Imagining Gitcoin 3.3 in wildly frontier decentralized architectures
Challenge to Gitcoin Core Architecture Technology Teams (initially Owocki + his fractional CTO), shared with Gitcoin community for sake of transparency.
Pre-read
Before you read this, make sure you familiarize yourself with Gitcoin 3.3
Context
Gitcoin 3.0 has re-established Gitcoin as a leading funder of Ethereums biggest problems. 3.1 and 3.2 are about tightening this and building revenue. 3.3 is about growth and scale.
Right now we are on a course and speed to explore the decentralization and progressive growth of GG rounds via standard web3 software architectures. We (myself and my fractional CTO) are expecting to deliver a technical architecture paper in November.
As we are delivering this technical architecture paper, I am prompting the question “what if we leapfrogged into 3.3 with new paradigms?”
Three frontiers I’ve been tracking:
- Intent-based systems (Anoma, SUAVE, others): moving from transactions → outcome declarations.
- Protocols for post-capitalist expression (ECSA, experimental DAOs): treating protocols not just as infrastructure, but as performances of new cultural/economic realities.
- Bittensor and decentralized AI markets: turning intelligence itself into an economic commons, coordinated and rewarded through open networks.
Gitcoin could explore the usage of all three.
Frame 1: Gitcoin 3.3 as an Intent-Based System
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What it means: Instead of rigid “domains” “rounds” or “applications,” funders and builders broadcast intents — “I want to support climate open source,” “I want to fund dev infra with $10k,” “I need $5k to experiment with zk-governance.”
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System’s role: Gitcoin becomes a solver network — aggregating, matching, and clearing intents across domains, optimizing allocations and creating new kinds of liquidity for public goods.
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Outcome: A fluid, always-on coordination layer where capital finds labor, talent, and needs in real-time — Gitcoin as the intent clearinghouse of Ethereum’s public goods economy.
Frame 2: Gitcoin 3.3 as a Performance Protocol
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What it means: Every funding round, quadratic match, or distribution ritual is not just mechanics, but performance. Protocols become expressive acts of solidarity, imagination, and culture.
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System’s role: Gitcoin curates stages, scripts, and rituals — protocols that let communities perform their values in visible, legible, and symbolic ways. Think quadratic funding (or other mechanisms) not just as a math formula, but as a community festival, an enactment of pluralism.
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Outcome: Gitcoin evolves into an aesthetic-economic institution — a place where capital allocation is theater, art, and ritual, re-encoding value beyond markets.
Frame 3: Gitcoin 3.3 as an Intelligence Network (Bittensor)
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What it means: Capital allocation increasingly depends on intelligence — evaluating projects, forecasting outcomes, and guiding decision-making. With Bittensor-like architectures, Gitcoin could tap into decentralized networks of AI agents or workers that continuously learn, rank, and evaluate the quality of funding applications.
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System’s role: Gitcoin integrates with or builds subnets specialized in round operation, impact measurement, and capital allocation. Validators and models compete to provide the best output, with token incentives rewarding high-quality intelligence.
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Outcome: Gitcoin becomes not only a funding platform but an intelligence amplifier for the ecosystem — a place where AI and human work co-create new forms of discernment and trust in capital allocation.
Challenge to Technology Team
Imagine Gitcoin 3.3 in these lenses:
- If Gitcoin were rebuilt tomorrow as an intent-based architecture, what would change about the protocol stack? The UX? The primitives?
- If Gitcoin treated every allocation as a performance, how would we redesign rituals, artifacts, and interfaces to express values (pluralism, solidarity, regeneration) in the act of funding itself?
- If Gitcoin integrated decentralized AI (Bittensor-style), what new forms of intelligence, evaluation, and coordination could emerge to strengthen public goods funding?
Appendix A - Performances
In the context of the Economic Space Agency (ECSA) and its work on protocols for post-capitalist expression, a performance is much more than just “production” in the conventional economic sense. Here are the key elements:
Definition
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A performance is the organization of a coherent set of actions across a network to achieve a stated goal that results in a network state change.
