[GITCOIN 3.0] Gitcoin Grants 3.0: Strategy Sprint [OWOCKI EDITION]

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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After a week of discussion about the [GITCOIN 3.0] Gitcoin Grants 3.0: Strategy Sprint, I’ve forked the sprint and put together the following strategy doc. This is meant to be additive to the scope that rena laid out, a YES AND.

Gitcoin Grants 3.0 Strategy Sprint [Owocki Fork]

Overview

Current efforts to evolve Gitcoin resemble incremental improvements (Gitcoin 2.3). To truly address our long-term goals, Gitcoin needs a deeper pivot: Gitcoin 3.0.

We strategically delayed GG24 by three months, moving it from August to October. Let’s utilize this additional time (May - July) for a comprehensive reset. We’ll deeply consider:

  • Technologies emerging between 2025-2027
  • Ethereum developments expected in 2025-2027
  • Next-generation capital allocation mechanisms
  • Emerging capital formation methods
  • First-principles thinking
  • Our rich Gitcoin legacy

The goal: Create the strongest possible foundation for Gitcoin 3.0.

Goals & Objectives

High-Level Objectives

Achieve a three-fold outcome:

  1. Relevance: Reestablish Gitcoin’s importance to key opinion leaders (KOLs).
  2. Software Quality: Build cutting-edge, high-quality onchain capital allocation software.
  3. GTC Utility & Longevity: Enhance Gitcoin’s relevance to Ethereum funders and ensure sustainable value creation for GTC holders.

Specific Objectives

Relevance

  • Develop and recommend a clear Sensemaking strategy for Gitcoin.
  • Define and recommend a Domain-Driven Allocation (DDA) structure, enabling effective identification and voting on domains.

Software Quality

  • Dramatically improve software delivery—achieving 5x quality and velocity at 1/5 the cost compared to Gitcoin 2.0 by leveraging decentralized developer networks.
  • Prevent monopolies from capturing funding flows by fostering competitive pressure through innovative mechanisms like those demonstrated by Bittensor (see Allo Arenas).

GTC Utility & Longevity

  • Clearly define how GTC holders can benefit from capital allocation mechanisms developed for Gitcoin.
  • Create a competitive, financially sustainable model ensuring Gitcoin gains upside from investments into capital allocation mechanisms rather than giving funding away.

Design & Strategy Considerations

Recommendations should explicitly address:

  • Identifying and making sense of Ethereum’s most significant challenges.
  • Clearly defining domains that align with these challenges.
  • Selecting effective providers for capital allocation and round operations tailored to identified domains.
  • Ensuring a competitive marketplace for continuous improvement of capital allocation mechanisms.
  • Designing arenas (like Allo Arenas) to maintain diversity, encourage competition, and prevent single-team dependence.
  • Ensuring mechanisms bootstrap effectively with equitable fees
  • Gitcoin securing investment upside in the projects it accelerates.
  • Gitcoin’s fundraising strategy in the future.

Design Priorities

We will design toward:

  • A modular arena model for domain-specific funding rounds
  • A competitive ecosystem of capital allocators and builders
  • A Gitcoin that can bootstrap, govern, and profit from the best capital allocation primitives in the ecosystem
  • Preventing centralization or monopoly by any single team or operator
  • Clear paths for evolutionary learning and improvement

Evaluate Strategic Providers

  • Infrastructure
  • Community partners
    • Regen Coordination
    • Greenpill.network
    • Celo
  • Other web3 crowdfunding tools
    • Giveth
    • Octant
    • Drips
    • 1Hive/Conviction Voting
    • Allo.Capital & Other Allo builders
  • Sensemaking tools
    • Simscore + other rnDAO ones
    • Signals Protocol
    • Pol.is
  • Capital formation tools
    • q/acc
    • Revnets
    • echo.xyz
    • Other solutions
  • Dda providers
    • Questbook
    • Grants Ship
    • Custom-built solutions
  • QF providers
    • Giveth
    • CLRFund
    • Custom built solutions
  • Retro funding providers
    • Agora
    • Easyretropgf
    • Custom gbuilt solutionms

Deliverables

The sprint’s primary deliverable will be the Gitcoin 3.0 Whitepaper, including:

  • Clear Vision Statement
  • Strategic Roadmap
  • Detailed Software & Process Specifications for:
    • Sensemaking
    • Domain specification
    • Round operations
    • Continuous learning
  • Comprehensive Staffing Plan
  • Budget Outline
  • Financial Models
    • Fee-based sustainability models for Gitcoin
    • GTC utility structures
  • Requests for Proposals (RFPs) covering:
    • Infrastructure Layer (including grants management and shared services)
    • Quadratic Funding (QF)
    • Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro)
    • Domain-Driven Allocation (DDA)
    • Sensemaking

Sprint Scope

This strategy sprint is Phase 1, tightly scoped to ensure timely and actionable outcomes for GG24.

