I think that more utility for the governance token will come if/when product market fit is hit and network effects (thereby there is more surface area for utility to be applied) begin to surface.
Right now I think Gitcoin’s various products are between step 2 and 3. Not at step 4 yet. So maybe thats why you don’t see much utility yet @DistributedDoge .
That said, I personally cannot advise acquiring the token for speculative reasons (and never have).
That said, I DO think there is value to providing utility to loyal members of the Gitcoin ecosystem who want extra utility in the Gitcoin network’s tools + economy.
Some areas of extra utility I think Gitcoin COULD provide one day (though these use cases would have to pass a legal review + be approved by governance, its not up to me.), and how they might unlock as more GTC is staked.
- Grant Staking - Stake GTC to unlock premium features in Allo and Grants Stack (unlocks at 3m total staked)
- Collections - Stake GTC on a collection to get it featured, and to allow yourself to earn referral rewards from created reflink’d collections in Gitcoin Grants. (unlocks at 3m GTC)
- Stake GTC on diff grants to increase their rank in the UI (unlocks at 5m GTC)
- Stake GTC to unlock premium round design options (MACI, cluster mapping, allowlist features) (unlocks at 5m GTC)
- Stake GTC to use premium apps (checker, Fund Public Goods with AI, funding.social, quadratic yeeter and other things built in the Gitcoin ecosystem) (unlocks at 5m GTC)
- Deal flow generator - Stake GTC to view premium data feed about the hottest up and coming projects in the ecosystem. Many hot apps have been discovered on Gitcoin (Uniswap, Yearn, 1inch in the v1 days), this would be a premium way to discover this dealflow… (unlocks at 5m GTC)
- Stake GTC to unlock frontier capital allocation mechanisms (RetroPGF, Conviction Voting, Streaming QF)
- More Ideas from others - Not my ideas, but see also: GTC Value Accrual Intro from @James
- Incentivizing long term staking. The above app should not just linearlly reward people for staking GTC wherein x GTC = y unit of utility. Instead it should reward people for staking for longer, wherein x GTC * y weeks = (x*y) unit of utility
Here is a mock of what these use cases would look like on the GTC token center…
Open to feedback!