GG24 Domains and Gitcoin Matching Pre-Ratification

I believe the tenative plan is to use fair fees no? I think @MathildaDV was going to bring that to a vote soon.

1 Like

Great summary @ccerv1. Just to clarify PGF R&D Round is also Mixed and will use Peer-Reviewed Hypercerts for the Mechanism Design Round. Also agree with @MontyMerlin @ivanmolto that the dashboard and map falls into the PGF R&D domain.

2 Likes

Yes fair fees are already baked into this ratification proposal. @LuukDAO and I will be posting an update that includes those details here shortly!

1 Like

I support ratifying these domains and appreciate all the work done by the community and stakeholders in sense-making to set these domains. Ratifying these rounds will enable us to move forward with the domains and continue to flesh them out more so builders and communities have a good experience in GG24.

One area I would like to see infused within the other rounds is a focus on privacy and identity given the privacy domain did not make the cut. Privacy is integral in my opinion to scaling Ethereum and adoption of regenerative tools. As an operator for the PG tooling round in the Public Goods R&D domain we’ll look to support privacy and identity as core primitives to build upon and hope to see other domains do the same where applicable.

3 Likes

Slight clarification on the Public Goods R&D domain. @paul2 and I are also operators and the mechanisms are hypercerts for the research round and conviction/retro funding for the PG tooling development round.

2 Likes

[UPDATED]: I have updated the post with the following details:

2 Likes

strong plus one here! privacy is an important public good and with the EF just releasing their privacy roadmap, we need to start prioritizing it!

2 Likes

@MathildaDV Missing a zero.

I have to type more to meet 30 character minimum

Looks good to me and would vote yes.

Also impatiently waiting on news about when/how Grants Stack will be revived (you know, that beautiful platform on which we spent tens of millions).

And yes I know Allo Protocol will be reused in some way (unclear to me in what way), and yes I know in GG24 you will step away from QF alone.

The sunk cost fallacy is a common decision-making bias where people continue an endeavor (time, money, effort, or resources) because they’ve already invested in it—even when the current costs outweigh the potential benefits.

I’m ready to let go of the sunk costs, I dont see any reason we’d revamp GS. IMO the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits. If there was demand for it (and profit from keeping it online), we’d have seen it when GS was alive 2023-2025.

That said @divine-comedian has been revamped some of the infrastrucutre and is running it now. More details here What's happening with the Grants stack indexer?

2 Likes

This proposal is now live on Snapshot ready for voting: https://snapshot.box/#/s:gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0xfe763827c432492c9280eaef057698b1455e989b4ea18da7f9333a73bf82a111

I am also hopeful that even with the sunk cost, there are ecosystem-wide ā€œdividendsā€ for the future generation of capital allocation tooling by studying what worked well (and didn’t) with Grants Stack. Here are a few looking outside-in:

  • Keep workflows decoupled: Don’t tightly link application, discovery, and allocation processes.
  • Adopt open standards: Use frameworks (e.g., DAO-IP5) so tools can interoperate and best-in-class modules can be swapped easily.
  • Expect a learning curve: Every new allocation mechanism (beyond QF and Direct Grants) will go through its own Forming → Storming → Norming → Performing cycle.
  • So avoid locking in too early: Prematurely hardening technical choices can freeze the system into patterns that may not fit once mechanisms mature.
3 Likes

i’d add

  1. build something people want
    • don’t miss the market (grants stack was so focused on QF but didnt deliver it until 2023 when the market was moving on)
  2. iterate quickly
  3. staff your product team with people who are lean, hungry, and 0 to 1 minded. you must hit 0 to 1 before 1 to 10.
  4. use your product yourself, eat your own dogfood.
  5. build for modularity/composability so others can extend your software
2 Likes

Looks great to me, I vote yes, thank you @MathildaDV for putting this together and to the Gitcoin team.


