[NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE - this post is made on a best-effort basis as is the opinion of one contributor, and should not be relied upon to make any financial decisions. ]
State of Gitcoin/Grants Lab Q3 2024
“Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years!” – LL Cool J
Asks
- If you’re building an ecosystem, consider adding the powerful capital allocation tools built by Gitcoin to the mix.
- We offer the following types of campaigns for growth-oriented ecosystems: Quadratic Funding, Retroactive Funding, Conviction Voting, Grants Ships. All of these things are built on our new Allo Protocol! More on that below.
- Email me (kevin@gitcoin.co) or DM on twitter to learn more.
TLDR
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Ecosystem Growth Tools: Gitcoin offers powerful capital allocation tools like Quadratic Funding, Retroactive Funding, and Conviction Voting, all built on the Allo Protocol, to support growth-oriented ecosystems.
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Strategic Vision: Gitcoin is becoming a leading capital allocation protocol for the tokenized internet, with immediate goals to succeed in the on-chain grants market and a long-term vision to integrate Allo Protocol across the Ethereum ecosystem.
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Solid Foundations: Gitcoin/Grants Lab has strengthened its leadership team and has a significant runway, with an especially healthy grants matching pool. Gitcoin plans to leverage these foundations to invest in building on the Allo Protocol & its ecosystem.
Mission
Fund What Matters.
Gitcoin has delivered $60m worth of funding to web3 ecosystems ($6m so far in 2024). Through the allocation of this capital, we help growth-oriented ecosystems fund what matters to them. We fund public goods. We invest in people. We help ecosystems find their (3,3).
Vision
Capital Allocation is the process of deciding how to spend financial resources. We each make 1000s of capital allocations decisions monthly - from repaying friends for a meal to paying rent. At scale, capital allocation becomes a full time job for grant administrators and ecosystem builders. The way we make these decisions will be completely revolutionized in the coming decade as web3 proliferates.
Gitcoin is building the capital allocation layer of the post-tokenization internet. As tokenization eats the world and trillions$$$ of assets are tokenized over the coming decade… We will offer the most powerful suite of enterprise grade capital allocation tools to tokenized communities.
[This is a pivot in emphasis for us since when you last heard from us! We are transcending being regen/public goods/impactDAO to being a sophisticated ecosystem growth toolkit in what we believe will eventually be a billion$$ category]
We execute this vision over two horizons.
Horizon 1 - 18 months, winning in onchain grants market
Horizon 2 - next 5-10 years after that, Allo Protocol becomes the allocation layer of the post tokenization internet.
Team
They say that the order of operations to build a great company is people, then products, then profits.
I am happy to say that Grants Lab has a new fortified leadership team:
- @meglister - General Manager, Grants Lab
- @deltajuliet - Executive Director, Gitcoin Foundation
- @jehanav - Marketing
- @Sov/@dssdan - Sales/Bd
- @katalunia & @gnomadic - Engineering/Product
- @MathildaDV - Grants Programs
In addition to the company, the DAO is cultivating a new generation of leaders. The DAO is presently being reset to focus on people who build/use Allo Protocol in Q3 2024 + beyond.
- We have a pipeline of innovative Allo builds where Gitcoin citizens can earn GTC by building on Allo…
- We are dogfooding our tools by using Gitcoin to build on Gitcoin - running grant programs for our builders.
- We recently proposed a 6.9m GTC fund earmarked for Allo builders + innovators, and program managers using Gitcoin’s tech stack.
This Grants Lab leadership team and Gitcoin citizens is the layer 0 foundation of a new era of Gitcoin. We call this era Gitcoin 2.1.
Product
Gitcoin offers
- Program Layer - Gitcoin (and its network of round operators) can run your grants program end to end, or train up your own internal team.
- App Layer - Use Gitcoin Grants Stack, EasyRetroPGF, or partner-applications to run powerful capital allocation campaigns in your community.
- Protocol Layer - Fork Gitcoin’s tech and bring it into your own app.
- Partnership Layer - We find (3,3)s with people who are building the movement, especially those who are doing it on Allo Protocol.
Financials
Gitcoin is doing a meager amount of services revenue.
Gitcoin (at current burn rate) has ~15 months of stablecoins left and 0-45 months of other tokens left (depending on market conditions).
The Gitcoin Grants Matching Pool is incredibly healthy. It has $18m in treasury, which at $500k/quarter, is funded for 36 quarters (9 years). There is a lot of demoing Gitcoin’s tech and funding ecosystem growth ahead of us!
More on Financials here.
Further Reading
If you’d like to learn more about the Gitcoin ecosystem, checkout the
Why write this?
- To communicate to past, current, and future Gitcoin stakeholders why the Gitcoin ecosystem is worth their time, attention, and capital in 2024.
- (stakeholders = investors, partners, grantees, intellectual contributors, financial contributors, GTC holders, GTC stewards)
- Action produces information. By broadcasting this, we build consensus about the state of Gitcoin/Grants Lab in Q3 2024 by pushing sensemaking (especially dissenting views) out into the open by way of the gov forum.
- To (hopefully) mark the bottom
in enthusiasm, financial success, and sentiment around Gitcoin.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading to the end. I value your feedback and partnership in making gitcoin lead again 