gm.
i want to write about what gitcoin means to me, why it exists, why i’m still focused on it when most projects of our generation are dead, and the energy i’m trying to bring back to it.
ethos
gitcoin has always been about one thing: fund what matters.
we started in 2017 with bounties for open source maintainers nobody was paying. we grew into quadratic funding because the math was a better answer than the market was giving us. we built allo, passport, grants stack, deepgov, support.eth - every artifact was an attempt to make capital flow toward the things humanity actually needs but the price signal misses.
the ethos under all of that is simple: public goods are real. the people who build them deserve to eat. and the mechanism design to make that happen is winnable in our lifetime.
fund what matters is the mission. everything else - the protocols, the rounds, the brands, the entities - is just a vehicle for the mission.
telos
the telos - the why under the what — is bigger than ethereum and bigger than crypto:
steer the direction of technological evolution toward pro-human futurism. distribute power, raise all boats, upgrade humanity, regenerate the biosphere.
gitcoin is a vehicle for that. funding what matters is how we do it. when something gets wound down it’s because the vehicle wasn’t moving the mission - not because the mission changed.
the dharma i’m bringing
i spent a lot of the last year doing from emptiness — chasing the next product, the next funding mechanism, because i have a bias towards action - but a lot of it didn’t work.
my mentor called me on it. so did the KPIs.
so the energy i’m trying to bring to gitcoin now is different:
- doing from fullness, not emptiness. the work has to be intrinsically meaningful in the moment, not a means to a future feeling.
- fund what matters, for real. not what’s fundable, not what’s narratively convenient - what actually matters. the discipline is in the difference.
- presence over performance. sit with the people doing the work. be intimate with the actual problem, not the deck about the problem.
- the telos isn’t about us. if the work succeeds, the win belongs to the people whose lives changed - not gitcoin’s brand. movements aren’t measured by their instituions.
what i’m asking of you
push back when something looks like it’s drifting from “fund what matters.” show up and add value (ill post more details about how to do this soon). i need this community to be the people who remember what gitcoin is for.
more soon. for now: thanks for being here.
— owocki