GG23 OSS Program Eligibility Criteria

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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The Gitcoin Grants Program champions the development of Open-Source Software (OSS) across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Our eligibility criteria aims to ensure that all participating grantees adhere to the highest standards of ethical conduct, community values, and the ethos of OSS. This framework is designed to nurture innovation and facilitate meaningful contributions to the open-source community.

The eligibility criteria for the upcoming GG23 are as follows:

Quadratic Funding - 3 Rounds

Ethical and Community Standards

  • No Hateful Content: We firmly stand against discrimination and hate speech.
  • Deceiving Users: Prohibited is any content that could harm users or lead to unintended consequences.
  • Falsification: Attempts to falsify contributions, including Sybil attacks or other manipulative practices, are strictly banned.
  • Fraud & Impersonation: Projects must accurately represent their affiliation and intentions to maintain transparency and trust.
  • No Quid Pro Quo & Bribery: Incentives in exchange for donations are disallowed, maintaining the integrity of the contribution process.
  • Advertising Restrictions: Utilizing grants for direct promotional activities or sales is prohibited.
  • Funding Caps: Projects with significant external funding may be reconsidered to ensure equitable distribution of resources.
  • Legal Compliance: Mandatory is the adherence to all applicable laws and regulations for participation.

Open-Source Principles and Project Activity

  • Licensing Requirement: Projects must be fully open source, offering “source available” for anyone to fork, modify, and redistribute, embodying the essence of open-source collaboration.
  • Activity Metrics: Demonstrated established and ongoing development activity as evidenced by GitHub commit history.

This eligibility framework is devised to ensure that the projects we support are aligned with the foundational values of the Gitcoin Grants Program and actively contribute to the growth and integrity of the OSS ecosystem. Projects that violate these guidelines will face disqualification from consideration, underscoring our dedication to maintaining the highest standards of ethical conduct and community engagement.

Projects fulfilling the licensing requirements and displaying sufficient activity metrics will be directly approved. Those partially meeting these standards will be subject to a manual review process, while projects failing to satisfy any of the criteria will be deemed ineligible.

OSS Quadratic Rounds

When applications open, the program will feature three rounds within Grants Stack. Each round will feature eligibility requirements tailored to that segment’s unique objectives and needs. These include the following:

  • dApps & Apps
  • Web3 Infrastructure
  • Developer Tooling and Libraries

The allocations for the rounds are as follows:

  • dApps & Apps: $200k
  • Web3 Infrastructure: $200k
  • Developer Tooling and Libraries: $200k

Applicants are limited to submitting their projects for a single round of funding, and may only apply with one project per round. If you wish to apply with multiple projects in one round, please reach out to our team and we will manually assess eligibility as there may be exceptions. It is recommended that grantees choose the round that most closely matches their project’s primary mission and goals. By doing so, we aim to provide focused and impactful support and ensure resources are directed where they can achieve the greatest effect.

dApps & Apps

Objective: To accelerate the adoption and development of dApps & Apps offering novel utilities or services within the ecosystem.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • User-centric dApps & Apps enhancing Web3 accessibility and usability.
  • dApps & Apps contributing to financial inclusion, education, and social impact are encouraged to apply.

Round Specific Criteria:

  • Demonstrable user interface design and positive user experience.
  • Innovative application use cases expanding the OSS ecosystem’s reach.

Web3 Infrastructure

Objective: To strengthen the Ethereum ecosystem’s foundational infrastructure by supporting projects crucial for its development, scalability, and security.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • Core Client Teams & Development: Support for teams behind essential Ethereum clients (e.g., Geth, Nethermind) and projects enhancing core network functionality.
  • Staking Infrastructure and Diversity: Initiatives improving staking processes and promoting client diversity to strengthen network security and resilience.
  • Decentralized Identity and Cross-Layer Solutions: Projects focused on decentralized identity solutions, cross-layer interoperability, and seamless token transfers, enhancing user experience and network efficiency.
  • Security and Scalability Innovations: Research and development aimed at bolstering the network’s security through EIPs and scalability solutions like sharding and rollups.
  • Wallet Security and Privacy Technologies: Innovations in wallet security, recovery solutions, privacy pools, and zero-knowledge proofs, aiming to protect users and advance voting mechanisms.
  • Standardization and Future-Proofing: Efforts to standardize crucial technologies and develop forward-thinking solutions, such as account abstraction and statelessness.

Round Specific Criteria:

  • Infrastructure Impact: Projects must demonstrate a significant contribution to the Ethereum network’s infrastructure, addressing both foundational needs and innovative solutions to current challenges.
  • Engagement in Pioneering Development: A focus on pioneering technologies or approaches that promise to elevate the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly in enhancing privacy, interoperability, and user experience.

Developer Tooling and Libraries

Objective: Improve developer efficiency in the OSS and Web3 ecosystems through supportive tooling and libraries.

Target Areas for Funding:

  • Development environments, frameworks, and testing tools for Web3.
  • Libraries that enable secure, efficient smart contract development.

