TL;DR
- Domain: Dev Tooling should have a GG24 domain allocation to ensure Ethereum’s tooling backbone is sustainably funded.
- Steward: Dev Tools Guild unites the teams behind Ethereum’s most widely used developer tools to fund critical infrastructure, increase coordination between developer tooling projects and the core protocol.
- Funding: Dev Tooling should be a scaled quadratic round with Dev Tools Guild representing their member projects and scaled based on the number of member projects
Domain: Dev Tooling
Gitcoin 3.0’s vision is Funding What Matters and dev tooling is fundamental to Ethereum’s future:
- Ethereum apps and infrastructure depend on these tools.
- Neglecting tooling risks developer friction, ecosystem fragility, and security gaps.
- A dedicated domain for dev tooling ensures that capital flows to the projects that form Ethereum’s foundations for building apps.
Dev tooling projects would be eligible if they can:
- Demonstrate significant positive impact to the Ethereum developer community over a sustained period
- Free software in the GNU parlance that can be utilised by developers building on Ethereum, without the requirement of any third-party commercial products or services to use them to their full potential.
Steward: Dev Tools Guild
The Dev Tools Guild unites critical Ethereum developer tooling to collectively fund projects and their maintainers (think Protocol Guild but for dev tooling), and boost coordination between protocol and dev tools developers.
Guild members consist of key open-source dev tools spanning:
- Client Libraries: ethers.js, viem, web3.py, Web3j, Nethereum, Alloy
- Smart Contract Languages: Solidity, Vyper
- Frameworks & Dev Environments: Foundry, Scaffold-ETH, Ape
- Standardization Tooling: Sourcify
Dev Tools Guild should steward the GG24 Developer Tooling domain, curating and overseeing how funds flow within the domain.
- Our fixed membership means we have a vetted set of projects that already meet the criteria for critical Ethereum dev tooling.
- This provides clarity and trust for Gitcoin, we know where the funds are going, and the projects are longstanding public goods.
Funding: Scaled Quadratic Funding
Dev Tooling should be a scaled quadratic round with Dev Tools Guild members represented by the guild and the number of donations scaled based on the number of member projects. The purpose of this is to remove the burden from member projects applying individually, without penalising them for being represented as a single entity.
Non-member projects that meet the eligibility criteria could also participate in the round.