Gitcoin Citizens: Round 1 Results
TL;DR
The Gitcoin Citizens Round #1 has become the most successful Gitcoin Round to date in terms of crowdfunding versus matching, with a quadrupling of matching funds in donations. With the Citizens Round #1 we invited the community to retroactively reward Gitcoin Citizens who supported & engaged the Gitcoin community, through content, data analysis or support initiatives. 33 projects were accepted, Gitcoin allocated $20,000 DAI in the matching pool funds, and the community donated $82,968, resulting in a ~400% amplification of matching funds. With this post we are announcing the final results and specifically the final distribution of matching funding after sybil analysis.
Objectives
One of the big ideas to come from the Gitcoin contributor retreat in February 2023 was a proposal to pilot a series of quadratic funding rounds for rewarding efforts supporting the Gitcoin Community. As defined, Gitcoin Citizens are value-aligned community members who are eager to contribute their time and skills in service of the DAO and the wider ecosystem.
Conceptually, running these rounds lowers the barrier of entry for contributing to Gitcoin, determines what the community values most, and helps test (dogfood) the Allo protocol.
Specifically, the three objectives of this experiment were:
- To gain experience using quadratic funding and the Allo protocol to build our own ecosystem, demonstrate effectiveness, and identify areas for improvement.
- To experiment with a supplementary budgeting process that has greater accountability and less administrative overhead.
- To increase community engagement and participation at all levels of Gitcoin from contribution to governance
These ideas were captured in [GCP-004] - Gitcoin Citizens Round which allocated funds for this experiment, we then announced the round and its timeline, which ran from June 13-27. This document summarizes the results of the first pilot round, and announces the final results of the allocation pool.
The Round in Numbers:
The results of the first Gitcoin Citizens round surpassed all expectations. Our initial goals were to have 20 projects entered and to raise an incremental $2,000 in donations on top of the $20,000 (DAI) matching for a total of $22,000 in funds distributed to grantees.
The actual results include 33 final projects and a total of $102,698.02 distributed to Grantees. To note, given Gitcoin allocated $20,000 DAI in the matching pool funds, but the community donated $82,968 . We achieved ~400% (!) amplification of matching funds: a new Gitcoin record.
This was also the largest ever usage of Grants Stack/Allo on an L2 at the time and provided an important test before GG18.
By The Numbers:
$20,000 DAI matching pool
$82,968.02 from crowdfunding
$102,698.02 going to grantees
17,021 unique contributors
57,344 contributions
$1.45 as average contribution
61 initial nominees submitted
57 projects submitted to round manager
33 projects meeting the minimum criteria
2 iterations of the Citizens Hub (grantees & donors)
1 CitizensGPT
2 loom videos
3 twitter spaces
194 Gitcoin Citizens tweets
202 replies, +400 retweets, 1.6K likes, 2.4K clicks,
280K impressions and an average engagement rate of 4.8%(!)
