Hi all,
I’ve been doing some goalsetting work at the start of the year, and part of that has been envisioning a possible target state for Moonshot Collective. I’m sharing this work in order to articulate a north star + stimulate discussion ahead of the 1/10/2022 Moonshot Collective monthly call.
This post assumes that you’re already familiar with the moonshot colletive. If you’re not, watch this presentation or this post first.
Moonshot Collective Target State: An Innovation Machine
Exhibit A: An Innovation Machine
Where we want to go
Here is a vision of what things could look like in 2025:
NOTE: This section of the post is written as though it was written in 2025 looking backwards to give the reader a more visceral feeling of how things might unfold.
Moonshot Collective’s flagship tool The Coordination Party Kit :
- Is our secret weapon. We use it to recruit, reward, retain talented developers, designers, and other web3 talent better than any other DAO.
- Because of GitcoinDAO’s competitive advantages (access to web3 native capital, coordination, culture, talent), we have reached a critical mass of talented people dogfooding important DAO era tooling.
- Because “What talented developers work on in their free time is a leading indicator of what everyone else will be working on in a few years”, it has turned out that GitcoinDAO/Moonshot Collective is churning out software that changes the way people think about the (1) the internet of jobs & (b) public goods.
- As word got out about The Coordination Party Kit , we’ve found that it began getting adoption outside of GitcoinDAO. These tools are now used by 100s of DAOs across the ecosystem, distributing over $100k/mo in rewards to contributors.
In addition to Coordination Party Kit, Moonshot Collective has
- released a decentralized Proof of Personhood Passport, enabling many other dApps to create sybil resistence out of the box.
- forked dGrants and enabled 10s of new innovations on top of dGrants, helping to enable dGrants to do for Quadratic Funding what wordpress did for blogging (QF makes it really easy to build a campaign, customize it, and execute it!, wordpress made it really easy to launch + customize a blog, and become a blogger.)
- enabled other innovations that we didnt see coming in 2022.
Even A-list community members are taking notice.
- In March 2020, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said Gitcoin Grants “is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem”. (note: this has already happened)
- (note: this has not happened, its just an articulation that something that COULD happen) In December 2022, he said “With (1) GitcoinDAO being a primary hub for developers in the ecosystem (2) Gitcoin Grants hitting $100mm/year GMV, (3) & all sorts of interesting DAO-native coordination gadgets gaining adoption, many of which originated at GitcoinDAO – we now truly see Gitcoin’s second act”.
- (note: this has not happened, its just an articulation that something that COULD happen). In April 2025, he said “Now that the market cap of the top 500 DAOs in the world has surpassed those of the top 500 companies in the Fortune 500, it’s been neat to see GitcoinDAO develop into the GSuite of DAOs. The more coordination the better IMHO.”
Caveat empotor: We shouldnt actually optimize for Vitaliks opinion. Vitalik is just one human being, and theres already too much hero worship of him in the ecosystem. The above example is just one illustration of how this could unfold. We should really aim for an intersubjective consensus among prominent leaders in the space, not Vitaliks opinion.
Caveat empotor: product roadmap subject to change! Coordination Party Kit, Decentralized Proof of Personhood, and dGrants all seem promising now, but as we do more discovery of the problem space, the roadmap could change (but either way we are building an innovation machine, a machine that builds products)
Traction as of January 2022
Before the Moonshot Collective even launched in July 2021, there was a track record of YOLO innovation happening in/around GitcoinDAO. For example:
- Fundoss - a QF application for web2 that successfully raised $95k for web2 oss. (2021)
- Quadratic Trust - a tool for curating social media with Quadratic Funding (2021)
- Building the Gitcoin Swag Store into the hippest place to rep your love for public goods, Gitcoin, and Ethereum. (2021)
- Downtown stimulus - a QF application that successfully raised $45k for Boulder COVId relief. (2020)
- WTFisQF - an easy QF calculator/explainer. (2020)
- QuadraticVote.co - an easy tool for hosting Quadratic Votes. (2020)
- Hosting Sustainweb3 - a one day conference about OSS sustainability. (2020)
- the launch of Gitcoin Labs and the Burner Wallet, with my friend Austin Griffith (2019)
- Various experiments & products launched on Gitcoin.co including small experiments like Gitcoin Quests, Gitcoin Kudos, the Quadratic Lands, an avatar builder, a quadratic funding social network, and other tools that later evolved into being flagships like Gitcoin Hackathons or Gitcoin Grants. (over the years)
- a handful of other tools that recorded here and here (over the years)
In many ways these initiatives were the seeds that showed there was heat here, and caused us to formalize a rapid prototyping workstream.
Once the Moonshot Collective launched, it’s first big success was Moonshot Bots (raised $3mm for public goods), GreatestLARP (raised $500k for public goods) , and their first product suite is The Coordination Party Kit.
Zooming out.
But Moonshot Collective (and innovation at GitcoinDAO more generally) is not just about one launch, or any subset of launches. Moonshot Collective is a Web3 Innovation Machine.
Our Niche
Every Quarter, we ship new products that solve DAO-era problems. Some of our products fall into these categories:
- DAO-Era Coordination & Resource Allocation
- DAO Ecosystem building.
- Internet of Jobs
- Public Goods Funding
- Regenerative Cryptoeconomics
Our Strengths
The Moonshot Collective is proficient at:
- Generating & validating hypotheses.
- Quickly & effectively testing hypotheses.
- Learning from our experiments.
- Shutting down the stinkers OR doubling down on the winners.
- Productionizing the winners.
- Capitalizing on the winners
- Knowing how to leverage our unique competitive advantages.
- We are beloved in the DAO Space.
- We have a massive network of influence via GitcoinDAO.
- We have an unfair advantage in our access to (and proficiency with) Scaffold ETH
- We have an unfair advantage in our ability to recruit web3 talent via GitcoinDAO.
- We can cross-sell our tools to existing customers.
- We are early innovators for the internet of jobs/public goods (a narrative that is just starting to catch up to its importance).
Our Composition
The moonshot collective is comprised of layers of contributors. The further in the center the more long-term time horizons for these contributors are.
- Leads (presently Kevin + Austin, but could be decentralized) - 6 month time horizon
- Coordinators (PMs and senior contributors) - 3 month time horizon
- Individual Contributors (Developers, Designers) - 1 week - 1 month time horizon.
Over time, we plan to decentralize the leadership of the MC by allowing permissionless “promotion” between these layers.
The Machine that builds the machine
If any product we launch is a machine, then moonshot collective is an innovation machine that builds the machine. Moreso than any one product, this is our true target state.
I would like for this machine that builds the machine to
- be an innovation machine (eg proficient at the strengths listed above).
- be progressively decentralized away from myself/Austin.
- be a great first starting place for developers entering web3.
- be a place that developers/designers/creators choose to stay contributors & members of, even as their horizons expand and they get other opportunities.
- be a positive force for the world.
Feedback welcome
This is just one attempt at a north star for the MC. While it has informed some of the investments we’ve made in Moonshot so far (bringing on Brent + Laura to do Product Management, emu to do Project Management, etc), it is not final - it is the start of a conversation. I’d welcome other opinions of where we should be going.
See you on Mondays MC call!