November CSDO Digest

[DisruptionJoe]

@Vega

We know from this thread that Giveth spends roughly 10x less monthly than Gitcoin, so it’s 10x less vulnerable to running out of runway due to a downturn.

It’s also much newer than Gitcoin, and hasn’t had the benefit of being blessed by Vitalik with blog posts on vitalik.ca.

(To add insult to injury, Giveth seems to be shipping protocols much faster than Gitcoin on way less budget.)

Right. I get all those arguments, but I don’t understand when you connect it to the token price because the opposite of the desired effect is happening. The market seems to think that all the shipping and lower production costs of Giveth aren’t worth it. I’d like to understand how you decide that our model for payment is wrong. (I agree that it is not optimal.)

Perhaps you are saying that the head start and early Vitalik endorsements are entirely responsible for Gitcoin having lost an order of magnitude less value on the market than Giveth?

I tend to think the macro-environment is driving all of it, but relative changes do matter. BTW. Per your last paragraph, this IS NOT JUSTIFICATION. It is attempting to understand logic with an inherent paradox.

@Vega

I think that this post covers a good success case:

@a33titude

GTC

In my opinion, the bull case for GTC basically boils down to:

1. Grants will be successful & have $billions/year in capital going through it.
2. Passport will be the foundation of a new sybil resistant economy in web3.
3. Governance rights to manage these systems will somehow become valuable.
4. GitcoinDAO will survive to get to that point.

The official purpose and essential intents are a good goal post as well.

I do highly agree with the Bull/Bear case post being great. Everyone should read it and we should move the continuation of the 2023 business plan there.

The essential intents are good, but even in the exercises we did to create them we didn’t follow the guidelines.

@DisruptionJoe

To me, none of these are very good as essential intent because they are not clear and achievable. They are too high-level. Here are my suggestions for how we can use these intents to clearly move Gitcoin toward sustainability.

I would slightly change the buckets

Bucket 1 - Launch and grow the components of a successful Grants 2 flagship protocol

A successful grants 2.0 protocol is each of the components having been launched with well documented SDKs and clear growth metrics. The components include the fixed and modular components.

Fixed components include the grants registry, the identity registry, and the round manager (pool registry). The round manager is where communities can choose their own “funding stack” of modular components.

Standards, protocols, modular design, and composability all benefit evolutionary systems because it limits the design space so new builders can experiment where the most impact is available. A funding stack includes the user and grant moderation (regulation), the funding mechanism, and the discoverability of grants on the Gitcoin UI (only because it will be the only one at launch). These spaces are what will create the most innovative solutions.

Here are my essential intents for this objective.

• Launch the grants registry, user registry, and pool registry (3 binary goals)
  • If these are completed it means we hit our base goal of shipping a flagship product (Could clear up the wording to indicate actual usage, but I don’t think semantics are the issue here)
• Identify and set growth targets for each to use during season 15 (ie. 10k Passport non-sybil passport holders, 5000 grants on registry, $50 million in pooled funds)
  • Clear growth goals to be assigned to workstreams for accountability
• Identify and set growth targets for 1 click funding stack permutations available (ie. 12 funding stack permutations)
  • The value proposition is that GTC will catalyze an increase in the accessible experimentation surface for any community to fund their shared needs. Growing this experimentation surface can be measured by permutations available on the Gitcoin UI for easy use by any community.

Bucket 2 - Improve the sustainability of Gitcoin

The sustainability of Gitcoin requires capital contributors to continue seeing the velocity of GTC lower and innovative solutions shipped. This means the communication from contributors to stewards who control funding decisions is delivered in an effective way and that the contributors efforts are substantial.

To do this Gitcoin must create a portfolio diversification thesis, a value capture thesis, and the roadmaps and tools to implement them. Diversification is simple actions and tools which can be handles by a delegated authority with oversight. Roadmaps and implementation are simply design and engineering.

Value capture is unexplained at this point. Here I will attempt to connect this to my long intro.

GTCs sole utility should be investing in workstreams, structured and unstructured, via Gitcoin governance. Gitcoin should use quadratic weighted staking to reward people for governance participation. The key is that the staked GTC would not only be eligible for voting to direct funding in GitcoinDAO, but it would also be used to participate in the governance of the components of the grants 2.0 protocol.

Each component of the funding stack could launch its own token for economic rights without governance (or with some portion) of the participation in governance.

For example, Gitcoin Passport would fuse with the sybil detection DAO concept and launch a token economy to incentivize the acceleration of network effects in its adoption. It could reward stamp providers used by reader apps based on how many uses the reader gets or by funds passed through it’s resistance algorithm. It could reward sybil hunters and data scientists in a model contest.

The grants and pool registries could do the same in their own way. Then Gitcoin could invest in the first solutions available for the composable components such as a decentralized grant review protocol or a revenue generating business consulting communities on using the protocol.

If this sounds familiar, it is the roadmap of ethereum ecosystem expansion. Gitcoin currently has a huge information asymmetry we can collectively take advantage of to bring sustainability.

We are building a city and have first dibs on ownership of the public utilities (decentralized grants eligibility reviews) and private businesses (UI generation and round consultation as a service). The best part is the monopolies are ethical because they are openly accessible through Gitcoin. Maybe we monopolize most solutions and SALSA tax their value into future rounds…

That said, here are my other essential intents:

• Have > 2 years of runway in stablecoins & runway time is INCREASING
  • An R(n) growth rate over 1 means sustainability
• Investments in Gitcoin built or used businesses & protocols > Gitcoin investments in non-gitcoin built or used businesses & protocols
  • Means we invest at least $100k in our own dogfooded solutions (ie workstreams become value capture factories)
• Improve steward satisfaction score from x to y
  • Implication of needed communication & process fixes around this role
• Improve contributor satisfaction score from a to b
  • Implication of needed improvements self scored by those in the role

In conclusion

My intention here is to share my personal perspective and influence others’ thinking. I don’t intend to prescribe what is correct or incorrect, but rather to share the perspective I hold.

I am HIGHLY aligned with the essential intents already proposed and would vote to ratify them to the DAO today.

As you can see here and even here, I’m pro-exploration of different and better models.

I’d love to connect if you have time. I really do appreciate you and other community members participating in the discussion. dm me and I can send a calendly link.