It's time for Gitcoin to get profitable

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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:seedling: Funding What Matters: Profitability & the Infinite Game

Hey Gitcoiners,

Gitcoin exists to fund what matters—to allocate resources to the builders, public goods, and regenerative projects that push the space forward. But to fulfill this mission at scale and over time, Gitcoin itself must be financially sustainable.

Profitability isn’t just a financial goal—it’s an enabler of impact. If we want to keep funding what matters indefinitely, we need a model that ensures Gitcoin generates more value than it spends.

:fire: What is Profitability?

At its core, profitability means Gitcoin has a sustainable financial engine. Our revenue streams (from protocol usage, grants programs, partnerships, etc.) must exceed our operational costs. More importantly, profitability means we don’t just survive—we thrive.

A sustainable Gitcoin means:
:white_check_mark: More funds for builders, open-source maintainers, and impact projects.
:white_check_mark: Less reliance on outside grants or treasury drawdowns.
:white_check_mark: The ability to fund public goods not just today, but 10+ years from now.

:dart: Why Does Profitability Matter for Gitcoin?

  1. Mission Alignment: Our goal isn’t just to sustain Gitcoin—it’s to sustain the builders and communities we serve. Profitability lets us fund what matters indefinitely.
  2. Infinite Game Thinking: A financially sustainable Gitcoin isn’t just reactive—it’s proactive. We can build, iterate, and refine our mechanisms over the long haul.
  3. Regenerative Economics: A thriving Gitcoin means more value flows back into the ecosystem, instead of being extracted or depleted.

:building_construction: Profitability Across Gitcoin’s Core Products

Gitcoin’s economic engine is powered by three main components:

:one: Allo.Capital

Monetization Model: Protocol Fees, Revenue, Fund

Allo Protocol is the backbone of Gitcoin’s grants infrastructure. Profitability here means ensuring sustainable revenue streams from protocol usage, integrations, and ecosystem adoption.

Allo Kit - is an enabler of other builders to build apps that fund what matters. There may be service revenue or app level fees that come out of it.

Allo Fund - it is a possible business unit we launch that allows us to participate in upside of the apps launched in/around Gitcoin/Allo.

:two: Gitcoin Grants (GG) Program

Monetization Model: Fee Revenue
The GG Program funds public goods using Gitcoin’s infrastructure. To be financially sustainable, we need to design models where the people administering these rounds can charge a fee to keep themselves afloat financially and where ecosystem partners contribute, funding is diversified, and long-term stability is prioritized.

:three: Grants Lab

Monetization Model: Attestations, Services Revenue, Retroactive Funding
Grants Lab is the primary software development unit of Gitcoin, empowering its ecosystem with new funding models and mechanisms.

It has a diversified revenue stream that includes mint attestations, services revenue, and retroactive funding. More on their annual budget request.

:rocket: The Path Forward

Zooming out - Gitcoin’s mission funding what matters. But if we don’t ensure our own financial sustainability, we won’t be around to fulfill that mission long-term.

Our next chapter must be about building a regenerative, impact-driven, and financially sound Gitcoin. When we’re profitable, we fund more builders, allocate more resources, and expand the frontier of what’s possible.

Here’s the brass tax: Gitcoin can become profitable. It’s already doing more than $1m/year in revenue. But it’s costs are too high for that level of revenue (closer to $4.5m/yr) It can either become profitable by cutting costs or growing revenue. 2025 is the year where we give growing revenue a shot. If that doesnt work, then 2026 will be a very tough year.

Let’s fund what matters—forever.

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@owocki can we see some of our future goals on Coinmarketcap, Coingecko etc please? Currently, those pages appear dated and out of vogue. It also says we are a fork of COMP and UNI, their marketcap-$470 million and $5.5 billion respectively. Gitcoin needs to have a fresh Outlook for sure. Everyone need to know that there is a pivot happening. Again - excited this conversation is even happening!!

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Might be a weird question - could we have a dex of our own like UNI under the Gitcoin umbrella-perhaps a Gitswap?Where a percentage % of profits from the swap be used for funding grants?

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I think this is a good idea; if any DAO member wants to compile copy to submit to coingecko and coinmarketcap, I’m happy to support.

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Where and how does GTC fit into this ambition?

I’ll be honest, this is also a selfish question. I’ve consistently kept 1/3 of my salary in GTC, because I believed and believe in Gitcoin’s future. This was at a time that the token value was between 6 and $20.