The Round in Rewards:
| Project | Matching Funds | Crowdfunding | Total |
| Karma |
$2,000.00 |
$11,363.91 |
$13,363.91 |
| Biteye |
$2,000.00 |
$8,391.21 |
$10,391.21 |
| BanklessDAO's Gitcoin Citizens |
$2,000.00 |
$8,315.66 |
$10,315.66 |
| Bankless Academy |
$2,000.00 |
$7,813.57 |
$9,813.57 |
| Dune Analytics dashboard - Proof Of Stake by Vitalik Buterin - Digital Book |
$1,808.00 |
$3,697.44 |
$5,505.44 |
| DeSci Round Operators |
$1,444.00 |
$3,653.74 |
$5,097.74 |
| Gitcoin Onboarding with Regens Unite |
$1,086.00 |
$2,821.30 |
$3,907.30 |
| ITU Blockchain |
$774.50 |
$2,877.77 |
$3,652.27 |
| Kairos Research |
$774.30 |
$2,342.76 |
$3,117.06 |
| All for Climate DAO: Gitcoin support since GR12 |
$586.30 |
$2,106.67 |
$2,692.97 |
| Gitcoin Gas Optimization |
$586.20 |
$2,393.85 |
$2,980.05 |
| ZER8's Gitcoin Citizen Round Application |
$491.30 |
$1,828.95 |
$2,320.25 |
| Borderless |
$343.10 |
$1,497.29 |
$1,840.39 |
| Quadratic Trust - Anne Connelly |
$326.90 |
$1,350.83 |
$1,677.73 |
| greenpill.network |
$305.80 |
$1,266.77 |
$1,572.57 |
| Carl Cervone - Onchain Impact Evaluatooooor |
$296.60 |
$1,146.09 |
$1,442.69 |
| Owocki/Supermodular.xyz (FBO Gitcoin Matching Pool) |
$293.10 |
$1,220.08 |
$1,513.18 |
| Bankless Hindi |
$285.70 |
$1,720.67 |
$2,006.37 |
| OpenLore Library |
$262.00 |
$1,961.78 |
$2,223.78 |
| Archimedes' Lever |
$248.70 |
$1,335.56 |
$1,584.26 |
| Eartbased soul |
$233.20 |
$1,220.01 |
$1,453.21 |
| Keith Comito: Gitcoin Citizen - Building in Public and Bringing Gitcoin to the Masses! |
$228.10 |
$1,355.86 |
$1,583.96 |
| Lefteris Karapetsas |
$220.60 |
$1,365.42 |
$1,586.02 |
| Blu3 Global |
$194.90 |
$1,128.56 |
$1,323.46 |
| Gitcoin Awareness and Female Founder Amplification |
$178.80 |
$1,269.03 |
$1,447.83 |
| Indigenous Voices in Gitcoin by Mycelia |
$172.90 |
$1,483.40 |
$1,656.30 |
| 40acres DAO |
$167.70 |
$938.28 |
$1,105.98 |
| Zuzalu Gitcoin Hype Squad |
$140.60 |
$980.84 |
$1,121.44 |
| Bob Jiang |
$129.80 |
$921.51 |
$1,051.31 |
| Jimi Cohen - Gitcoin Radio |
$120.00 |
$839.85 |
$959.85 |
| Jon Ruth - Discord and Telegram Superhero |
$116.20 |
$910.44 |
$1,026.64 |
| Carlos Melgar - Community Supportooooooor |
$94.24 |
$609.09 |
$703.33 |
| 🐙 Mars - Gitcoin citizen |
$88.46 |
$839.84 |
$928.30 |
Sybil Analysis:
While investigating the donations to this round, we found significant evidence that over 50% of round donors were airdrop farmers. Their pattern of onchain activity indicated they routinely engaged with the types of protocols and NFT mints that had a chance to bring them a future reward. This generated an interesting discussion and led us to more research into how airdrop farmers potentially influence the community signal.
We also found evidence that many of these donors were, in fact, bots. As a result, we built software that can identify bot-like behavior and flag it. Certain users who were flagged this way had their matching contributions silenced.
The #1 reason a user’s donations were not matched in this round is that they didn’t have a sufficiently high Gitcoin Passport score. This is promising because we do not want to engage in opaque, centralized decision-making that erodes the credible neutrality of Quadratic Funding. To external eyes we could simply be adjusting the donations to achieve whatever outcome we want. However, we think one glance at this round’s matching results will display that we have not done anything like this. In future citizens rounds, we plan to rely exclusively on Gitcoin Passport and hope to work with the team to apply the lessons from this round to improving sybil defense.
You can find the full sybil analysis for this round here. We consider these results final, but we of course welcome any and all feedback. We will be proceeding to pay out the matching funds asap.
Conclusion:
We’d like to thank Gitcoin for funding this effort, the MMM team for the support on communication strategy and content reviews, the PGF team for the support in using the Grant Round platform, and the Grants Stack team for their engagement, fixes, and continued platform development. Last but not least we would like to thank you, the Gitcoin Citizens for all you’ve done and continue to do, without you there would be no community. We can’t wait to hear and see what you’ll do next. From our side, we are consolidating our lessons learned to be posted shortly, and we are working on a series of experiments to run for the next Gitcoin Citizens round slated for later this fall.
Many thanks