In Scope

  • All strategic activities required for successful GG24 launch and Gitcoin 3.0 launch.

Out of Scope

  • Activities and tasks not directly influencing GG24 launch outcomes or Gitcoin 3.0’s foundations.

Activities, Methodologies, Timeline

(To be detailed further)

Team

(to be defined)

Resources & Pricing

(To be defined)

Next Steps

  • Define detailed timelines and responsibilities.
  • Schedule initial strategy workshops and meetings.
  • Initiate preparation of the Gitcoin 3.0 Whitepaper.

Reference Documents

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GMGM

Long time listener, first time commenter.

I wanted to throw another tool into the ring - DeVouch https://devouch.xyz/

We’ve provided support for Gitcoin since our launch in the hopes of doing something interesting in terms of funding allocation and/or project curation with Gitcoin.

In this pivotal evolutionary moment of Gitcoin we think there are opportunities worth exploring using DeVouch to empower aforementioned KOLs to interact meaningfully with the Gitcoin platform.

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@owocki Hi @maets23 from SimScore here.

It seems the first Gitcoin 3:0 step to develop the process to write the white paper.

Blankboarding may be an interesting option.

It is a process that my company developed at a painful point in it’s development. We couldn’t do the small things right anymore.

Over the next 12 years we blankboarded annually with a 100x increase in valuation.

In simple terms here is the process:

  1. Ask this question: “What are Ethereum’s biggest problems?”
  2. Each stakeholder provides 3 answers.
  3. In a conference, randomized small groups of 5, discuss their 15 answers in a circle.
  4. Each randomized group determines the top 3 answers from their group
    5a. During a deliberation period, all groups merge ideas that are duplicates
    5b. Stakeholders deliberate and ask questions.
  5. Each stakeholder then votes on the top 3 from the whole ecosystem.
  6. The top 10 problems statements from this process become the basis of the white paper.

I ran a process like this for 12 years. The results were outstanding.

Paul

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Thanks for the post, @owocki .

As far as new crowdfunding tools, Updraft is feature complete and running on arb sepolia testnet. I’m getting campaigns ready for launch. It uses a new mechanism allowing participants to earn as they help discover the best ideas and solutions.

Can Gitcoin raise matching funds for an eth-biggest-problems campaign on Updraft?

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open to giving it a test drive! will DM on tg

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That would be very appreciated. Anyone else that wants to try it out should come to the Updraft discord and get some test UPD tokens.

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Excited about this refined scope for the Strategy Sprint. I’m eager to play a role in this Strategy Sprint and beyond.

Over the years, I’ve gained experience and gathered resources that are relevant in nearly all of the recommended Design & Strategy consideration and would love to contribute these to shape up the best possible GG24 and Gitcoin 3.0 strategy.

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Excited to see Gitcoin 3.0 embrace modularity and experimentation in capital allocation.

At divvi.xyz, we’re building a fully onchain, permissionless, post-impact capital allocator—where protocols define the impact they want to incentivize, and builders earn by delivering measurable onchain outcomes.

This model directly addresses two of Ethereum’s biggest challenges:

  1. Unbiased, decentralized capital allocation: L1s, L2s and protocols can define the onchain KPI they want to incentivize, they deploy a campaign, and the Divvi protocol measures and attributes impact to builders, making capital allocation fully transparent.
  2. Merit over politics: On Divvi, onchain impact is impact—rewards are automatic, regardless of who the builder is or who they know.

We’ve seen strong early traction in live campaigns with Celo, and are eager to share results and explore experiments with Gitcoin’s DDA or Allo Arenas tracks.

Open to collaborating with others thinking deeply about high-ROI capital deployment.

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Thanks Owocki for this detailed breakdown.

I think it feels like the right moment for Gitcoin to refocus and evolve, seeing that you’re looking more at the future and anticipating what developments and tools the ethereum ecosystem would need, and positioning to fund those solutions before the need arises, doing that also with futuristic allocation mechanisms.

I’m excited to see how this unfolds and ready to work towards Gitcoin 3.0’s success.

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Bury the dead horse and see how many people will miss it.

For me Gitcoin lost sense after all its support projects become crypto based. Like it became a venture fund for Ethereum of some sorts. If you have wallet fatigue - you out of the game. No application writing skills - go smoke bamboo. What about people behind the open source? Is Gitcoin for the people, or it will be just as comfortable paying “open” OpenAI tokens for aigents to maintain the open source software? Yes.

Basically, I don’t care about funding open source without people behind it and open source people are always open. The main question I have about all these Gitcoin 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and future initiatives (which is the perfect sci-fi reading btw):

WHO HAS BEEN SUPPORTED BY GITCOIN FROM THE PROJECTS I KNOW?

Of course, I want to be supported too. That’s probably the only true reason I am asking.

I don’t think we can support anonymous crypto regens and folks who code in the open the same way. So back to key-signing parties and offline, off-chain networks.

