Monthly updates:
- [June 2026] Techne Update - Funding What Matters in the Age of AI
- [July 2026] Techne Update - The First-Principles Theory of Change
- [August 2026] Gitcoin Transition Stewards Q&A 1-2
- [September 2026] Gitcoin Transition Stewards Q&A 3-4
- [October 2026] Techne Update - Techne Gets a Name, a Pilot, and a Launch Date
techne gets a name, a pilot, and a launch date
tldr
- the work we’ve been calling the gitcoin reboot now has a name: techne. the product is the techne, the movement is techne, and the job is helping people renegotiate their relationship with technology.
- our first pilot, beacon, is in the app store and ran its first in-person test. the sample is tiny and we’re treating it that way.
- we cut the bet list down. the sdk moves to 2027, and qf folds into our second pilot (local money) instead of standing alone as a platform.
- dao housekeeping moved too: the governor upgrade went onchain, trust graph v1 shipped, and the allo.capital wind-down is in its final wires.
- launch is targeted for mid-december. the legal work is the thing most likely to make us late.
why a new name
gitcoin funded open source for 8 years, and qf was our best answer to “how do we pay for things markets won’t.” the question in front of us now is bigger than open source. ai is pulling time, money and attention away from the places people actually live, and a lot of people are scared about what it does to their work.
techne (greek for craft, the knowledge of making) is the name for that wider job. we picked a visual direction in early september and the wordmark landed last week.
a few things about how techne relates to gitcoin:
- techne gets its own accounts, email, and brand, built fresh alongside gitcoin’s.
- the dao and gtc keep doing what they do.
- gitcoin has 9 years of trust and relationships behind it, and i’d be silly to pretend techne isn’t built on them.
- i’m also going to stop explaining techne mostly through gitcoin, because the new audience has never heard of quadratic funding and doesn’t need to.
the pilots
the bet we care most about is whether software can move people from online to offline, toward their neighbors and whatever’s happening down the street. every pilot is a test of whether it shifts time, money, or attention back into a real community.
beacon (local events). an events and discovery app. it ended sprint 4 with an app-store release. on sept 26 we hosted the first beacon party, and 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in genuinely bad weather. we have 8 engaged beta testers and 5 reported new connections out of it.
that’s a promising afternoon, and it’s too small to support a conclusion. the next city test is oct 2, with another being scoped after that. we’re also drafting before/after baselines (hours spent with other people, dollars spent at local shops) so the next readout has numbers worth arguing about.
one thing that didn’t work: our early survey. around 300 cold emails produced almost nothing usable, and we got 20 completed surveys. lesson learned, we’ll recruit through communities we’re already in.
a small infra win: we built an adapter that pulls a city’s public event calendars into at protocol, so beacon (and anyone else) can read them.
buoy (local money). pilot 2, targeting november. this is where quadratic funding lives now. qf works best when the community is small enough that people actually know the projects, and that’s what local means.
what we cut
in july i listed 4 product bets. two of them are getting smaller:
- sdk / local-agi tooling moves to 2027. we don’t have the people to do it well this year, so it waits until we can staff it properly.
- the qf / funding platform stops being its own bet and becomes a feature of buoy.
the zine, podcast and membership track stays. the plan is a print-pdf zine (5 to 15 pieces, with original art) around december or january, a six-week membership cohort taught with a socratic education startup, and a narrative podcast with a first episode in december.
storytelling
the content strategy moved this month from “localism” to “renegotiating our relationship with technology,” with localism as one chapter inside it. the national storytelling pod is running three content experiments: a hero video for a landing page, a set of positive-deviance case studies (communities that already pulled this off), and before/after videos following beacon users.
we’re also working on a mission statement. the current draft is “an internet ecology that distributes power, prosperity, and agency,” and we’re testing whether “technology” beats “internet” there. it isn’t ratified yet.
fundraising
we brought on a head of fundraising. the 6-month goal is to prove techne can be funded at scale: legal foundations in place, a real prospect pipeline, and case studies from the pilots to show people.
the planned structure is a 501(c)(3), framed around community wellbeing and education with software as the method, possibly with a for-profit subsidiary and an interim us entity while that application is pending. gitcoin may make a founding contribution, but it won’t be part of the 501(c)(3) application.
dao housekeeping
- governor upgrade. the temp check passed, i put the proposal onchain on sept 23, and scopelift’s simulation of the full upgrade passed. voting closes today, oct 1. [UPDATE WITH RESULT BEFORE POSTING] if it executes, the security council can return the funds it’s holding as treasury delegate to the timelock.
- trust graph v1 went live at trustgraphs.xyz on sept 15. shadow mode starts in october, so we can watch how it would have scored real decisions before anyone relies on it.
- q3 budget report is due at month-end.
what’s next (october)
- the next beacon city test (oct 2), and another after that
- a one-month version of buoy scoped and ready to build
- the landing page goes up
- steward call oct 14
- gitcoin foundation board meeting oct 28
- podcast producer locked, zine table of contents drafted, first parnassus seminar
opening the floor
- which of your communities would you want beacon or buoy tested in? we want towns where someone local will vouch for us.
- for the buoy qf rounds, what did gitcoin’s grants rounds teach you that we should copy, or never repeat?
as always, if you want to help steer this, delegate and ask questions on the gov forum.
owocki
Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.
Juri hier from Halveth. Tell me more about why GTC still since 2020 -99%? But its has good ideas even wider than btc…