The Gitcoin Grants “main round” does not fund public goods principally as “main” implies. Instead, it operates in the Ethereum community, if I understand the official eligibility criteria from Gitcoin’s Fraud, Detection, and Defence workstream. FFD is not just defending the main round against non-human attacks but moreover, e.g., against non-EVM/Ethereum and for-profit projects. I’m not sure these are the specific rules. Still, in any case, there are a bunch of eligibility variables like this. Correct if I’m wrong, @DisruptionJoe and @Sirlupinwatson?
If we acknowledge eligibility rules like this, then “main round” is probably a misleading coining for what’s actually happening. This mismatch most likely increases the number of illegible grant applications, FDD’s workload, confusion for grant recipients and funders, et cetera.
Moreover, as @GlenWeyl noted recently, Gitcoin “is not really a global system.” Indeed, the Gitcoin Grants “main round” is an ecosystem program to fund non-profit Ethereum projects or something along these lines. It’s not a general-purpose program for “public goods.” And that’s precisely why we have scaled the main round program so meaningfully. FDD has sufficient knowledge of the Ethereum community structure to apply bespoke mechanisms to police collusion and potential authentication fraud of funders/earners who try to game the system. (In contrast, strategic collusion/identity fraud are inevitable problems that truly global/individualistic Quadratic Funding programs would run into.)
In turn, philosophically, we might better embrace and communicate a vision more faithful to what we do: Gitcoin builds ecosystems. Yes, bold notion on the plural.
Similarly, the Uniswap grants round we operate is not a “main” round. Accurately, we’ve been calling that Uniswap program on Gitcoin Grants and similar programs like the “Climate” and “Longevity” rounds “ecosystem rounds.”
Hence my proposal: Let’s consider rebranding the Gitcoin Grants “main round” to “Ethereum round,” and with that, we can probably get rid of the “main” versus “ecosystem” dichotomies more generally.
Also, please allow me to loop in Gitcoin’s Memes, Merch, and Marketing workstream (@seedphrase, @Fred, and @seanmac) because this is very much Grants Round structure marketing territory.