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It must be recognized by the network as a discrete series of events and as an offer of social worth — effectively, a proposal to create new value that the network can verify and account for.
Features of Performances
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New Forms of Participation
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Unlike capitalism’s single stream of value (profit), performances allow agents to design their own expressions of value creation.
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These can emphasize social meaning, shared risk, and affect — not just outputs for sale.
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Reciprocal Staking
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Agents don’t just invest money; they stake part of themselves in each other’s performances.
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This creates webs of interdependence and shared exposure to the future, building a network commons.
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New Modes of Valuing
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Performances are evaluated not by profitability but by how the network collectively recognizes their contribution to social value.
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Units of measurement emerge from this collective evaluation, turning performances into the foundation of postcapitalist accounting.
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Recognition & Risk
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For a performance to matter economically, it must be recognized — captured in a ledger as a new asset or claim.
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It is also a risk position on the future: the costs of staging a performance are justified only if they generate value beyond those costs (a surplus).
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Performances can be closed (with a defined script and end) or open (ongoing, aspirational, feeding into larger processes like commons-building).
In Short
A performance in ECSA’s terms = an expressive, risk-laden process of value creation, recognized by the network, where participants collectively define what counts as valuable.
It is simultaneously:
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An economic act (creation of surplus, staking, accounting),
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A social act (relation-building, meaning-making), and
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A performative act (a way of enacting new forms of postcapitalist life).
How is a performance different than production in capitalist frames?
In capitalism, production reduces value creation to a profit equation: inputs go in, outputs are sold, and surplus flows to capital. The social meaning of work and the relationships inside production are invisible, since only price and profitability count.
By contrast, in ECSA’s framing a performance is value creation as a social, expressive act. It emphasizes shared risk, meaning, and affect, with outputs recognized collectively through staking and network evaluation. Instead of extracting surplus for profit, performances enact new forms of value and commons, making the process itself part of the expression of postcapitalist life.
Appendix B: How Intent-Based Systems Work
Intent-based systems represent a shift from transaction-level instructions (“do this, in this way”) to outcome-level declarations (“this is what I want to achieve”). Instead of encoding the full path of execution, participants express intents—high-level goals or desired states. The system then coordinates how those intents are fulfilled.
Core Mechanics
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Expression of Intents
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Users, agents, or DAOs broadcast intents such as “fund open-source climate tools” or “swap ETH for stablecoins at the best rate.”
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Intents are abstract, not bound to a single venue, path, or counterparty.
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Aggregation & Matching
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Solvers, matchmakers, or coordination protocols collect intents and look for complementarities.
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Many-to-many matching allows, for example, a group of funders’ intents to intersect with a portfolio of builders’ intents, producing more efficient outcomes than bilateral transactions.
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Construction of Transactions
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Once matched, the system compiles the required transactions (across chains, protocols, or networks) to fulfill those intents.
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This often uses cryptographic proofs, settlement layers, and shared ledgers for verifiability.
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Execution & Settlement
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The final transactions are executed atomically, ensuring no participant bears counterparty risk.
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The network records the fulfillment, creating a verifiable history of which intents were realized.
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Why It Matters
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Flexibility: Intents allow expression of goals without being constrained by one market or protocol.
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Efficiency: Liquidity and coordination are optimized across domains, not siloed order books.
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Expressivity: Participants can embed preferences (ethical, social, environmental) into their intents, making allocation more reflective of collective values.
Example
In a traditional DEX, Alice must specify: “Swap 1 ETH for 3000 USDC on Uniswap.”
In an intent-based system, Alice simply states: “I want to maximize stablecoins for 1 ETH.” The network may fulfill this by routing across multiple venues, bundling with others’ trades, or even bartering with complementary intents.
In short: Intent-based systems transform economic coordination from rigid instructions into a declarative, expressive medium, where the system optimizes pathways to realize participants’ goals.