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DeepGov DebateArena: Scaling Sensemaking through AI-Powered Debates for Gitcoin 3.0

deepgov

Overview

Building on the success and insights from the DeepGov experiment and aligned with the Gitcoin 3.0 strategy sprint, I propose we can fork DeepGov implementing a DeepGov DebateArena - a framework for AI-powered debates that enhances community sensemaking, creates valuable data, and drives engagement through entertainment and participation.

Why DebateArena for Gitcoin 3.0?

The Gitcoin 3.0 strategy sprint outlines a need for stronger sensemaking capabilities and improved domain-driven allocation. DebateArena directly addresses these priorities by:

  1. Scaling sensemaking beyond human capacity - Using AI agents to process, debate, and synthesize complex information at scale
  2. Creating engaging community interfaces - Transforming governance discussions into entertaining, educational content
  3. Generating valuable data - Capturing diverse perspectives and community reactions for better domain identification
  4. Distributing governance participation - Allowing community members to develop, train, and deploy their own “political representatives”

Key Components

1. AI Politicians & Persona Development

Unlike the original DeepGov approach with predefined personas (Grant, Luna, Panda), DebateArena allows anyone to create their own AI politicians by:

  • Training models with their specific values and perspectives
  • Defining policy positions on key Ethereum/public goods issues
  • Creating distinct personalities that can engage in lively debate

This democratizes the creation of governance agents while avoiding authenticity concerns (e.g., “Is this really what Vitalik would think?”) by focusing on citizen-created politicians rather than emulating existing figures. Of course there is still space for an “AI Vitalik” from infiniteregen.ai :slight_smile:

2. Structured Debate Formats

DebateArena could host regular debates in various formats:

  • Weekly “TV Debates” - Scheduled discussions on specific topics with multiple AI politicians
  • Podcast-Style Shows - Longer-form conversations with deeper exploration of issues
  • Town Halls - Community Q&A sessions with AI representatives
  • Text-Based Forums - Asynchronous debates happening in dedicated channels

These debates would tackle the most pressing questions in Ethereum public goods funding, domain identification, and Gitcoin’s strategic direction.

3. Human Interaction & Oversight

Humans remain essential to the system through:

  • Question Submission - Community members can submit topics and questions
  • Live Interaction - Real-time engagement during debates
  • Jury Voting - Humans evaluate performance and select winning arguments
  • Training Feedback - Continuous improvement of AI politicians through human feedback

4. Incentive Structure

To drive participation and quality, DebateArena includes:

  • Rewards for Winning Debates - GTC allocation to creators of well-performing AI politicians
  • Audience Participation Credits - Rewards for asking insightful questions and voting
  • Data Contribution Value - Recognition of value created through debate data generation

Technical Implementation

The initial implementation would include:

  1. A Telegram bot that hosts debates in group chats (we have proven high engagement from our DeepGov GG23 experiment where within one week more than 820+ messages were exchanged)
  2. A basic framework for configuring and deploying AI politicians
  3. Voting/feedback mechanisms for community evaluation
  4. Data collection systems to capture valuable insights

More advanced implementations could include:

  • Voice synthesis for podcast-style debates
  • Visual avatars for video debates
  • More sophisticated model training interfaces

Connection to Gitcoin 3.0 Objectives

DebateArena advances the Gitcoin 3.0 objectives by:

  • Relevance: Creating engaging content that attracts KOLs and community members
  • Sensemaking: Generating structured debates that help identify key domains and challenges
  • Competitive Innovation: Fostering competition between AI models and approaches
  • Community Ownership: Allowing anyone to participate in governance through their AI representatives

Next Steps

If there’s community interest in this approach, I propose:

  1. Creating a small working group to develop the initial DebateArena prototype
  2. Running a pilot debate series with 3-5 AI politicians on key Gitcoin 3.0 topics
  3. Allocating a modest budget from the strategy sprint resources to validate the concept
  4. Developing metrics to evaluate effectiveness and community engagement

Inspiration & References

This proposal builds on:

Looking forward to your feedback - if that aligns with the Gitcoin 3.0 strategy sprint!

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YES!!! I love to see GTC Utility as a focus for the DAO and Gitcoin 3.0!!

Are we also looking at Capital Allocation beyond Financial?

Pairwise has been playing with this idea of using Liquid Democracy & Pairwise voting to run a sort of People’s Choice Awards… Like the Oscars for Ethereum in different topics… The financial prize can actually be small, the more important Prize would being the People’s Choice Winner for that category! Would that fit in the scope?

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yes-yes-chad
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@owocki Thanks for putting this together!

Signals Protocol is still in early development, which means there is the opportunity for Gitcoin to be heavily involved in shaping the more nuanced details of the protocol to better support the 3.0 agenda.

We have been engaging with researchers and others deeply embedded in the on-chain governance space to review and comment on our draft primer, which you can find below. We invite you all to share your thoughts: Signals Primer - Google Docs