Progress Update
We’ve now completed 12 stakeholder interviews as part of our sensemaking process to identify funding domains for GG24. These conversations with teams and ecosystem builders have revealed patterns that will guide our domain recommendations. We’re continuing interviews through mid-August to gather additional perspectives.
How Our Understanding Has Evolved
In our original post, we identified four emerging trends: Impact Measurement, Sustainable Funding, Ecosystem Coordination, and Access Infrastructure. With 12 interviews now complete, these patterns have both deepened and expanded in interesting ways.
Key Patterns Emerging
Impact Measurement and Metrics
Our conversations revealed widespread challenges with impact measurement. Stakeholders described how current metrics often fail to capture genuine impact. Projects face pressure to demonstrate growth, which can lead to focusing on easily measurable but potentially misleading indicators like wallet counts or transaction volumes.
The challenge extends beyond having better measurement tools. The ecosystem needs evaluation frameworks that value authentic impact and create incentives for accurate reporting. Several stakeholders suggested that subjective expert assessment might be more valuable than purely quantitative metrics for understanding true project impact.
New Theme: Developer Tooling Infrastructure
Beyond our initial four trends, a new pattern emerged strongly. Developer tooling, including languages, compilers, and developer libraries, faces particular sustainability challenges. Unlike applications that can implement various business models, core developer tools have limited monetization options while needing to remain neutral and accessible.
We heard repeatedly about small teams maintaining essential infrastructure with unstable funding. These projects often support thousands of others but lack visibility in popular funding rounds. Recent spinouts from the Ethereum Foundation have highlighted these challenges as teams work to establish independent funding models.
Interestingly, several stakeholders recommended leveraging existing tools and infrastructure rather than building everything new. This suggests an opportunity to accelerate progress by supporting and scaling proven solutions rather than duplicating efforts.
Sustainable Funding: Understanding the Trade-offs
Our original findings showed 100% of stakeholders worried about sustainable funding. As we’ve continued conversations, we’ve gained clarity on why this remains such a challenge. When teams pursue revenue generation, they often need to allocate time to commercial activities that could otherwise go toward core development. Examples included engineers taking on consulting work or tools adding proprietary features.
These trade-offs appear particularly acute for infrastructure projects. The push for sustainability can lead teams away from open-source development toward activities that generate revenue but provide less ecosystem-wide value. Several stakeholders emphasized the need to move beyond vanity metrics toward genuine sustainability through either increased revenue or reduced costs—while maintaining alignment with public goods missions.
Access Infrastructure: Rethinking User Adoption
Our initial synthesis identified on/off-ramps and mobile wallets as key needs. Continued conversations have expanded this theme. Stakeholders noted that many successful Ethereum applications have relatively small user bases compared to traditional web applications. This has led to discussions about focusing on specific use cases and target audiences rather than broad adoption goals.
The emphasis has shifted toward building applications for defined user groups with clear needs—regional stablecoin solutions, industry-specific tools, and applications solving concrete problems. This represents an evolution from building general infrastructure toward targeted solutions that can demonstrate real usage.
A related concern emerged around developer adoption. One stakeholder noted that while new AI models attract millions of developers within months, Ethereum’s developer base remains comparatively small. This suggests the adoption challenge extends beyond end users to the builders themselves, requiring strategies to attract and retain developer talent.
Ecosystem Coordination: Beyond Fragmentation
The coordination challenges we initially identified have proven more complex than simple fragmentation. Stakeholders described how rapid changes in funding mechanisms create uncertainty for projects trying to plan long-term. Some funding rounds have evolved to emphasize marketing and social presence, requiring technical teams to invest significant time in promotion.
Some coordination issues were identified as requiring standards or leadership decisions rather than additional funding. The Protocol Guild model we highlighted originally remains a positive example, but replicating this success requires addressing deeper structural issues.
New Theme: Grants Discoverability and Ecosystem Intelligence
A recurring theme across conversations was the lack of visibility into available funding opportunities. Projects struggle to navigate the fragmented landscape of grants, with no central resource for understanding what funding is available, eligibility requirements, or application timelines. This information asymmetry means well-qualified projects may miss opportunities simply because they don’t know they exist.
Stakeholders also noted that the ecosystem lacks intelligence about funding patterns and outcomes. Without aggregated insights about what gets funded and why, projects cannot learn from others’ experiences or understand how to position themselves effectively. This gap in ecosystem intelligence contributes to inefficient allocation of both applicant effort and funding resources. Some stakeholders mentioned existing efforts to address this, including teams working on grant discovery platforms and job boards, suggesting this is a recognized need with emerging solutions.
From the funder’s perspective, stakeholders noted that running effective grant programs requires significant operational investment beyond just capital allocation. This operational overhead may contribute to why funding opportunities remain fragmented and difficult to discover.
Evolving Domain Considerations
Based on these patterns, we’re evolving our domain considerations. This list is not meant to be taken as the final domains for GG24 but does provide some signal to the direction we are starting to head into as we continue our conversations.
Developer Infrastructure and Tooling should address the unique challenges of maintaining core developer tools. This includes sustainable funding for languages, compilers, and essential libraries without forcing teams into revenue models that compromise their core mission.
Impact Assessment and Integrity needs to go beyond measurement tools to address incentive structures. This could include frameworks for expert evaluation, dependency tracking, and mechanisms that reward genuine impact.
Targeted User Applications emerges as a potential domain focusing on applications with specific audiences and use cases. Rather than general infrastructure, this would support projects with clear paths to meaningful usage in defined contexts.
Sustainable Funding Models requires exploring approaches that acknowledge the trade-offs teams face. This might include bridge funding, revenue-sharing models from dependent projects, or other mechanisms that protect public goods development.
Funding Discovery and Intelligence could address the information gaps in the ecosystem. This might include centralized resources for grant opportunities, tools for understanding funding patterns, and platforms that share insights about successful funding strategies.
Next Steps
We’re continuing stakeholder interviews through mid-August. The patterns we’re seeing suggest that effective funding needs to address structural challenges in the ecosystem. We welcome community input on these emerging themes and how they align with your experiences.
Our synthesis will incorporate all stakeholder input and community feedback to propose domains that address these foundational challenges.
Share your perspectives below as we continue building our understanding through collective sensemaking.