Round Specific Criteria:

  • Significant reduction of development barriers or enhancement of project efficiency.
  • Demonstrated support and usage within the developer community.

Evaluation Process

Our evaluation process combines quantitative measures, such as adherence to open-source licensing and active development indicators, with qualitative assessments, including the project’s contribution to the OSS ecosystem, community engagement, and innovation.

Conclusion

By establishing clear criteria and specific targets for each funding round, the GG23 OSS funding initiative aims to foster innovation, enhance community engagement, and promote a transparent and inclusive selection process across the OSS ecosystem. This approach ensures support for diverse projects, contributing to the growth and sustainability of open-source and Web3 technologies.

Retro Round - 1 Round

Funding: $600k

Optimized for mature projects, distributing more valuable funding across a smaller pool of projects. Higher expected value for builders with higher floor and a ceiling.

Floor will be set at $10k, which is the minimum any builder will receive in the round.

Eligibility

The Retro Round is curated to 30 top mature builders from past Gitcon Grants rounds.

How we’re quantifying mature builders:

  • The list is based on grantees participating in OSS rounds in GG18, GG19, GG20, and GG22, with criteria applied to participation in more than two rounds at a minimum.
  • The grantees are force-ranked on their Elo Rating - a score based on their GMV normalized for differences across round sizes and competition.
  • To exclude projects that have not been recently active, the list filters out grantees that have less than one commit a week over the last 6 months (or less than 25 commits over 6 months).

This is a curated round, and all eligible builders will be contacted directly by the Gitcoin team to apply. Any eligible builder has the option to opt into the round or proceed to participate in the QF round if they so choose to. If you are participating in the Retro round, you may not apply to QF.

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Love the experimenting with breaking down categories for QF & Retro, excited to see the results and findings. As akways, looking forward to the round!

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I really like the direction Gitcoin Grants is taking. During the feedback session with the Gitcoin team a few weeks ago, I mentioned how important it’s for some projects to have more curated approaches (e.g. Octant), so we could have a greater impact. It’s great to see more experimentation happening in that direction!

Regarding that, I want to mention that since GG22, Vocdoni has transitioned to a more Ethereum-centric approach that aligns better with the GG23 criteria. We’re developing DAVINCI [1], a new voting protocol that benefits from Ethereum’s security, utilizing zkSNARKs and Homomorphic Encryption to ensure anonymity, verifiability, anti-coercion, and accessibility. In summary: the first solution meeting all the criteria for a universal voting protocol.

We’re currently fundraising to support this development, and Gitcoin Grants would be really helpful for us. Would it be possible to update our project description [2] with this new project direction before the curation process begins?

Thanks!

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gm sir, happy to learn you’re having great expectations in relation to the upcoming OSS Round.

Yes, you can head to https://builder.gitcoin.co/ and start working on revamping your project profile with this new direction and developments.

LFG :hammer_and_wrench:

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hey @MathildaDV ,

amazing to see all of this being put together!

I have a doubt: Are the QF rounds independant form the Retro Round? I see different elegibility critera, but I’m not clear if they are linked to each other… probably the fact that each of them are fiving $600k.

e.g. In case a project is not able to participate in the Retro Fund round (because doen’t match the 2 OSS rounds criteria, for example), it would still be eligible for participating in the QF round?

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gm sir, they’re independent. QF Rounds = Early Stage Projects & Retro Rounds = Gitcoin Curated List of OSS Projects from past rounds, Retro Rounds are “Opt-in” meaning that if a project wants to reject the invitation, they still can decide to apply to a QF Round.

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Many thanks for your quick answer @wasabi, really appreciated!
We already updated our Gitcoin profile :smiley:!

Just one last thing, I want to clarify two points regarding project eligibility, as we would love to be considered for the retrofunding round:

  1. In 2021, we voluntarily stopped participating in Gitcoin Grants to give more space to other projects, as we had secured some funding at the time. However, a year later, our situation changed, and we needed public goods funding again, so we reopened our Gitcoin Grants profile. Since then, we’ve been actively participating in some rounds. I’m mentioning this just in case our project appears as disabled in any database, as we’ve had issues with that before.

  2. In a previous round, our application was analyzed (IIRC, it was some kind of AI or something) and incorrectly flagged as non-open-source, leading to a rejection. But, this was later acknowledged as a mistake by the Gitcoin team since all our code is (and always has been) fully open-source and publicly maintained.

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Thank you so much for your comments and feedback. It’s always so valuable!

This is part of the exact reason we are transitioning into multi-mechanism and introducing the Retro Round! As we’ve gotten this feedback from a few projects. Currently, the metrics for the retro round are based on participation in GG18 - GG22, alongside other success metrics. If you’re not eligible this time, however, there may be ways to adjust and iterate for a future round (which we’ll be doing anyway bc GG23 is going to be the first experiment of this!)

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Love this RetroPGF + QF experiment! :popcorn:

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Sounds good Mathilda, thanks for your answer! Looking forward to experiment with these new funding mechanisms! :eyes:

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