A way to increase the runway is also focusing enough on the value increase of GTC, is this no longer a point of focus?

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Where and how does GTC fit into this ambition?

Well, the revenue goes back to the treasury, and GTC has governance rights over the treasury. So it would follow that the revenue would increase the utility of the governance rights, at least to me.

Gitcoin Grants Lab owns GTC utility from here on out. More details here. I’m hoping theyll roll out a specific roadmap for GTC utility in the next quarter or two. An experiment in GG23 would be a good idea IMO.

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Allo.fund is an interesting idea to both make Gitcoin profitable & take worthy startups to the next level.

Is the concept to invest in projects in the allocation space from an existing treasury or raise from LPs? If the LPs are the way, there’s more than 1,000 family offices in this sheet which could potentially support that: Fund Your Purpose - Google Sheets

The track record ratio of grants allocated by Gitcoin to their resulting market cap is phenomenal overall, if investments went into the top grantees which also fit the thesis it would be even better.

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TBD. If you want to follow along as things develop, checkout the DAO Design Contest on research.allo.capital.

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Love to see it!

Especially love the idea that “Our revenue streams must exceed our operational costs.”, not just be net zero.

My main criticism is that the post doesn‘t even mention $GTC, which is imo an important part of the picture for these reasons:

  • Aligning the Gitcoin ecosystem
  • Making Gitcoin less prone to governance attacks
  • Raising morale by making long term believers whole
  • Increases of treasury, free marketing & other things that come with having a token with good price action

More thoughts outlined in the Regenerating $GTC post

I think it would also be worth looking into how Gitcoin is spending those $4.5m/yr & try to get that lower instead of just increasing the $1m/yr of revenue. Seems like a lot for whats happening tbh.

As has been general practice and demonstrated by Marc of Aave as well, first comes cost-cutting, then revenue growth. Maybe they can be done concurrently, but the high spend def shouldn‘t just fly under the radar.

Tl;dr I love the post, but also have decently sized concerns:

  • No mention of GTC
  • Glazing over current burn rate
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I agree!

Copying a convo that happened 2 comments down about how this connects to GTC

Its also worth noting also

  1. that there is a new GTC utility experiment going live in GG23.
  2. GTC’s utility has recently been articulated as extended by it’s subdaos

Happy to learn more about what Marc of AAVE did… got a TLDR?

FYI Gitcoin’s spend has been cut by 2/3 (from $1.2m/mo a couple years ago down to about ~$400k/mo right now). I’d defer to GL lead @meglister as to whether any more spend optimizations are feasible/necessary. Whats the most feasible way to get profitable? (1) Cut costs or (2) keep costs constant and accelerate into increased revenue? It seems that the path were on now is primarily the latter.

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Thanks @owocki ! @peth re burn rate, we review this monthly and post on the forum. You can find the most recent here: Gitcoin Monthly Meeting - March 2025

We are pulling GL burn down to ~250k/mo after completing contracts in March, as noted in the deck. I think we have some more room to cut but anything material (more than 10-15k/mo) will start impacting our ability to deliver roadmap/serve customers. We are full steam ahead on revenue with 260k YTD and hoping to hit 450-500k in Q1. We are also rolling out a GTC experiment in GG23 as noted above.

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@owocki Gm gm !! hope all is well. Just a quick question, If I have a bright idea for a possible collab with Gitcoin and a project that I am building ( a profit sharing idea with Gitcoin ). Where can I propose that ? Perhaps a general discussion regarding eligibility or vibe check on office hour chat before I can bring it to public discussion. Some guidance would be much appreciated.

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just post it here on the gov forum. you can use the GCP template

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Still waiting to see something tangible out of all these discussions on $GTC last couple of months. The engagement here has also been absymal and all remaining conversation revolves around Allo. The price of $GTC has only gone from bad to worse. Altruism is great but here the backers and believers are getting haemorrhages.Why is this so hard to achieve? In terms of real use case- GITCOIN is the pioneer but a financial disaster for people who love the project. Can’t this altruism be scaled up by becoming a multi billion $ company?

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I think this is tangible.

I think ~$1m in revenue in 2024 is tangible.

If you’re not getting engagement on your posts, perhaps it is because showing up and just demanding that number go up doesnt achieve anything.

