tldr: the aug 26 → aug 27 transition is not about decentralization for its own sake. it’s about transmuting gitcoin’s declining legitimacy into more ascendant + growing legitimacy.
as we move through an especially liminal year for gitcoin, i keep coming back to vitalik’s 2021 post, “the most important scarce resource is legitimacy.”
vitalik defines legitimacy as “a pattern of higher-order acceptance.” basically, something is legitimate when people accept it, in part because they expect other people to accept it too.
he lays out several sources of legitimacy:
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brute force: someone has enough power to impose it
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continuity: it was legitimate yesterday, so we accept it today
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fairness: the outcome feels fair or credibly neutral
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process: we trust the mechanism that produced the outcome
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performance: the system produces good results
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participation: people had a say in producing the outcome
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vitalik makes another point that feels especially relevant here: legitimacy is descriptive, not moral. something can have legitimacy and still be bad. and legitimacy can disappear when enough people stop believing in the system.
legitimacy in gitcoin’s liminal time
gitcoin exists in a liminal (inbetween state). although the dao launch promises were fulfiled, the market that gitcoin was in almost completely evaporated in 2024-2026. we are figuring out the bridge from what gitcoin was to what it is to become.
the transitionary stewards + trust graph experiment is an attempt to transmute two kinds of legitimacy (continuity, process) into several others (fairness, process, participation, and if we are lucky, performance).
right now, a lot of gitcoin’s process legitimacy flows through this forum and the sacrosanct governance procedures we’ve adhered to.. continuity legitimacy flows through this forum, the gitcoin foundation, and also me. i’m the og founder and one of the only large token holders left who is still active as a container of context, source energy, mission, give-a-shit, and hope. i picked the initial transitionary stewards. much of the delegation for them originates around me (for now).
i can also still call the tribe back in when something is consequential enough. i use that sparingly. the ask needs to be thought out and well designed.
the point of the next 12 months is to leverage it to bootstrap something that doesn’t depend on it forever.
i think continuity + fairness + process + participation are the legitimacy sources we should deliberately build around.
- continuity: gitcoin has almost a decade of history (we funded $69m worth of public goods through 4m unique txns to 4k unique projects). carry the best of it forward.
- fairness: influence should increasingly follow earned trust rather than proximity to the founder.
- process: make the rules inspectable. the trust graph is one example. instead of “a gtc whale knows some people and delegates to them,” there is a graph whose rules and outputs can be inspected.
- participation: the transitionary stewards are the base constituency, each committing real time to the process. from there we can widen participation deliberately.
- performance: this one has to be earned.
the milestone i care about is still the same one i wrote about last month: the trust graph can outvote me. not because founder influence is inherently illegitimate. not because decentralization is automatically good. and not because adding more voters magically creates wisdom. because if gitcoin can move from legitimacy concentrated toward legitimacy produced by continuity + fairness + process + performance + participation, then we have built something more durable and positioned for the new era.
the goal for aug 26 → aug 27 isn’t “decentralize gitcoin.” the goal is to earn legitimacy for whats next.
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.