Gitcoin Listening Tour: Learning From 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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Gitcoin Listening Tour: Learning From 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

Gitcoin has been through three major eras of experimentation. Each brought successes, but also challenges and failures. As we chart the path forward, I want to hear directly from the community about what to stop, start, and continue doing.

Why I’m Doing This

This tour isn’t about settling scores or pointing fingers. It’s about constructive input to make the 3.0 era a time of thriving. Gitcoin has always been an experiment in building better ways to fund what matters, and experiments require honest reflection. We need to look back with clear eyes so we can move forward with clarity and strength.

The Questions I’m Asking

  • What failed about Gitcoin 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?
  • What should we stop doing?
  • What should we start doing?
  • What should we continue doing?

The Process

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be attending twitter spaces, devconnect, other community gatherings, and discussing with builders, funders, and community members. Notes and takeaways will be anonymized and shared publicly so everyone can benefit from the collective wisdom.

How to Contribute

  • Submit thoughts asynchronously here.
  • If you see me in a shared social space, ff to pull me aside and lmk what you think.
  • Reach out directly if you want a private channel for feedback. DM me on telegram or @ me on twitter (i’m owocki in both places) and let me know
  • Respond to the post with a comment below.

The Goal

By gathering input across the community, we aim to co-create the foundation for Gitcoin’s next chapter. This is an opportunity to identify blind spots, celebrate what worked, and align around the most constructive way forward.

Gitcoin’s mission remains the same: to fund what matters. The listening tour is how we ensure that mission is carried out with integrity, effectiveness, and community trust.

Appendix - Eras of Gitcoin

Here’s a framing you can use when describing Gitcoin’s eras:

Gitcoin 1.0 (2017–2020): The Startup Era

  • A company building products to fund public goods (Gitcoin Grants, hackathons, bounties).
  • Centralized structure, Consensys-backed, fast-moving startup energy.
  • Big successes(in owockis opinion): pioneered quadratic funding, seeded early Ethereum projects. Hired Austin Griffith, spun out Kernel.
  • Challenges(in owockis opinion): centralized decision-making, unclear sustainability path, and reliance on funding from a few key players.

Gitcoin 2.0 (2021–2024): The DAO Experiment

  • GitcoinDAO launched with GTC token and community governance.
  • Attempt to decentralize decision-making across workstreams and stewards.
  • Big successes (in owockis opinion): empowered a global community, validated DAO-driven funding at scale (tens of millions in grants).
  • Challenges (in owockis opinion): diffusion of responsibility, governance capture risks, lack of clear accountability, and slower execution, not good at building great software or finding financial sustainability.

Gitcoin 3.0 (2025+): Protocolization

  • The 3.3 vision becomes the focus (more here)
  • Big successes: TBD
  • Challenges: TBD

In short:

  • 1.0 = centralized company launching experiments.
  • 2.0 = DAO era, decentralized governance, sometimes chaotic.
  • 3.0 = arena era, to be continued (more here)
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At the core, we should re-Architect the concept and re-introduce “forced” induction cataclysm as a chaotic intuitive insertion, where each process should be taken apart, as fractal pieces of the puzzle, and we should “bend” them toward incremental automated processes in view to offer a much better experience, intuitive curiosity, and maximum composition as a mix of end-consumer supporting tools.

With all the applications and features Gitcoin contributed to building the source, we should consolidate those in order to encapsulate and revitalize the core engine. This should not increase the cost of the operation, but might certainly ease and smooth everything up.

For example, we could use a range of specialized agents, where each can be an adaptive function as a modular microprocess;

  • Specialized field:

    1. Cartographer agent
    2. Mediator agent
    3. Validator agent
    4. Security agent (SOC)
    5. Processing agent (Multimodal, Muldi-codex agent, etc.)

(You could build the arena around those “swift” operators, where mechanism isn’t the key, but a global strategy used with variables and relative features)

XX. The re-introduction of the Kudos and quest, could also be a “game-changer”, user love to play and many use it as a cadence to reduce the rate, in order to simply relax, and I believe this could be a suitable inclusion in that meantime. And since I was very interested to do so, I could potentially help in that area.

This is a partial example where each agent has their own specialized field; this allows them to dramatically reduce the workload and computational power used to run such scheme, but exponentially augment the initial point of friction that must be resolved, which is the “usable” or tooling offer as a form of support. So each is a small LLM; instead of running a single unit, you can program or reprogram those with ease.

Think about disperseApp, where you decide whether or not to select a said grantee depending on if this aligns with your expected frameworks for a particular grant round; an LLM agent with a specialized field should only support the end-user-consumer with the amplification of an informed decision in addition to the currently available details.

Just about every process could be improved; if you need help, please let me know.

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