Hey everyone — a cross-functional group met on 5/20 to brainstorm ways to increase the utility of GTC and we wanted to share notes from our discussion back here. We kicked off the session by each sharing why we thought there was value in GTC having utility. Key themes that emerged from that part were:
- Creating a virtuous cycle for the DAO
- Providing legitimacy / longevity / viability for the DAO
- Making Gitcoin more of a commons economy, which feels like the most aligned way to manage a public good
- Providing more psychological safety for contributors
- Enabling the community to have more meaningful engagement with the DAO through GTC
After discussing the why behind our task, we all took a few minutes to drop ideas for GTC utility into a slido. We then upvoted ideas that we wanted to discuss in more detail with the remaining time. The full slido can be seen here, and the notes from our discussion on the top upvoted ideas are here:
- Identity / Trust Bonus (staking in dPopp Passport)
- High-level mechanic would be to stake GTC on yourself or on others in order to get some reputational benefit.
- Some key considerations from the conversation included:
- The idea generally has support, but it’s unclear if trust bonus is the right metric or if we should be focusing on increasing the cost of forgery
- We need to think through the benefit for the person staking, as well as the potential slashing mechanic
- It may be more aligned to require holders to stake on others instead of themselves
- Grants Curation Game (Delphi Version)
- We did a lot of work pre-token launch on building out a grants curation game (details here) that rewarded those for curating before the round instead of during the round. People earned money for curating grants / collections. We should investigate how best to use this curation mechanism for future rounds.
- This idea had general support from the team —> we also discussed clarifying how curation is different from actual voting in the round. The tl;dr is that curating ahead of the round influences how the funds are then distributed during the round.
- Create a Tokemak reactor which gets $200k-$300k/mo of TOKE (which can be dumped to stables) going into the treasury
- This idea was presented on a governance post here. The basic premise is that Gitcoin would put up GTC into one half of a liquidity pool and the Tokemak community would put up the other half, based on governance votes from their community on which pools to fund. This type of arrangement would enable us to earn money in TOKE, which we could then convert to stables if needed.
- The team was interested in this concept, but thought it would be valuable to more deeply understand risk level (impermanent loss, etc).
- Mutual grants with up & coming DAOs
- The idea is that GTC becomes a kind of emerging-markets fund of the ecosystem, which would align our interests with those of similarly-motivated DAOs and facilitate creative collaboration.
- The team was supportive of this idea generally, but felt like this was more of a tactic for treasury diversification as opposed to GTC utility specifically.
- Locking a portion of recurring aqueduct contributions into GTC liquidity pools
- The team discussed the potential considerations and trade-offs of this approach, including whether or not our community or customers would be interested in this idea.
After discussing the top ideas, the team decided on a few next steps:
- Posting these notes to the governance form (this post)
- Standing up a CSDO-like committee to shepherd these ideas forward and present them back to CSDO (Kyle and Chase to kickoff)
- Scheduling a follow-up meeting to focus specifically on how GTC utility could be built into Grants 2.0 protocol development (scheduled for week of 5/30)