I was talking with a Gitcoin community member at Messari Mainnet last week, who had not realized that Vitalik Buterin wrote reviews of Gitcoin Grants Rounds 3-9.
Here they are:
- Gitcoin Grants Round 9: The Next Phase of Growth
- Gitcoin Grants Round 7 Retrospective
- Gitcoin Grants Round 6 Retrospective
- Gitcoin Grants Round 5 Retrospective
- Review of Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Round 4
- Review of Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Round 3
As you may know, Vitalik is both the founder of Ethereum and the author of the original Quadratic Funding paper. He is both the brainchild of the matching formula behind Gitcoin Grants + Gitcoin Grant’s first (and most influential) customer, so to me that meant his takes on Gitcoin Grants were extra important.
During this span of time, we entered into a theory/practice/results loop with Vitalik in which he would propose ideas, we would implement them. Then he would write about how those experiments went.
Experiments we ran:
- New Matching calculators in the UI
- Media Rounds
- Negative Voting
- a bunch of stuff around sybil ressitence
- pairwise matching
- L2 integrations
- Subscriptions
- Grant collections
- and plenty more, you can follow this thread to see the experiments in progress.
That loop of theory/practice/results with Vitalik has not been super tight as Vitalik has been focused on the Merge, and Gitcoin has been focused on figuring out it’s DAO/Grants2 future, but it’s always possible that loop may recur after Grants 2 launches. As a result, Vitalik has not written a Gitcoin Grants review since round 9.
Another development worth noting is that Vitalik is focused on a public goods funding ecosystem that is no longer just Gitcoin. There are multiple CLR/QF tools now, Optimism/Retroactive Public Goods Funding is happening, and there are other public goods funding projects that have legitimacy. The future of public goods funding is pluralistic. Perhaps future Vitalik reviews of Grants 2 will cover Grants 2’s modularity & interoperability with other pluralistic tools!
I am writing this post in order to highlight these to members of GitcoinDAO as part of a knowledge transfer. If you joined GitcoinDAO in 2021-2022, you likely were not a part of Gitcoin during the time in which Vitalik was deeply engaged. As grants 2 approaches product market fit in both Ethereum + NFT/DEFI/L2 ecosystems, perhaps there are some nuggets of wisdom in the above posts. Afterall, what works well in Ethereum + Vitalik champions might be a guiding light for will works in other ercosystems as Grants 2 grows both horizontally (to DEFI/NFT/L2s/alt-l1s) and vertically (deepens in Ethereum).
