GTC Conviction Voting dApp => Network Utility

[owocki]

I wanted to share a dApp prototype that @austingriffith & two of the BuidlGuidl builders built (Viraz + 0xDarni).

This is a dApp that allows a user to stake GTC on Gitcoin Grants based on the Grant quality using Conviction Voting. From there, Gitcoin Grants 1.0 (or 2.0) could then adjust the sort algorithm of the grants based on what grants GTC holders think is most valuable.

Problems this dApp solves:

1. Allow GTC Holders to have governance utility with their GTC.
2. Provide fairer starting conditions to the Gitcoin Grants rounds, so it does not become a horse race (where ppl get more contributions => higher matching => repeat)

Check out the demo of this conviction voting dapp. It allows people to trustlessly stake GTC on their favorite grants, signaling their conviction about which grants are quality.

0xdarni.eth takes us through a conviction voting prototype

Roadmap from here

1. Audit the smart contracts
2. Deploy on Optimism L2
3. Simplify the UX
4. (If governance decides to) Adopt this data as part of the sorting algorithm on Gitcoin Grants.

Links:

1. Play with the demo yourself: https://gtc.v37.io/
2. Checkout the Github
3. Demo video
4. What is conviction voting?

This was built in 3 days!

What can we learn from this?

What I think is incredible about this prototype is that Austin + crew conceived + built this in 3 days!

They didnt hire any fancy consultants. They aren’t spending $200k-300k/mo on software development. This was just someone who cares about Gitcoin who chose to work backwards from an outcome + ship the software (and will probably be rewarded retroactively from Build Gulid/Gitcoin if/once this ships). It’s really inspiring to me!

What can we learn from this type of rapid prototyping? Can we sprinkle some of this culture in the Moonshot Collective + Gitcoin Product Group so that we can ship Grants 2.0 well before the overton window closes?

IMO its existential to solve our software dev velocity problems. We cannot continue to plow hundreds of thousands of dollars into software development that is neither fast, cheap, nor good. Questions about priorities are only existential when it takes us 2-6 months to ship any new module. If we could quickly ship slim MVPs it would be less of a zero sum “my priority vs yours” between leaders.

I am a strong advocate of focusing on minimum shippable increments. This GTC Conviction Voting dApp is a great emergent example of that.

Prompts

1. How can we get more rapid prototyping juju (build guild culture) into MSC/GPG? Daniele showed here that a steel thread for a small dApp takes 2-3 days if you have the right builder on a project/focused on outcomes.
2. Do we want to support this conviction voting app as part of grants 2.0 roadmap?

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clarification (added 2026-08-04): this post was exploratory thinking shared for community debate, not an offer or a promise. gtc is a governance token with no economic rights, as it has been since launch in may 2021. finances discussed on the gov forum are those of gitcoin’s organizational entities. utility here meant governance and product usefulness; no financial return was contemplated. dyor.

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Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

[DanieleSalatti]

Hello Gitcoin!

I’m 0xDarni, aka Daniele

If you want to play with the demo as @owocki suggested, first you need to mint some test-GTC on Rinkeby.

Looks like I cannot post links, so here is the contract address: 0x961D0F9a9519434DF0F950c191bE5010bcCe177b

Edit: I just got permissions to post links, so here’s the contract!

We created a simple ERC-20 just for this with a public mint method, etherscan on Rinkeby is all you need

[iSpeakNerd]

My first time minting from etherscan, thanks! Love using test networks to learn, why does no one teach how to use them??!?

[DanieleSalatti]

Just a note that we have redeployed a new version of the contracts!

We are iterating quickly right now, I will wait to post new contract addresses until they are closer to the final state

[griff]

I love CV (I have been helping to push it forward, and the first time the concept was explained was on Giveth’s blog )

but this is not CV.

But I do agree with Darni and Viraz’s approach! In fact, it’s very similar to GIVpower! (please don’t call it CV).