Your sense of expectation that OTHERS should be doing more; where does it come from? Were you promised something that wasnt delivered? Or is it just an expectation, but not an agreement?

From expectations vs agreements:

  • Expectations are often unspoken, while agreements are usually explicit. When we have expectations, we don’t always communicate them to the other person and are often what we think someone should do or be. This can lead to misunderstandings and disappointment. Agreements, on the other hand, are made explicit. This means that both parties know what is expected of them and can hold each other accountable.
  • Expectations can be unrealistic, often based on our hopes and dreams and set too high. While agreements are more realistic - based on what is possible and achievable and on what both parties are willing to do (boundaries anyone?!)
  • When we have expectations, they can be one-sided and we often focus on what we want from the other person. This can lead to resentment and anger. Agreements, on the other hand, are usually mutual. This means that both parties are making promises and commitments to each other.

IMO We need to turn more of these expectations into agreements…

To do that, we need more gov proposals that create agreements about resources, their uses, and how that impacts GTC. Doing the work is weaving the path forward, making intros to help, listening and reading and understanding,and providing feedback… This is doing the work of turning around the DAO.

Just driveby posting demanding that number go up IS NOT doing the work.

Here are some posts you could engage with if you want to move from expectations to agreements and get answers to your questions.

I want Gitcoin to be successful too. Thats why you see me engaging on these posts (and prettymuch every post on Gitcoin’s path to success here 2021-2025, with the exception of my formal 15-month disaffiliation w the project around 2023).

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Thanks Kevin even though all wasn’t pleasant lol. From your perspective it hurts when someone is critical about Gitcoin but from my angle it breaks my heart when $GTC as a token has been massacred. Nothing is binding I know, but lot of us bought into $GTC thinking it will eventually have some benifits for investors too which never happened. I hope this cycle there is a turnaround.

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Actually, it hurted the most to me when people were lauding praise on Gitcoin in 2022-ish, but it was the DAO was spending $1.1m/mo and not really shipping product that had product market fit… and the bear was coming… and I was on the outside not able to help or do anything because I had disaffiliated to promote decentralization. Complete heartbreaker! I had a pit in my stomach a lot of the time back then.

Today, I am one of the most critical of Gitcoin, because I want it to be better always. I want it to be protopian, eg getting better every epoch (quarter, month, week)…

Appreciate you showing up and caring! I dont mind you being critical of Gitcoin. Because you seem to want to maximize Gitcoin’s value, I’m trying to guide you to constructive criticism. Constructive = value creation.

I’m not sure at what cost you acquired your GTC at, and what your investment thesis was at that point… but…

This is not financial advise, DYOR, dont make any financial decisions based on this … But I actually think that the market has converged on a valuation close to what a fair expected value for Gitcoin is, recently. EG the FDV of Gitcoin is about $35million and the SubDAO economics (according to the math below) show a valuation within the same order of magnitude. Whats funny about 2025 is that the Gitcoin treasury has never been worse, but the actually business has arguably never been better! From GTC SubDAO Tokenomics:

Can that be increased? Yes. (Play with the numbers in the spreadsheet to see how.)
Can we promise that? No.
Can the broader Gitcoin ecosystem work towards it? Yes.

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Appreciate your undying patience mate! Answer to your question - I bought it at $20+ levels right up to its Ath whatever that was under $30. In short a nearly -100X reversal.It happens with Degen shit coins but one wonders why it happened to this project of repute?I never sold any of them because I still truly believe in Gitcoin. It is unreal how it impacts lives with so many giant projects born out of its womb and there are many more in the waiting.Since we are on on all tier1 CEXs could we allocate some budget for Market makers? Again I am not trying to get others to work by not making a DAO proposal - I am old school and my tech skills are genuinely horrible. Current sentiment for GTC from 6800 votes attached

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@Recce How about you take active role in the community ser ? And drive the agenda. You can propose changes that you would like to see to increase the value propositions of the eco-system. Get involved. I have been part of few DAOs. You would not believe the amount of work gets contributed by members. Gitcoin is not a business in my opinion, it’s a community of builders and believers. It is home for many and we are here to work towards to make it. Token value will increase in time. I can tell you that the community leaders already have taken steps to ensure things are moving towards right direction.

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Also comparing Gitcoin with Degen Shitcoin is just Disrespectful . GTC is not a Pump and Dump shitcoin.