Transition Stewards Meetings - notes

[owocki]

Core Context

The group convened to reboot Gitcoin with ~$16–17M remaining treasury and a clean slate after a difficult DAO era. The goal is a 12-month “transitionary stewards cohort” to redefine strategy, governance, and sustainability.

Key Retrospective Insights

• Gitcoin fulfilled its original DAO promises, but failed to achieve sustainable revenue or scale.

• The DAO era suffered from:

• Over-expansion (large team, high burn)

• Weak market demand for public goods funding

• Token design limitations and governance friction

• Broader market conditions mattered:

• Capital concentrated in DeFi/speculative categories

• Public goods + regen lost momentum

• Despite this, Gitcoin created:

• New categories (quadratic funding, public goods funding, onchain crowdfunding)

• Significant cultural and ecosystem impact

Major Lessons (group consensus themes)

• You can’t run DAOs on vibes → need real business models

• Trust + structure balance is critical (too flat = chaos)

• Tooling must serve real users, not abstractions

• Incentives and accountability in governance are underdeveloped

• Crypto tooling has historically been too hard for normal users

Strategic Direction (Emerging)

• Shift toward building something people actually want (priority over governance purity)

• Strong interest in:

• Local/community use cases

• Real-world capital allocation

• Recognition that public goods funding is important but economically hard

Governance Experiment

• Proposal for a “trust graph” delegation system:

• Voting power flows through networks of trust (transitive delegation)

• Designed to decentralize power over time

• Intention: eventually the steward group could outvote the founder

Operating Plan

• Weekly meetings initially → then monthly

• Light compensation for stewards (debated)

• Next steps:

• Budget proposal

• Legal restructuring options

• Define product direction

Tensions / Open Questions

• How to create sustainable revenue

• How do evolve GTC token

• Whether DAO structure is even the right long-term form

• Balancing:

• Decentralization vs execution speed

• Governance vs product-market fit

Underlying Tone

• Honest reflection on past failures

• Desire to move forward without baggage

• Emphasis on focus, pragmatism, and rebuilding from first principles

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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.

[owocki]

heres a summary of the feedback i’ve gotten from yall since our first meeting (chattham house ofc)

• gtc retrospective was healthy for clearing the air and composing learnings

• the group needs direction from owocki before it can self-organize

- main fault line: some think treasury power belongs in private (CEO + challenging board), and doubt a renaissance without a hard pivot (and product market fit). one voice still says spin down the DAO

- open worry: sustained engagement. needs a heartbeat, watch who shows up weeks 2-4

- bull case: new direction lands in market

- bull case: trust-graph governance could set an industry standard

• warnings: hand-picked delegates can read as performative, and big pots of money attract extractors. but same critics are aligned overall and say don’t exit prematurely, owocki is still still the vision holder

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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.

[owocki]

Summary (Chatham House Rules)- Meeting 2

The group discussed a proposed new direction for Gitcoin centered on localism and “cosmolocal” infrastructure, with the goal of shifting time, money, and attention from online/network monopolies toward local, real-world communities.

A key influence on this direction has been guidance from a MENTOR, including a potential fundraising pathway via aligned high-net-worth networks interested in social impact.

Core Direction
• Build a local-first platform (“Hometown, name TBD”) to:
• Redirect online behavior into offline local participation
• Create a community-owned local data layer
• Enable interoperability across cities via shared schema + SDK
• Initial pilot in Node Zero, expanding to multiple cities by end of 2026
• Parallel effort to explore nonprofit (501c3) structure

Key Hypotheses
• The problem is not lack of information, but lack of behavior change
• Success depends on:
• Converting intent → action
• Leveraging social accountability (groups, pods)
• Targeting high-transition life moments (e.g. moving, new parents)
• Existing platforms fail due to:
• Misaligned incentives (ads, engagement maximization)
• Network capture and “enshittification”

