turning Gitcoin into “house of competing brands” that wasn’t super successful. To give concrete example in early stages I felt like, “Gitcoin” wasn’t doing enough to support “Gitcoin Citizens”. Also the attempt to bring “community rounds” on par with “official Gitcoin rounds” didn’t really work out. To contrast - Giveth, Octant seemingly put full conviction in everything they do. Octant just finished Ecology rounds, and even though it wasn’t a usual theme, it got similar amount of voters.

Mixed:

Niche Community Rounds - On one hand organizations do apply for community rounds, but proposals are mostly coming from “usual suspects” centered on niche topics that don’t attract many donations at all. Given that many funders are crypto-natives I hope for at least one round on theme that captures current spirit of a times - “Privacy, AI” (or whatever is next hot topic in few months) - in addition to traditional mix of “Green, Mushroom, Regen”.

Protocol Ambitions - Positioning as protocol was a good strategy at a time while everyone worshipped protocols and looked down on apps. Now that sentiment has shifted and Allo didn’t find much use, I hope Gitcoin would embrace the reality of being a “good fundraising event organizer” rather than trying to be a Moloch of universal grant allocation.

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Thanks for the thoughtful notes. I really apreciate it!

Promises of future “retroactive-rounds” really need to be treated with extra care if rules can change mid-play.

I would respectfully push back on the idea that future Citizens rounds were “promised”. The truth is there were two camps here, those who wanted to lean in to Citizens and those who didn’t. I was in the former camp. Others (who are no longer here) were in the latter. As with any DAO, only governance (which controls the treasury) can make a promise to deploy the treasury.

Regarding the future retroactive rounds (which i think is the same as Gitcoin Citizens rounds?)… I still think this is a good idea, and I’d support including these in GG24/25/26/etc as long as they are well scoped and executed! Maybe its worth setting aside some funds for them formally so that the “promise” can be made and backed.

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tl;dr:

  • Gitcoin’s biggest ideas and innovations have emerged from loose, flexible, open structures that emphasize autonomy in exploration.
  • Gitcoin has struggled to scale implementations profitably — focused execution demands formalized processes and operational control.
  • Ambidextrous organizations excel at doing both simultaneously. Gitcoin shouldn’t try to be one.

As a past contributor, donor, and grantee, I find it helpful to frame Gitcoin’s journey through the lens of organizational ambidexterity — the ability to simultaneously explore new opportunities (innovation) and exploit existing strengths (scaling with efficiency).

In my view, Gitcoin’s various experiments and successful spin-offs have excelled at exploration, fueled by openness, proximity with the community, and diversity of thought. But Gitcoin has struggled with exploitation, where the absence of centralized control has made it difficult to scale initiatives profitably and sustainably.

More specifically, organizations that do both well have a single unified leadership who are able to link different cultures, structures, and processes in these parallel systems. They have the financial means to protect exploratory teams from being crushed by efficiency demands, while harnessing operational teams to fund and support exploration. I don’t think Gitcoin has ever been in a position to afford this as a choice.

My opinionated take is that Gitcoin should not aim to be ambidextrous. Instead, it should double down on exploration — innovating boldly in design space for solving challenges in OSS with affordances enabled by the intersection of crypto and AI — areas where few others are willing to go. Approve small, fast, focused internal funding with progressive unlocks for bets that can be monetized by spinning out to partner orgs, DAOs, foundations better equipped with the rigor, controls, and operational processes needed for profitable scale.

Gitcoin’s edge lies in its willingness to explore, and leaning into that strength is its best shot at building a more sustainable future.

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Hi everyone… I’m newer to Gitcoin, but I’ve been learning a lot by reading these reflections on Gitcoin’s next chapter.

One small thought I wanted to offer:

In addition to composting old structures and product lines, maybe Gitcoin 3.0 could also compost some of the inherited assumptions about coordination itself.

Across many decentralized projects (even outside Web3), heavy coordination layers often grow because trust isn’t designed into the system. Instead, systems try to control complexity with layers of process. But in reality, light, relational infrastructures; trusted circles, permissionless tools, minimal stewards and often do better at adapting fast and staying true to their purpose.

It feels exciting that Gitcoin is moving toward a leaner, more open model… maybe it’s also a chance to rebuild trust as a default setting, not an add-on.

Thank you for opening up this conversation — looking forward to learning and contributing as Gitcoin enters this next cycle.

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@owocki

  1. Acknowledging what worked and what didn’t, without judgment
  2. Preserving the essential while releasing what’s peripheral
  3. Creating space for stillness before new growth emerges
  4. Celebrating what Gitcoin 1.0 and 2.0 accomplished while being honest about its limitations.

Well said - these are the important points, and remembering that there is also a wrong season for certain actions that we may not have seen but can now that we’re looking back.

@thelostone-mc
Parting advice: whatever you build next, make sure it scales and lasts .

You have been so instrumental to this work. I appreciate your grace and advocacy for the work that you and your team have created. Your advice rings very true, and getting back to the basics of the Gitcoin Grants Program feels like a new start that I hope I hear your voice in.

@owocki
Gitcoin 3.0 needs to return to its foundation: supporting open source software and addressing Ethereum’s biggest problems.

Yep, agreed. How can we do that in a way that highlights Gitcoin’s contributions to the ecosystem, while giving builders + funders a home that builds/enables trust, transparency and legitimacy?

@DistributedDoge - I agree w/ a lot of your points but also Owocki’s. I think we’re all singing a similar tune. We over-engineered ways to get the community involved and then lost a lot of that momentum without having the treasury, RFPs or quality control to back that up.

@rohit Agree with most of your points but:

Approve small, fast, focused internal funding with progressive unlocks

Leads to operational overhead and more centralization. I do believe we scale technology within the community vs internally and would love to see the program become the testing grounds for a portfolio of orgs/products that have graduated from the work that @MathildaDV has put into growing the foundation of our funding.

@scttee.eth

It feels exciting that Gitcoin is moving toward a leaner, more open model… maybe it’s also a chance to rebuild trust as a default setting, not an add-on.

Would love to see more of this. Too often forums are just a ‘louder means smarter’ back and forth. Comments made to ensure the community knows ‘I know what I’m talking about’ and would love to see us signal to each other who/how/why trust is built.