Writing Exercise - What is Gitcoin's EndGame? v0

[owocki]

(this is v0 of endgame. there will be further iterations )

In chess and other similar games, the endgame is the stage of the game after the middlegame. The endgame begins when a few pieces are left on the board. From Wikipedia

One thing that I’ve heard from many people, in and out of Gitcoin, for the last few months is that there isn’t an agreed upon path to success for Gitcoin that everyone is aligned on. It seems to me it’s not clear to everyone what Gitcoin’s endgame is.

Asking “What is Gitcoin’s endgame?” means asking “what is the realistic vision, strategy, and roadmap going forward?”.

I would like to challenge the community to engage in constructive dialogue about Gitcoin’s vision, roadmap, & endgame. Articulating an endgame means working backwards from what success looks like and also forwards from where Gitcoin is now. By collectively sensemaking, we will chart a course towards success by 2030. We will collectively grasp the elephant. And we will articulate to the market what the path forward is.

I have my own thoughts on these topics. I (in consultation with Kyle and other stakeholders in the DAO) will be likely releasing document(s) that describes what we think the mid game (next 1-2 years) and endgame are (after that, 3-10 years).

But I do not want to unveil them yet. It is important to me that this process is bottoms-up & I want everyone who is a stakeholder in the DAO to have an invite to contribute to this discussion unmoored by my own /others thinking. I would welcome anyone else in the community to also create such an artifact and share it.

With that in mind, I would like to challenge the community to a writing exercise. What do you think the endgame plan for Gitcoin is? Perhaps you only see a part of it, I think submissions that articulate the endgame for a smaller/autonomous portion of the DAO are good too!

To me a good endgame plan is:

1. Values aligned
2. Maximizing the accomplishment of Gitcoins mission
3. Will create financial sustainability (ideally financial thriving) in support of realizing Gitcoin’s mission
4. Pragmatic/Do-able
5. Nuanced & Comprehensive - it considers multiple perspectives, seperates concerns & considers tradeoffs between them
6. Will mean ultimately decentralizing or ossifying Gitcoin.
7. Will be ratified by governance eventually.

But the following caveats apply:

1. Others may have other value sets and criteria for what a “good” endgame plan is. And thats okay (actually its desirable).
2. Some of these things are of course in dynamic tension with one another. That is the fun part

Please comment below or DM me if youd like to participate. I’d love to read submissions from diverse parts of the community towards the mid/end of September.

[birdsoar]

Owocki thinkpieces have been missed. Welcome back! Is there any format for submission you would find particularly helpful? Are submissions shared publicly (forum posts) or privately (word docs), or can people choose their preference?

[birdsoar]

Also I am interested, will PM.

[owocki]

Owocki thinkpieces have been missed

Hopefully this time around I can have a better hit rate on pieces that inform people vs just get discarded as noise (but its always fun for me when some inititaitve comes up and I get to say "oh yeah, checkout this thing I wrote 15 months ago, and recycle a post that was initatially didnt hit )

Is there any format for submission you would find particularly helpful? Are submissions shared publicly (forum posts) or privately (word docs), or can people choose their preference?

I dont want to be prescriptive on format. You can do markdown, google docs, notion, whatever works for you. Personally I’m doing a nextra JS site similar to https://docs.allo.gitcoin.co/ bc I like the way it can be navigated + forked/PR’d.

You are welcome to write a public post or a private one. Up to you. I like to work in public so I will be making mine public eventually.

[FractalVisions]

Here is my two cents for this morning…!

The description of the future is an interesting topic because it is so hard to predict. I will give you a million dollars if you can tell me how a movie you have never seen before is going to end 30 minutes into the beginning. Honestly no one knows what is going to happen due to regulatory pressure currently surrounding the industry.

The Stand with Crypto initiative that CB has set out on is a great example of how GTC Grants can help to create a healthy ecosystem that can help to push legislation to the table within the levels of the federal government in order to lessen the pressure on cryptocurrency companies located in the continental US.

On the other hand market conditions could remain unfavorable over the course of many years. Influential & unintentional market manipulation can also play a role in similar catalyst events such as the one that we most recently witnessed or experienced with SBF and Luna crashing.

What we do know is the impact that Gitcoin has made so far.

Based on the constant growth & expansion of the ecosystem it must become increasingly important to track the impact of the grant funds that have been allocated in the past.
As well as strict rules, oversight, and accountability enforcement when funding from a matching pool is distributed by the grantees to help fund these projects. Ensuring that direct impact is being made with grant funding will determine how long this type of sustainability can last.

I have participated in & observed other’s behavior related to the Optimism ecosystem over the past year where grantees from a project that were issued 300,000 OP tokens had misappropriated the usage & distribution of their grant. Due to the NO SALE rule that was established after they received the tokens. The team used that as an excuse claiming that the rule didn’t apply to them. You can read more here.

L2DAO Investigation: Summary

Note This is a previous participant of the Gitcoin ecosystem which has now burned a bridge with the Governance of OP and is currently seeking a grant through the Arbitrum round of Gitcoin.

Gitcoin must be able to decipher where the money goes & determine if it is actually making an impact in the world that is significant enough to create change.

Otherwise what organization would want to put their money into a matching pool ?

If the projects that are taking part in grant funding are not directly contributing to the ecosystem of Gitcoin to help create sustainable infrastructure or actively participate in retroactive funding hypercerts for the new smaller projects joining the ecosystem by paying it forward are we really heading in the right direction right now?

Do projects that max out the cap of matching pool rewards give back to the rest of the community in someway to help create sustainable growth & is there a dashboard to track this activity?

It is fair to say that Gitcoin might have distributed Quadratic Funding to illegitimate projects in the past that have gamed other governance systems by gaining a reputation in the GTC ecosystem with zero transparency of on chain impact being made after they were funded through Gitcoin grants. The importance of this learning lesson can be used to perform our due diligence when moving forward into the future.

A similar standard needs to be upheld for the ecosystem to find long term solutions & sustainable funding for new projects.

While it’s great to see Revoke Cash receive an incredible amount of funding each round it is unclear how the project helps to contribute towards the rest of the ecosystem other than providing a security dApp. There are many other similar products that exist now so we don’t need to solely focus or rely on one project/product to try and keep us all safe from scams.
I hope people don’t assume that scams will disappear by throwing money at a company that still has yet to completely solve the problem on their own. Nor should a single company be held accountable for keeping everyone safe at the same time.

This is a dangerous path to navigate through the trilemma of pillars in the cryptocurrency world known as scaling, decentralization, & security.

Meanwhile there are other new web3 security protocols & projects that are struggling to get funding in comparison. To me a world where we have multiple security protocols in a decentralized ecosystem seems like the best solution for safeguarding the crypto space.

Otherwise it seems like a centralized entity or corporation is getting all the attention & funding due to its commonly known popularity. Which has a stark familiarity of the old broken legacy systems that are crumbling down around us.

When we centralize dependencies of any one single entity it creates a vulnerability & weak point in the rest of the ecosystem which is what I thought we all originally came to this space for. “Decentralization”

Please tell me I am wrong !?