Definitely surprising (in a good way) to see so much vigorous discussion on this happening over the last two weeks!
I gave the coins to Gitcoin because I support their work in public goods funding and I think robust public goods funding institutions are something that the open source and crypto worlds really need more generally. There’s a lot of good that could be done (for the Ethereum community, for the world at large, and for the AKITA community as well) out of having a large and sustainable long-term pool of funds being guaranteed for future public goods funding rounds.
I think there are much better alternatives to just burning the coins, even for the AKITA community’s interests! Cryptocurrency communities generally suffer from a severe lack of public goods funding, and so we regularly see multi-billion dollar projects languishing with 4-person development teams. So… why not just put the coins toward long-term funding of public goods?
Here’s an example simple proposal:
- Put the coins into a Sablier contract that unlocks them over the course of some long period of time (eg. 20 years).
- When the coins come out, use them to fund quadratic funding rounds.
- One possible split is 50% Ethereum-focused, 50% AKITA-focused.
- Another option is 40% Ethereum, 40% AKITA, 20% not-necessarily-crypto global public goods.
Having a large pool of coins in a dedicated public goods funding pool actually empowers a community much more than those coins being unavailable entirely; it ensures that there are resources to support ecosystem projects, execute on a roadmap, and do other things that ensure the ecosystem will continue to be very relevant for a long time. Putting them in a stream (could be Sablier or could be a dedicated contract), in the mean time, ensures that participants have confidence that nothing is going to get dumped quickly (a 20-year stream implies a 5% “issuance” rate during those two decades, equivalent to what DOGE has forever).
The decision is definitely far out of my control at this point, but it would be amazing if long-term public goods funding can be considered as an option!