I strongly support this approach and consideration. We must view our budget natively with GTC
I very much agree with having some parameters on DAO-wide budget â but will also add that todayâs stewards call reinforced for me that we need to get bigger picture thinking on financial sustainability than just âwhat is our budgetâ.
To me, the existential question of âhow does Gitcoin live on in perpetuity?â is still very much outstanding.
The token price â the DAOâs lone source of funding, beyond its small pool of stables â has gone down by >75% this year, and we are only just entering a bear market in which itâs not unfathomable to imagine that Governance Tokens, as a construct, could become all but obliterated.
Some thoughts:
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There is no precedent for any company, let alone a DAO, to live off appreciation of its perceived value while having no plan to bring in meaningful revenue. My impression is that the future ability to live off token utility & resulting demand alone is the default assumption DAO folks are working under when it comes to Gitcoinâs future. I think we need to get real here â while itâs certainly possible, itâs a monumental & unprecedented feat, but is being taken as a given. What would need to be true for the utility ideas @kyle lays out here to play out, and what does the timeline look like? What are the risks? If the token drops by another 75%, what is the plan?
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Alternatively, is Gitcoin a public good and should Gitcoin itself be receiving grant funding (e.g., from corporations, from governments even) to cover its operating expenses?
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Alternatively yet, is there any viable path to Gitcoin making sufficient revenue to cover its opex (or even a portion of its opex) and not needing to pull from the treasury so much?
To me, these are the types of questions we need to be boldly & confidently declaring a unified view on as Stewards & Workstream Leads. Not having a clear plan here is the biggest thing that keeps me up at night regarding Gitcoinâs future.
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GTC holder Gitcoin user and tech employee here
To me, the problem is not the $1 million dollars a month/mo spend, a budget, its that GTC holders donât really see much from the spend.
Iâve been following the project since DAO launch. For $3 million per quarter, the community gets a clunky round on the old Grant platform that almost works. Forward progress has not been visible. The protocols have been incubating for 18 months since DAO launch and are supposedly starting to launch soon but who knows how long until they hit product market fit, thereâs no real updates on GTC utility either. In the gov forum, there does not seem to be a recognition of the sense of urgency that the bear market has created! And dApps like GIVETH are showing much more can be done on much less.
There is a common saying in tech product management that you can have product done high speed, high scope, or high quality (choose 2 of 3).
So you can have
- high speed, high scope, but not high quality
- high quality, high speed, but not high scope
- high scope, high quality, but not high speed
I really hope that when the protocols launch it turns out Gitcoinâs product development is high quality, because I dont think it has been high speed. I also dont think itâs much more high scope than dApps like Giveth [it was noted above that Giveth has shipped 6 products, maybe Giveth is higher scope].
We wonât know until the product hits product market fit or not though.
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IMHO yes. This is not incompatible with Gitcoin providing services/value to tokenholders. Indeed itâs not unusual at all for nonprofits to have revenue from both donations and sales.
Also support investigating this. âRevenueâ is a more specific and clear-minded way to approach âutilityâ IMHO. In fact, one could argue that they are equivalent, i.e. asking people to hold a token to access âutilityâ is equivalent to asking for payment (revenue) to access said utility.
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Yes, I tried to make this point above. Youâve made it more clear IMO. There is enormous pressure to deliver a protocol & passport with proven product market fit ASAP.
So far the signs are good, with rounds launching from Unicef, Fantom, and now Optimism.
And Passport is being rapidly adopted and extended by the community into use cases such as gating communities and more.
That said, the fundamental problem that we are basing our runway at Gitcoin on GTC remains. Even IF we are successfully performing a forward flip on a highwire - itâs not clear whether we will be sustainable.
With that in mind, a few approaches are ongoing that we could perhaps help to boost:
- Budget improvements. As discussed on this weekâs steward call, DAO Ops is working on revising Gitcoin budgeting. As I am also suggesting directly to them, perhaps every workstream should do zero based budgeting as an exercise. Also up for discussion is whether to denominate all budgets in GTC and then insist on paying people in GTC, thereby tying everyone more directly to GTC success. I think @griff for eg is especially credible on this and related subjects (see above). For the zero based budget scenario I think workstreams would be compelled to look at more high leverage approaches like the way Giveth spun out GeneralMagic for eg and relying on external communities. This exercise might also encourage each workstream to look more immediately at revenues.
- Discussions about GTC utility. These discussions are also ongoing however somewhat behind the scenes. Perhaps they need to be more front and center at least in steward conversations. Put the stewards to work to think them through, solicit feedback from the broader community and so on? Again, if we request zero based budgeting it might escalate the importance of revenue generation / utility creation as well. Some of the interesting ideas Iâve heard discussed for eg could see GTC play a role in helping to protect and market grants rounds - via staking. I do think discussing revenues vs. GTC utility itself could be useful as well.
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