The founding of Ethereum is famously chaotic, with many people claiming to be cofounders at various times of the project. Apparently there is not good documentation of who Vitalik offered this title to, and it has led to people trying to leverage the social capital of the title ‘cofounder of Ethereum’ in order to boost their own social capital illegitimately.
I am writing this post to proactively document the agreements I’ve made with people over the years with various parties about their ability to use the title ‘CoFounder of Gitcoin’. I hope this post will help those associated with Gitcoin to have clarity about who is a cofounder of Gitcoin and who is not, which will provide preventative clarity to the question.
Phase 0 - Pre-Consensys
When Gitcoin was being built in Summer 2017, I briefly partnered with Nathan Sobo to build Gitcoin. Nathan’s engagement only lasted for 2-3 weeks, and he signed over all rights to the project to me at that time. Nathan is great, and I really enjoyed working with him, but Nathan is not presently a cofounder of Gitcoin.
Phase 1 - Consensys
When Gitcoin joined Consensys, I offered the title of cofounder to the first 4 people that I hired in June 2018, on the terms that they worked full time at the project for 4 years full time.
Here is an email that was sent to all 4 of these people, to document this arrangement.
None of these 4 people ended up staying for 4 years at Gitcoin, and so per the terms laid out, they may not use the title Cofounder of Gitcoin any longer.
Phase 2 - Gitcoin Holdings
Around the time Gitcoin spun out of Consensys and became Gitcoin Holdings, I offered the title of “cofounder of Gitcoin” to Scott Moore and Kyle Weiss, on the same terms as the Phase 1 - that they stayed working at Gitcoin full time for 4 years from their start date.
As far as I know, both of these individuals are still working on GitcoinDAO full time, and per the terms that I offered, they are permitted to use the title as long as they remain full time employed as of 4 years from their start date.
Scott joined Gitcoin full time May 2018. 4 years from that is May 2022.
Kyle joined Gitcoin November 2020. 4 years from that is November 2024.
Phase 3 - Gitcoin DAO
As Gitcoin is now a DAO that is disaffiliated from supermodular.xyz, it is now up to the governance process to define how they gate the titles of people associated with the DAO, including the cofounder title.
Summary
TLDR
- There are many people who have made important contributions to Gitcoin over the years, but not all of them are cofounders of Gitcoin. These people may use the title “early contributor to Gitcoin” or “early team member of Gitcoin”. I would be supportive of a project to discover, specify, verify, and recognize those contributions so they are preserved and celebrated in posterity.
- As of August 2022, my interpretation of the above history & neutral reading of these agreements is that Kevin Owocki, Kyle Weiss, and Scott Moore are the current cofounders of Gitcoin.
- The DAO owns this now + I defer to DAO governance on the future history of this state.
I hope this post helps document the history here for posterity.