Funny I read this after shilling GIVpower in another forum post:

Roadmap to Network Utility ️

Giveth is doing something really interesting called “GIVpower” where people who lock GIV tokens can use their voting power to increase a project’s ranking on the platform… We will use several data streams to create a projects ranking and each project’s ranking effects the benefits we offer on the platform starting with the default sort on the platform and GIVbacks (and eventually GIVmatching and other cool things that we have waiting in the wings) This would create a little bit of demand and ut…

The hardest part is parameterizing it and communicating the impact of staking for longer to the user…

In summary tho, that’s why we came up with the idea of GIVpower… if you stake 100 GIV for 2 weeks… you get 100 GIVpower, if you stake for 8 weeks = 200 GIVpower, if you stake for 128 weeks = 800 GIVpower, 200 weeks = 1000 GIVpower (scaling quadratically of course)

Also, mStable had a similar approach and then THEY CHANGED IT!!! I interviewed them about why (1 day of research will save 6 months of testing in prod):

dGov Case Study: mStable ft. dimsome

Anyway, we have a bunch of designs and thoughts about how to do this… @0xDarni any interest in a sync? I just found you on Twitter and DM’d ;-D

[griff]

Also… if this does go out, I would give people who stake extra voting power on snapshot

[DanieleSalatti]

It’s more “inspired by CV” I’d say - but I have no idea how to call it

@griff

The hardest part is parameterizing it and communicating the impact of staking for longer to the user…

Very true, and these are the two major things missing right now. I have a couple of ideas to improve the UX and communication, but defining the parameters will be trickier - especially if we want to make it somewhat sybil resistant.

@griff

Anyway, we have a bunch of designs and thoughts about how to do this… @0xDarni any interest in a sync? I just found you on Twitter and DM’d ;-D

Absolutely! Would love to chat!

PS: 0xDarni was my old profile - from a time when I wanted to be pseudonymous - I deleted it to avoid confusion since I don’t need it anymore. I’m here now: https://gitcoin.co/danielesalatti

[DanieleSalatti]

Little update for those who are following this thread and want to play with the test version.

• The repository has been renamed. It is now here (the link from the OP will redirect anyway). Still temporary, but communicates a bit better what project the repo is about.
• The ERC-20 contract you need to mint some test tokens on Rinkeby is here.
• The app is still at gtc.v37.io.

This is a demo of the new UX that I sent to @owocki and @austingriffith, it’ll show you what to expect:

GTC Workstream Update

Any feedback (on UX, concept or anything else) is welcome
What did you find easy? What did you find hard or non obvious?

[owocki]

Looks really nice! Some notes:

• on the cart page it still says “Remember: you will not be able to unstake your tokens until the set time!” but IIRC there is no set time anymore.
• i agree that it would make sense to show the user how much voting power their GTC is worth.
• is it easy to write a python script to get the voting power per grant? if so id love to get a snippet of code that does this so i can automatically import these weight numbers into the cGrants DB on a regular interval.
• id love to know what other gitcoin product leaders (@kyle @lthrift @kevin.olsen ) want to see here to be comfortable using this dApp to create a user signal to rank grants.
• id love to know if we can cross-pollinate how you build with the GPG. you move so fast, maybe the GPG could learn something from you?

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Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

[DanieleSalatti]

@owocki

on the cart page it still says “Remember: you will not be able to unstake your tokens until the set time!” but IIRC there is no set time anymore.

Fixed!

@owocki

is it easy to write a python script to get the voting power per grant? if so id love to get a snippet of code that does this so i can automatically import these weight numbers into the cGrants DB on a regular interval.

I quickly changed the schema and mappings, and redeployed the subgraph so now we have an additional entity - which makes querying for that easier.

I’m outside and running out of battery, but this repo should be a good starting point to get to the data you want. It gets the first 100 grants and the related votes and releases, it’s missing the logic to actually calculate the voting power. I can get to that sometime this week

@owocki

id love to know if we can cross-pollinate how you build with the GPG. you move so fast, maybe the GPG could learn something from you?

