Hey @thedevanshmehta thanks for your perspective! Responded on twitter and figured I’d do so here in a few more characters…
First of all, I still see equal creation of funding opportunities for web3 community and education projects. The community round structure is intended to create those. In fact, you could run for a governorship position and advocate to set the criteria for funding to only web3 community and education based projects!
I think you and @owocki make a good points about not wanting to hurt product growth, which is obviously super important. We’ve made a commitment (regardless of whether this goes through) to report on the impact of any changes to the program and will certainly recommend adjustments if it seems like growth is negatively impacted.
Zooming out on the purpose of the Gitcoin Grants program – we’re stewards of this fund and want to deploy it in a way that is 1 aligned with the community desires and 2 benefits the growth of the ethereum ecosystem. We see it as a key source of “cradle stage” funding for ethereum projects. Right now I’m hearing from grants managers in other ecosystems (typically funding more mature/unicorn projects) that they have healthy pipelines of community projects, but a lack of OSS projects and dApp builders. Given that, it feels like the Gitcoin Grants program can have the highest impact on the ethereum ecosystem this year by funding those OSS projects & filling that pipeline.