Hey Gitcoin Community,
Philip Hutchins here to propose a new workstream focused on decentralizing the core Gitcoin platform: the Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream! This post serves as my resume for the lead position and as a means for you to hold me accountable to the high bar you would expect from a workstream this critical to Gitcoin.
Though I am relatively new to Gitcoin, I am definitely not new to open source or the decentralization space. My intro to crypto and decentralization was when I joined BitPay in 2014. Reading Satoshi’s whitepaper was an eye opening experience for me just as it has been for many of us in this space. I later went on to work for Storj Labs transitioning into the CTO role and leading the effort to redesign the product and rewrite the codebase to be scalable and decentralized. I later joined a team in the supply chain space designing and building a POC to enable competitors to turn into collaborators, and work together through sharing and utilizing excess resources.
Now, a “Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream” sounds super cool but what does it actually mean?
Well, Gitcoin is focused on growing and sustaining open source software, much of which is decentralized technology. The whole mission of Gitcoin is centered around giving back to and sustaining the communities around open source software. These are foundational parts of our internet infrastructure, and to promote antifragility, credible neutrality, and to grow funding for public goods it makes perfect sense to decentralize Gitcoin!
Currently Gitcoin is built like a web 2.5 app. It’s built on top of a few web3-era technologies utilizing smart contracts on-chain where possible, but also hosted in a centralized manner like a web2 app. For this reason, Gitcoin cannot yet be credibly called decentralized from a technical perspective.
Starting with Gitcoin Grants, I propose we work to make the grants system permissionless so that anyone can participate and fork the project, and be credibly neutral to ensure that no one person or entity directly controls the outcomes or direction.
The goal of the Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream is to guide and drive the project that will result in us not only being able to call Gitcoin itself a DAO, but Gitcoin Grants (and perhaps even other products) fully decentralized protocols.
I could see this workstream evolving in these phases
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Phase 1 (we are here) - Gitcoin APIs are available but centralized.
- Theme: Design & Documentation
- This working group’s focus is on
- Decentralized Grants Protocol and Architecture Design
- Formally documenting API, and Protocol
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Phase 2 - Decentralized protocol and API is designed, documented, and documentation released
- Theme: Implement and release Beta Decentralized Grants API
- This working group’s focus is on
- Decentralizing and documenting data availability. (in a privacy preserving way, of course)
- Decentralizing the Grants API
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Phase 3 - Gitcoin Grants Beta APIs are available, well documented, and decentralized.
- Theme: Iterate and move Decentralized Grants from Beta to Production and begin decentralization of Hackathons
- This working group’s focus is on
- Iterate on Decentralizing Grants moving from Beta to Production
- supporting the “public goods prototype workstream”.
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Phase 4 - Decentralized Gitcoin Grants in Production.
- This working group’s focus is
- building a well oiled DevRel machine, which means on evangelizing the mission + APIs + documentation as widely as possible, enabling developers worldwide to create value by building on Gitcoin’s dataset and protocols.
- This working group’s focus is
- Phase 5 - Serenity - Decentralized Gitcoin Grants tech is humming.
Get involved by joining the discussion here on the Gitcoin forum.
