One of the most frequent questions I get when telling people about Quadratic Funding is “Where does the Gitcoin Grants Matching Pool Money Come From?”
I have answered it about a dozen times now, so I’m going to answer it once here + use this post to answer it from now on.
Here goes:
As of Nov 2021, Gitcoin Grants has done 11 rounds.
- Rounds 1-6 were funded by the Ethereum Foundation (and sometimes small donors).
- Rounds 7-10 were funded by DEFI protocols like Yearn/Synthetix/Chainlink, investors like three arrows capital, and dozens of other Community members. [announcement]
- Round 11+ is funded by (in addition to previous funding mechanisms) NFTs like Moonshotbots and GreatestLARP.
In addition to the above, Gitcoin Grants received a large donation of AKITA from Vitalik Buterin.
The motivation for funding Gitcoin Grants varies, but here are the reasons we’ve seen:
- Funding Gitcoin Grants as a means of helping build the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Funding Gitcoin Grants as a means of supporting specific causes (Covid, climate change, crypto for change, media, infra tech, dapp tech)
- Funding Gitcoin Grants to give back.
- Funding Gitcoin Grants to build your brand.
- Funding Gitcoin Grants to get an NFT.
- Funding Gitcoin Grants to prove that Ethereum can fund public goods.
As of Nov 2021, the Grants Multisig has roughly $15mm of tokens in it. At $1m/round and 1round/quarter, that is 15 rounds of Gitcoin Grants forward funded (for 3.5 years).
Thank you again to the funders of Gitcoin Grants. Your support means the world to us!
Funders as of Round 11:
- Ethereum Foundation
- BadgerDAO
- ENS
- Yearn
- BalancerLabs
- chainlink
- Synthetix
- iearnfinance
- EF
- Kraken
- Binance
- Optimism
- Uniswap
- matic
- Stakefish
- DefianceCapital & Three Arrows Capital
- #FerretPatrol
- 1337 working group
- Aragon
- CMS Holdings
- harvest.finance
- SNX
- 0xeffalt
- PastaDAO
- Unstoppable Domains
- future_fund_
- YAMFinance
- Fire Eyes
- Sushi
- DoraHacks
- econoar
- rleshner
- 1inch
- 1kx
- The Graph
- bantg
- nanexcool
- Andrew Keys
- banteg
- LobsterDAO
- nanexcool
- bc_workshop
- $MEME
- Splunk
- auryn-macmillan
- Eric Coner
- followthechain
- meknab
- tenQkp
- $BASED
- $UNI
- Algorand
- Badger
- DAOsquare
- EPNS
- Forefront
- Harvest Finance
- Integral Finance
- Mask
- Polygon
- Teller