Got it — here’s a compact appendix-style explainer on Bittensor, written in the same style as the intent-based systems note:
Appendix C: How Bittensor Works
Bittensor is a decentralized, blockchain-based network designed to coordinate and reward the production of machine intelligence. Instead of relying on a centralized lab or company, it creates an open marketplace where AI models provide value to one another and are compensated through a native token, TAO.
Core Mechanics
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Subnets
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The network is divided into specialized subnets, each focused on a distinct task (e.g., language modeling, image recognition, data curation).
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Anyone can launch or join a subnet, making the system modular and extensible.
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Validators and Miners
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Miners provide outputs from their AI models (e.g., answers, embeddings, predictions).
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Validators evaluate those outputs, scoring them based on usefulness, quality, and alignment with the subnet’s objective.
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Incentive Layer
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TAO token issuance is distributed according to these validator scores.
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High-quality model contributions earn more TAO, creating a self-reinforcing incentive loop that drives participants to improve performance.
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Consensus & Security
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The network runs on a blockchain (built with Substrate), which handles consensus, staking, and token issuance.
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Participants stake TAO to join, aligning economic exposure with the quality of contributions.
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Why It Matters
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Open Market for Intelligence: Anyone can contribute or consume AI capacity, reducing dependence on centralized providers.
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Continuous Feedback: Models are ranked and rewarded in real time, encouraging fast iteration and collective intelligence growth.
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Scalability & Diversity: By splitting into subnets, the network can accommodate many different forms of machine learning while remaining interoperable.
Example
A subnet for language generation could include dozens of independent models. Validators query those models with prompts, compare answers, and assign scores. The best-performing models earn more TAO, while weaker ones earn less, creating constant evolutionary pressure toward better outputs.
In short: Bittensor is an economic protocol for AI, turning intelligence into a public, decentralized resource governed by market-like incentives rather than corporate silos.
Appendix D: Other 2025 era architectures worth exploring in future
1. Zero-Knowledge (zk) Architectures
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What it is: Cryptographic proofs that let participants verify correctness of computations without revealing inputs.
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Why it matters for Gitcoin:
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Private yet verifiable funding: Matching rounds or allocations could be transparent in outcome but shielded in donor identity, enabling privacy-preserving pluralism.
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Sybil resistance: zk-credentials (MACI, zk-KYC, proof-of-personhood) can strengthen trust while protecting anonymity.
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Programmable compliance: Funders could encode rules like “only fund developers in X region” or “exclude exchanges” without leaking sensitive data.
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2. Holochain / Agent-Centric Architectures
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What it is: A post-blockchain design where each agent maintains their own source chain and validation happens peer-to-peer. No global ledger; instead, a shared validation fabric.
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Why it matters for Gitcoin:
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Local-first public goods funding: Funding rounds could operate as bioregional or community-local ledgers, syncing only when cross-community collaboration is needed.
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Scalability: Removes the bottleneck of global consensus, allowing many parallel “Gitcoin-like” spaces to interoperate.
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Cultural fit: Aligns with Gitcoin’s ethos of pluralism and localism (EthBoulder ↔ EthAccra ↔ EthLisbon each having their own performance space).
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3. Data DAOs & Verifiable Data Commons
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What it is: Protocols where communities pool, govern, and monetize their data collectively.
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Why it matters for Gitcoin:
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Could enable impact measurement DAOs, where projects’ outcomes (carbon data, developer contributions, health metrics) feed into funding decisions.
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Bridges proof of impact with proof of funding, reducing fraud and strengthening legitimacy.
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4. Composable Identity / Reputation Systems
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Examples: Ceramic/IDX, ENS, EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service), Disco.
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Why it matters:
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Makes funding reputation portable and composable.
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Projects don’t just get “funded once” — their performance record builds a persistent identity in the ecosystem.
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5. Heterarchical Coordination Protocols
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What it is: Network-native architectures that coordinate across DAOs or subnets without hierarchy (think Inter-DAO protocols, Colony, DAOstack’s holographic consensus).
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Why it matters:
- Gitcoin could position itself as the interoperability layer of public goods DAOs, helping many small DAOs coordinate allocations together.