Yes, I’d love to sync with you guys

[DanieleSalatti]

@owocki what kind of growth do we want the voting power to have over time: linear, exponential, logarithmic…? And how fast do we want it to grow?

Once we know that we can start showing it to the user and tweak the Python script to calculate it.

[DisruptionJoe]

I’d guess from @griff comments that exponential (quadratic) must be the best. Awesome to see this project moving forward FAST. I’d also advise changing the name from Conviction Voting to not confuse people.

[ZER8]

It’s great to see another dApp being build around conviction voting. Conviction voting brought me to web 3 in 2019 Thanks to 1Hive

From a Grants perspective this will be a very useful signaling tool for our community. Would be curious what can be build on top of it or in continuation

[owocki]

@DanieleSalatti

@owocki what kind of growth do we want the voting power to have over time: linear, exponential, logarithmic…? And how fast do we want it to grow?

i would like to defer to the experts (like @griff)

@DisruptionJoe

Awesome to see this project moving forward FAST

Yes, I agree. There is something to be learnt here about how to do software development in DAOs.

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Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

[DanieleSalatti]

@owocki

i would like to defer to the experts (like @griff)

I had a call with him a couple of days ago - it was really interesting, he gave me material to read and showed me this: Config 4 | Commons Dashboard

His suggestion (@griff correct me if I missed something) is to replace the spending limit percentage in that model with a fixed multiplier, and make it go from 0 to the max in a pretty long amount of time.

E.g. you can get max 50x after 6 months, so:

1. you stake 5 GTC on a grant - on day one your voting power is worth 0

2. over time your voting power grows, and after e.g. 15 days it is now worth the full 5 GTC

3. after 6 months it reaches 250 (50x) - and it stops growing

At that point if you leave your tokens in, your voting power stays at 250 for that grant. If you un-stake there’s a decay function so it doesn’t go to 0 immediately.

The multiplier and the duration we should decide.

I have another call with him next week. I’m on a trip in NY at the moment - back on Monday - but in the meantime I handed over a couple of optimisations in the subgraph model to @Viraz.

Voting power will be calculated off-chain, so we will deploy to Mainnet soon

[DanieleSalatti]

@DanieleSalatti

I’m on a trip in NY at the moment

I’m back

We deployed to Mainnet.

The next step is adding a visual indicator of the voting power to the dashboard.

[owocki]

@DanieleSalatti

We deployed to Mainnet.

is the final place for this tool mainnet or a L2?

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Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

[DanieleSalatti]

@owocki

is the final place for this tool mainnet or a L2?

Wherever it makes sense
Is the DAO planning on moving GTC to an L2, even partially?

If you ask me, then I’d say long term an L2. Short term we could do L2, it just requires some work on the UX.

The reason we went for Mainnet is that @austingriffith tried bridging to Optimism and it cost him 41 USD to transfer 1 GTC:

Presumably you’d have to transfer back to L1 if you want to use the tokens for something else.

On top of that right now the UX is not great - this thread explains what Austin had to do:

https://twitter.com/austingriffith/status/1522671054308610048?s=20&t=jrp1o2jiuc-GNBtv-ZtXjQ

Nothing that can’t be solved: we can quickly build a UI to let people bridge GTC to Optimism in a few clicks from the dApp, or we can use a different L2.

We can do anything

I think the decision in the end should be coming from you / the DAO. I am not aware of what the long term plans are for the token and L2 adoption.

[erich]

In what values do you ground these prescriptions for increasing voting power over time? Indeed, it seems pretty off to me to formally punish deliberation in the staking process as you prescribe.

Deliberation is key to plural forms of social organization!

[kevin.olsen]

Does the 250GTC max apply universally? If I’m a whale and I drop 250GTC is my voting power maxed out at 15 days or does it really grow to 12500 GTC in 6 months?