Product + Tech Concepts
• Early-stage, still in discovery (“let us cook”)
• Potential elements:
• Local data layer owned by users (federated / protocol-based)
• Integration with AI (e.g. LLM routing, future agent-based commerce)
• Privacy + data sovereignty as core primitives

Risks & Open Questions
• Cold start problem for network effects
• Cultural fragmentation of local communities
• Avoiding disintermediation of existing grassroots efforts
• Differentiation vs AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT)
• Future-proofing for agentic / intent-based economies

Plan (H2 2026)
• Aug–Sep: data layer + product V1
• Oct: launch in Node Zero
• Nov–Dec: iterate + expand to ~5 cities
• Evaluate product-market fit + fundraising traction

Bet Framing
• ~15–20% of ops treasury deployed as a high-conviction bet
• Success criteria:
• Real-world engagement
• Product usage
• New capital inflows

Overall, the group aligned that this is a high-risk, exploratory pivot, with strong emphasis on behavioral design, local coordination, and alternative network effects—but with many unresolved questions still in active discovery.

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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.

[Donny_Jerri]

Looking at the ontology of this post alongside the ontology of the Kokonut Framework, Kokonut Intelligence, the emerging agent marketplace, and the composable DAO governance used to create each local instance, the ontological overlap is difficult to miss.

Ontologically speaking, of course.

The proposed model appears to be:

local communities retain sovereignty, operate through their own governance, produce locally owned data, use shared standards, connect through a broader intelligence layer, and benefit from what the other local instances learn without becoming subordinate to a centralized system.

That is very close to the architecture Kokonut has spent the last five years building and refining through an actual local implementation.

The governance stack is live. The common data schema is live. The MRV and evidence infrastructure are live. Kokonut Intelligence is live. Adelphi provides a real operating instance rather than a theoretical diagram. The agent marketplace is still emerging, so I would not claim that every component is finished, but a substantial part of the underlying coordination substrate already exists and has years of learning embedded in it.

The domains are not identical. Kokonut begins with regenerative agriculture, while this Gitcoin direction is broader. But the ontology is remarkably similar, and the framework was designed to be reusable across locally governed instances.

So before spending significant resources rebuilding the ontology of hyperlocal coordination from first principles, it may be worth inspecting the ontology that is already here.

But don’t take my word for it. I think trust has to be earned through inspection.

This is a fairly smart comparative analysis of the two systems:

discoverable through our AI overlords.
A pretty smart comparative analysis. Gitcoin Transition x Kokonut Intelligence

[owocki]

@Donny_Jerri

That is very close to the architecture Kokonut has spent the last five years building and refining through an actual local implementation.

very cool! want to DM me and lets chat more?

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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.

[owocki]

Summary (Chatham House Rules)- Meeting 3

TL;DR — Chatham House Rules

• Dev Strategy: Build an open, federated SDK for locally oriented networks—community commerce, events, funding, mutual aid—where users own their data and apps share network effects instead of trapping them.
• Product thesis: The platform can go broad, but success depends on one compelling flagship app. The strongest candidate is an AI-native asks/offers and intent-matching experience that solves an immediate local need.
• Opportunity: AI agents could reduce transaction costs and enable complex mutual-credit or non-monetary exchanges, potentially leapfrogging incumbent marketplaces rather than cloning them.
• Main risk: There’s plenty of theory and infrastructure, but no proven go-to-market product yet. The priority is practical value, not a sprawling feature set.
• Brand: Two leading directions are REDACTED1 and a REDACTED2 family of brands. No decision yet; target is mid-to-late August. Using “REDACTED2” would require alignment with the concept’s originator.
• Budget: Proposed H2 spend is roughly $1.2M over six months (~$170K/month), about 15% of the $6.8M operating treasury. December is the checkpoint: fundraising and product/technical momentum mean double down; weak momentum means teardown and rebuild.
• Next steps: Continue SDK/intent exploration, identify and build the focused flagship use case, finish brand diligence, and have stewards review the budget proposal asynchronously