TEMP CHECK - love.fund

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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TEMP CHECK - love.fund

tl;dr

we need a non-crypto brand for our fundraising endeavours. i’d like it to be love.fund, powered by gitcoin.

why

the people we now need to reach (donors, foundations, neighbors, folks scared about what ai does to their work) don’t know or care what quadratic funding is, and “crypto” makes a lot of them leave as soon as they say it. gitcoin is a great name inside ethereum, but outside it, it is not.

so the plan is to put a plain-language brand out front and keep crypto inside. we’d still use onchain rails where they help (transparent matching pools, yield-only matching, gtc where it fits), but they wouldn’t be what anyone sees first. people should be able to give, follow and share without knowing a wallet exists.

love.fund :handshake: techne

techne is an everything app for localism.

love.fund would be the name for our fundraising experiments, and would continue gitcoins legacy of being an innovator in crowdfunding.

the two are complementary

  1. love.fund pushes forward crowdfunding in the ai/crypto era
  2. techne pushes forward to consumer distribution
  3. love.fund is where techne and other aligned projects can raise.
  4. techne can provide distribution/scale to love.fund experiments.

what exists

a prototype at app.love.fund. you tell it what you care about, it drafts a fund split across real organizations, and others can back, follow or fork it. it uses play money and hasn’t routed a real dollar yet.

on the name

i’ve been sitting with the love.fund domain for a few months, and most of the sitting happened in conversations with ADVISOR.

the thing this fundraising brand says is that money should follow what we love. today it mostly follows money: returns chase returns, and what we actually hold sacred gets whatever’s left. money is a good servant, and the work is to put it back in service of the thing it’s supposed to serve.

“love” is also probably the most worn-out word in english. people say they love a handbag, a football team and their kids in the same breath, and only one of those is love. a lot of what passes for love is liking, wanting or a need to control. so the brand has to earn the word. part of what love.fund does is help someone tell the difference between what they like and what they’d actually give for, and that second list tends to match what people wish they’d spent their lives on.

you can’t love an abstraction. i don’t love localism; i love my neighbors and my friends, and i believe localism serves them. love.fund should fund the things people love and stay honest that every strategy (localism included) is only a path toward them, one we’d drop for a better path.

the name also reads 2 ways: fund what you love, and fund more love in the world. i like that it holds both.

the risk is that some people will hear it as soft. i think that’s worth carrying, and i’d rather earn the word than pick a safer one that means nothing.

the ask

  1. should gitcoin hold love.fund as the mainstream brand for our fundraising?
  2. if yes, i’ll come back with a small pilot proposal (one campaign, real money) and a budget.
  3. if you’ve got a better non-crypto name, now’s the time.

owocki

Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

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love.fund: one pager

love.fund is gitcoin’s funding brand. we facilitate pilots and campaigns that route money to the people and places doing the work, and we lend them our name, yield, and distribution so they don’t have to build those from scratch.

it starts as facilitation: someone brings a funding idea, we screen for the best ones, we help run it. the ones that work graduate into ongoing love.fund campaigns.

pilots (short term)

before we say yes to a pilot, we want answers to these:

  1. where’s the money coming from? a named funder, a matching pool, donors we can actually reach.

  2. where’s the audience coming from? who shows up to give, apply or vote, and through which channel.

  3. what are we trying to accomplish? one outcome we can check at the end, so we know whether to keep going.

if a pilot can’t answer the first one, it isn’t ready.

campaigns (long term)

a pilot becomes a campaign when it can carry these:

  1. love.fund branded, or co-branded with the partner.

  2. revenue share back to gitcoin, so campaigns fund the platform instead of draining it.

  3. good software that donors and recipients actually enjoy using.

  4. good operations: payouts land on time, reporting is clean, nobody’s chasing a spreadsheet.

  5. Its so powerful that we want to build it into the techne everything app as a flagship of our inchoate ‘funding’ app section.

we curate and fund. we don’t operate partners’ programs for them.

first three

We will run an open application process at brand launch, and well see what we get, but these three are good candidates to be the first three we love.fund.

  1. bioregional funding with benjamin. routing money to a bioregion, starting close to home.

  2. josh’s love.fund app. the product surface for campaigns.

  3. supertake for impact. say what change you want, get an allocation, follow or fork other people’s theses (spec).

[TEMP CHECK]: gitcoin x bread cooperative, revenue generating crowdfunding app
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I don’t love it.

Sounds hippie to me. Unserious when it comes to money. Investments / funds / grants do not run on karma and good vibes.

Reminds me loveverse.love that is currently offline, archived version here.

I’m much more in the theme of regenerative renaissance.

Regenerative: provide more value than you consume. WIN WIN WIN. Positive sum games.

I remember this GreenPill podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0EGTPSda4MDoOqWl2bCZ0F (19th May 2023 “The Regenaissance with Gnoman”)

My personal pick: regen.fund

I’m climate change believer. I don’t like word “sustainable”. Sustainable suggest old business as usual. As civilisation we need to activate net positive: regenerative. Regen is intuitive shorthand and is applicable to pretty much all industries / sectors / cultures / nations / religions. Just like love, but love seems more esoteric, spiritual, ineffable. Regen is something that can be measured, accounted, evaluated.

Personal project: https://demo.basex.com/ (Accounting for the full cost: externalities, cobenefts. Feedback explicitly welcome.)

I undertand the overal perception of crypto as an industry: dumpster on fire. I’m not setting the rules here, I’m just observing reality.

Many people are in crypto for idealogical issues. Here is a video of Aragon from 2018:

Thought 1: Mainstream adoption with tokenised stocks on Robinhood chain and “login with Privy” that completely abstract the blockchain behind it?

Thought 2: AI agent does not have bank account but has crypto wallet: https://agents.circle.com/

I am comfortable with highlighting the benefits of crypto:

  • Trust (through being trustless)
  • Transparency by default
  • Governance

Gitcoin does not scream “crypto”. Git is a source control protocol. Coin, note, banknote are common English words. Gitcoin has brand, legacy and $60m of results: https://gitcoin.co/impact

Mind the target audience

5% of Anthropic: Investing in the public benefit \ Anthropic

Today, we’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity with a structure that increases the stake as the company grows. Subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic’s shares will be committed today, with an additional 2% added at the board’s discretion for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a set baseline.

From EA (effective altruism) newsletter: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/REJjytdSyRFXLSgtD/what-will-it-take-to-deliver-billions-a-year-to-the-world-s

The New York Times reports that “between $37b and $100b could become available to charities annually” from a wave of wealth generated by rapidly growing AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

We’ve been speaking to a number of existing GiveDirectly donors in the AI space about what they expect will happen. While we’re skeptical that giving will be that high, it is likely very large sums of philanthropic money will move from AI and other sources over the coming years.

Gartner Hype Cycle of crypto

I think we reached a stage that it can be used on the backend and use the benefits, without talking about it. No need to talk “we use electricity” or “we use internet” or “we use AI” = we just use the best tool for the jobs.

When funding impact and regeneration (regen.fund) it seems naturally aligned.

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