I’m happy to see MC lead the charge on adopting Grants 2.0! It seems that we’re betting on token utility to come from staking mechanisms and there have been quite a few thoughts scattered across the forums (1, 2, 3, 4)
To sum it up and to help frame some of my queries, utility comes from:
- Staking GTC through the form of conviction voting
- Governance in DAOs (also beyond Gitcoin)
Utility is important because:
- It will reflect demand to be a part of Gitcoin’s network
- It provides some buy pressure on the token
However, this is a long term idea with really no way of knowing it will work out + we’re betting the entire DAO on this. I’ve noticed that there hasn’t been a discussion of revenue and prior discussions have been seen as defecting (a spicy 
question as @tigress nicely put it) though I do share the sentiment that revenue is important to keep the DAO going.
I think token utility is a “DARPA-hard” problem. So I’d like to provide a perspective on how one might approach it. The framework goes something like this (its a tl;dr of the article)
The DARPA execution framework boils down to showing that a vision is not impossible, showing that vision is possible, and then making it exist
To do that, having a fixed budget for ‘seedling’ projects to explore multiple pathways, having a highly technical team to scrutinise proposals, acid testing ideas, and cross-pollinating across the ecosystem is how they achieve it.
I hope this isn’t too drastic, but @GTChase you could also consider framing MC as a collection of DARPA program managers that are experimenting with the idea that a token-based network could help fund public goods across ecosystems.
However, I do agree with the budget for S15 to experiment with these 2 initial these put forth and would like to suggest some ways to speed it up.
Firstly CLR Fund has an open source repo including elements of MACI, quadratic voting etc that we could adapt. I would suggest having a conversation with them to include that as a module and then start experiments from there.
Secondly, perhaps starting some conversations about token utility so that we can frame reasonable experiments would be great. Token utility is a problem that every DAO faces so perhaps a coalition to tackle these efforts would be good rather than Gitcoin shouldering the entire burden (or resorting to ponzinomics). Some programs here 1, 2.