[PROPOSAL] Remove Ratification Requirement for Gitcoin Grants Round Results

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
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This proposal seeks to eliminate the need for a formal snapshot vote to ratify the results after each Gitcoin Grants round. By removing this governance step, we can streamline the process and distribute matching funds more quickly to grant recipients.

The ratification vote has served an important role in maintaining transparency and community approval for past funding rounds. However, as the Gitcoin Grants program continues to mature and refine its processes, this extra governance step has become redundant and unnecessarily delays payouts. We will still publish results but won’t have to formally request the funds from the Matching Pool in order to do so.

The Gitcoin team has shown a strong commitment to transparency and fairness in fund distribution. Our upgraded methodologies and tools, such as the cluster-matching quadratic funding mechanism (COCM) and Passport’s model-based detection system, have significantly enhanced our ability to allocate funds objectively and resist sybil attacks.

By removing ratification, we can realize the following benefits:

  • Faster payouts to grant recipients after each round concludes
  • Reduced overhead and operational strain on the Gitcoin team
  • Implicit trust in Gitcoin’s processes and methodologies

We will continue to publicly disclose all relevant data, methodologies and funding calculations for each round. The community retains the ability to scrutinize results and provide feedback through regular channels.

To recap:

  • No more snapshot votes will be held to ratify grant round results
  • Gitcoin will transparently communicate funding methodologies before each round as outlined in the GG19 post
  • Comprehensive results and allocation data will still be shared after each round
  • The community can raise any concerns through normal feedback channels (this forum, Discord)

This change takes effect immediately and will be applied to upcoming GG21.

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I am in support of this approach. It will help to greatly streamline the process of payouts and ultimately provide a better experience for our builders that participate in GG

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i think it’s ok to bypass the governance voting, but we are not having reports from the grantees, and it’s the only hard process that we can see before disburse the payments. How we can make a better experience for this, maybe ratification as the process is happening. I don’t see how we can manage this but could be great if we can track the results and see that we are not being exploited by bots or Sybylls.

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Digesting this now…

Reason to vote for this:

  1. It makes payouts faster + reduces operational complexity, resulting in a better grantee experience.

Reasons to not vote for this:

  1. continue to accrue debt in community oversight of rounds/legimacy that comes with it. Where does legitimacy come from if not from GTC?
  2. round ratification is one of the things Gitcoin, at the launch of the DAO, advertised that the GTC governance token could do utility wise. GTC governance token utility usage will suffer if we do this

But then again, debating with myself a bit here… Do we REALLY accrue debt here? DAO/round Governance was much more crude when GTC was launched in 2021. Maybe this is just a recognition that we were wrong + need to elove foward.

All in all, I think I’m leaning abstain but I’d vote yes if my arm was twisted*

*with the understanding that there is maybe debt being accrued here and/or an opportunity to improve in the future, which will need to be executed back later when Gitcoin pushes harder into decentralization (which I suspect will leverage a refactor into Grant Ships or Dedicated Domain Allocation or some other allocation strategy that is on the horizon that doesnt have the tradeoff of ux vs legitimacy)

3 Likes