I tried voting, but it tells me I don’t have enough GTC. However, I have over 100 GTC on mainnet, is there a minimum threshold that I’m not meeting?

You need to have this GTC delegated to you. If you didn’t delegate it before the vote went live you won’t be able to vote. In the future for support requests, please reach out to support@gitcoin.co or contact me directly on TG!

1 Like

Oh I see, thanks, will reach out in the future.

Thanks for the feedback.

I think there was a massive demand for this, but we eroded our own user base with at times decisions that were not value-aligned, and by not really prioritizing what our user base was saying/shouting. But the mantra I’ve always heard is that we just needed to get through this: we were building Allo & GS for generations to come, and the road to full decentralization is painful. I got this, so I kept spreading this gospel, to our users and our ambassadors.

I think GS became a kickass product in the end. Easy to check out, across chains, across rounds, credibly neutral, built on a fully decentralized protocol. Giveth does not have this. Neither does Optimism or Protocol Guild.

It is not so much the money we spent I care about, I care about the users who built communities, and I care about the product they could as of now use without any centralized intervention. People could now fund what mattered to their community.

So I think we did this. But yes, we iterated too slowly. And the team was not always very lean or open to feedback, even to feedback from within, which I can state as a very active user of the platform myself (ao with Gitcoin Citizens).

I don’t think we missed the ā€˜market’. I think the market isn’t even there yet.

And wrt profit: building profit models for public goods is tough. It’s one of the reasons Gitcoin has and had its place in the grants ecosystem.

In any case, I hope at some point some project will pick this back up. That’s why I was hoping Gitcoin could at least pay for the hosting costs to keep it online, even if it was just as an artefact, for communities to link to what they did instead of getting a 404 (or a link to buidlbox :thinking:).

It could be a starting point for what’s next, and an invite for future do-gooders to pick up the challenge while Gitcoin continues to build what you believe needs to be built next.

Seeing this made me really happy, so thanks Giveth & thanks @divine-comedian for keeping the dream alive. Maybe Gitcoin could fund Giveth to keep this live, as it seems Giveth is struggling to cover these costs?

In any case, it’s okay if you interpret this as ā€˜an ex gitcoiner venting some frustrations being held onto’ and it’s okay if your gut feeling is ā€˜help build solutions or gtfo’. I’ve seen these reactions, and I understand them. I’m always in awe of what you do and what Gitcoin continues to accomplish, so I will always be here to support, in some way.

So I’m taking the time to write it down anyway as a plea to maybe at some point to put GS (fully) online again, even if it’s just as a read-only version to inspire future builders.

We did a lot, and I’m personally proud of it.

2 Likes

In the end, I think only a small subset of the market demanded a fully decentralized protocol and wanted QF. IMO what happeend is we got outcompeted by structures that had less high cost of R&D and were post-QF. IMO protocol guild is plenty decentralized/capture resistent. And they ate our lunch (just look at their latest funding numbers). But it turns out that only a small percentage of customers actually cared about that.

There were signs of increased competition years ago ( Web3 Crowdfunding Tool Competitive Landscape ) but we didnt respond fast enough. I also think that in hindsight, spending $300k - $1m/mo on product and operational costs (against almost $0/mo revenue) was completely insane. It was a mistake not to diversify the treasury when GTC was $15. I am also disappointed to see that some IP that we put millions$$$ into was stolen from gitcoin in the 2.0 era, a costly principal agent misalignment that set us back years in terms of achieving financial sustainability.

If you have further comments on what we can learn from the 2.0 era, would love to get more comments on

@divine-comedian i wonder if giveth would be interested in taking this. most of the costs of keeping GS online were borne in the form of gettting the indexer online (which you’ve already done!)

1 Like

:warning: Please note: due to changes in funding commitments, this proposal has been amended. The updated version and new vote are here: [Amended Proposal]: GG24 Domains and Gitcoin Matching Pre-Ratification (Revision)

1 Like