[PROPOSAL] Gitcoin Grants 2025 and Beyond: Funding What Matters Most in the Ethereum Ecosystem
In a time when the Ethereum ecosystem is maturing and coordination is becoming more complex, Gitcoin Grants is evolving to become a central, pluralistic infrastructure for allocating capital to what matters most in the Ethereum ecosystem. The goal: create a Schelling Point for solving ethereum’s biggest problems— by leveraging a pluralism of capital allocation mechanisms and builds from the Ethereum community.
TL;DR
- Gitcoin’s business unit, Grants Lab, (as well as its flagship product, Grants Stack) is sunsetting, and Gitcoin is returning to solely focus on its grants program, and will move to a brand new tech layer to implement it.
- We are relaunching the Gitcoin Grants program in 2025, with a renewed and further focus on Funding What Matters most in the Ethereum ecosystem.
- We will take all learnings that we gained from GG23 to inform GG24 within the new structure.
GG Strategy - Relaunched
Goal
Position Gitcoin Grants as the default destination for high-impact builders and funders in the Ethereum ecosystem. When people ask:
- “Where do I go to fund what the Ethereum ecosystem needs most?”
- “Where can I find support for my entire builder journey?”
The answer should be clear: Gitcoin Grants.
“Fund What Matters.” Where Ethereum funds its foundations and future.
For years, Gitcoin Grants has helped the Ethereum ecosystem fund what matters—open-source software, public goods, and the builders that make it all possible.
In 2025, we’re relaunching our most ambitious public goods funding infrastructure ever—designed by the community, for the community.
Building on our multi mechanism promise, we’re further exploring the design space with Futarchy, Grant Ships, and more. This is coordination at scale. GG23 was the testing ground. Now, Gitcoin Grants is back: More pluralistic. More powerful. More focused.
It’s time to continue funding what matters most in the Ethereum ecosystem.
How will we do this? 
​​Create a Robust Builder Lifecycle Model
Serve builders across their arc—not just with one-off grants.
If we want to keep the best builders in the ecosystem, Gitcoin should be seen not just as merely a quarterly funding round, but as the home for long-term builder success. This reality will not be immediate, but will take iterative processes and innovation to achieve long term success. We already began this in GG23 by supporting builders at every stage of growth.
Build mechanisms around graduation and re-investment — keep the builder flywheel turning.
Use Signal-Based Governance to Drive Coherence around Ethereum’s Biggest Problems
Don’t just guess what the ecosystem needs—prove it.
Too often, funding categories are top-down. What if Gitcoin became the most data-informed funding allocator in Ethereum?
- Use community polling + onchain data to prioritize categories for each round
- Community = token holders, leading experts within th ETH ecosystem, donors, grantees, round operators.
- Reward early signalers when categories perform well (impact-wise)
- Make all of this transparent and auditable
Let the ecosystem govern itself—not with opinions, but with incentives.
Radically Transparent Fund Impact Reporting
Show where every dollar went—and what happened because of it.
Funders want trust. Builders want recognition. Ethereum wants proof. Gitcoin can be the leader in impact legibility.
- Onchain impact dashboards for each round (who got what, what they did, how much it helped)
- Optional impact “receipts” per donor (e.g. “you helped fund 12 repos and 3 tools now used in 7 dapps”)
- An evolution of our Impact Attestations.
- Social shareables for funders and grantees
Structure
We have seen an iterate growth cycle in our structure since GG20, where we recentered on our original intents to focus on OSS. In GG21/GG22, we focused on community-led coordination through community rounds. In GG23 we launched the first multi mechanism program. GG24 will combine all of these elements and will lean in on community governance/domains. We will maintain the momentum built, and rather scale it over the next few rounds as we begin evolving and iterating the program.
Moving forward, our GG rounds will be built on categories of signal around what’s most important to fund in the Ethereum ecosystem at any given time.
How do we create the categories? With the community. We will create a robust and trustworthy framework where we aggregate the signal within the ETH ecosystem that outlines the most important problems to solve at any given time.
- Heat Map: The sensemaking framework of aggregating information and data from leaders in the industry and other signal providers.
More information will be released as we begin to build out this framework. - Governance: Instead of a centralized decision, we allow governance models to vote on which categories to fund through a token holder voting system.
- Gitcoin Grants: Round is run through categories
- Retrospective: We take stock and feedback.
- Iteration: We iterate and improve for the next round.
Our Approach
- Quadratic Funding is what the program was built on, and the future will allow us to evolve into various capital allocation models depending on the ecosystem’s needs.
- Retro Funding was introduced into GG in GG23, distributing funds across the Top 30 builders in the Gitcoin ecosystem. TBD if we will continue with this structure.
- [NEW] Futarchy may make an appearance in GG24.
- Grant Ships to continue being the central allocator for community-led rounds.
- Experiments through AI funding, streaming QF, Dedicated Domain Allocation, Deep Funding and more (where it makes sense).
We will use root-level treasury routing mechanisms Dedicated Domain Allocators to identify problem domains and fund them. These domains would be things that benefit all Ethereans - accelerating adoption, supporting app layer builders, fixing ux issues, etc.
Moving Away from Grants Stack
Gitcoin is winding down Grants Stack because maintaining it through the Grants Labs unit was no longer financially sustainable, and the organization is refocusing on its core Gitcoin Grants Program to ensure long-term impact and stability. It is of utmost importance that we prioritize continuity, data preservation and minimal user friction switching providers again. The below outlines the priorities and structure for moving away from Grants Stack:
- Data preservation and migration from Grants Stack
- Allowing providers within the ecosystem to propose and present their tech stack
- Moving the decision on which provider to choose through governance
GG24
In order to ensure a smooth tech layer transition, it is my proposal to run one large round later in the year, but activate our builders and community until then through public testing and building of our program. Think truly building and testing in public. How will this work?
- Run activations and contests where we’ll fund those building the tools that we need.
- Gauge community interest and engagement through the guilds structure.
Why:
- Engage the community in building the infrastructure the program will be run on
- Promote healthy competition to incentivize the best builders and solutions
- Build a bench of go-to builders in the community for future needs and builds
- Push decision making out in the open
- Assure that we will have a great product to run future Grants Rounds on
We would love to hear from you. Please drop your thoughts below! This outlines the overall strategy. I will follow up with a post that outlines the more tactical nature of many of these activations over the course of the next week.