Vitalik: Gitcoin Grants Activity Review
Original title: "Vitalik: Review of the seventh round of Gitcoin Grants"
Original source: ETH Chinese website
The seventh round of Gitcoin Grants has successfully concluded! This round saw unprecedented interest and increased donations: 857 projects received $274,830 in donations and $450,000 in matching funds.
This round of donations has been changed again, divided into "dapp technology ,” “Infrastructure Technology,” and “Community.” The following is the final result of this round of Grant:
DeFi contributed Matching Funds
In this round, our matching amount Much higher than ever. This is due to the first high level of participation in various defi projects in addition to the regular matching funds provided by the Ethereum Foundation and some other participants:
The matching funding providers are:
• Chainlink, smart contract oracle project
• Optimism, layer2 optimistic rollup solution
• Ethereum Foundation
• Balancer, decentralized exchange
• Synthetix, a synthetic asset platform
• Yearn, a mortgage lending platform
• Three Arrows Capital , investment fund
• Defiance Capital, investment fund
• Future Fund, this is absolutely not An investment fund
• $MEME, meme coin
• Yam, defi project
Some individual donors: ferretpatrol, bantg, Mariano Conti, Robert Leshner, Eric Conner, 10b576da0
These programs have provided substantial matching funds, some of which have been used in this round, and some funds have been set aside as "emergency funds", In case the matching amount gets smaller in future rounds.
This is a very important milestone for the ecology, because it It shows that Gitcoin Grants is less dependent on a few funders and is moving in a more sustainable direction. But it’s worth asking, what is the driving force behind these funders? Is this sustainable?
There are several underlying motivations that may play out to varying degrees:
· To some extent, people are naturally selfless, Due to the rapid increase in interest and token prices, this round coincides with a flood of defi projects, so donating some of them seems to be the "right choice"
·Many members of the community are critical of defi, seeing it as an unhelpful casino, and against Ethereum’s lofty goals had a negative impact. Participating in public welfare is a statement of the defi project. They hope to become contributors to the ecology and help its development
· If you put aside this negative perception, defi is a highly competitive market, and its development depends largely on community support and network effects, so forming goodwill in the ecosystem is very important for projects
Develop the best defi project Enough revenue is captured from such public goods that it is in their own interest to contribute
· In defi projects, there is a high degree of "co-ownership", that is, holders of certain tokens also hold other tokens and ETH. So, even if it's not entirely in the project's interest to fund heavily, it might be in the interest of its token holders, who may also hold the tokens of the funded project and therefore push the project to fund.
Of course, the question we still need to think about is: these incentives How sustainable is it? Could this altruistic and public relations incentive only happen for a one-off outbreak of this size, or could it be more sustainable?
Is the scale of quadratic financing matching promising since then Getting to $2-3 million? If the answer is yes, then this would be great news for the diversification and democratization of public goods funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The quality of media recipients has generally increased
There is a strange phenomenon in both the last round and this round, the status of the "controversial" community grantees in the previous rounds began to decline by itself. In theory, it seems that such grantees should continue to enjoy support from advocates, while critics remain powerless about it.
But the fact that the biggest media category winner of this round is relatively uncontroversial , and is a popular mainstream member of the Ethereum ecosystem. The Zero Knowledge Podcast, an excellent podcast even though it's aimed at a relatively small and somewhat technical audience, received a lot of funding in this round.
What happened? Why has the quality of media grantees improved naturally? Perhaps the self-correction ability of the quadratic financing mechanism is stronger than we imagined?
Overpayment
For the first time in this round, the big winners in each category have all received massive funding. The White Hat Hacking project in the infrastructure category took in $39,258, and the Bankless podcast in the community category took in $47,620. One way to think about this is: Are these grantees overfunded?
To be clear, I do think that trying to establish some kind of ethics is It is very inappropriate to stipulate that contributors to public goods can only earn a certain level of remuneration, and cannot go far beyond this category. In contrast, those who issue tokens always earn a lot of money. This possibility is completely natural and fair for public product contributors (in addition, the amount of this round is converted to about 200,000 per year. dollars, and it’s not even that high).
However, we can ask a more pragmatic question: Given the current Is it more meaningful to donate an extra dollar to the most funded projects or donate to underfunded but very valuable projects?
Projects like Turbogeth, Nethermind and RadicalXChange can still take advantage of meager funds to do many things. Since this round of matching funds has reached such a large scale for the first time, we have to pay attention to this issue.
Especially if the scale of matching funds becomes larger and larger in the future, the ecological Is the system able to allocate funds correctly and avoid overpayment of certain items? Or, if excessive concentration of funds cannot be avoided, is the result really that bad? Perhaps the possibility of being the center of attention in a grant round and receiving a $500,000 windfall can incentivize public good contributors to participate!
These answers we don’t yet know as the trial scales up , may be revealed for the first time.
Types of funding
The current concept of categories in Gitcoin Grants is a bit strange. Each category has a fixed amount of matching funds that is distributed among the projects in that category. What this mechanism basically says is that we can trust the community to choose between projects within a category, but first we need independent technical judgment on how funds should be allocated between categories.
But since then things have become more paradoxical. The "collection" function was introduced halfway through the seventh round:
If we click "Add to Cart" in a collection, it will add all the items in that collection to the cart. This feature is weird because the author seems to be sending the exact opposite message: users who don't know the details can choose to allocate funds to entire categories, but users can't make more proactive decisions within each category unless manually edited quantity.
So what is it? We trust radical quadratic democracy to distribute within each category, but ignore the distribution between categories? We trust it to allocate between each category without letting people make more granular decisions in it? I suggest that in round eight, these philosophical challenges should be considered more deeply and a more principled approach developed.
One solution is to set up only one fund matching pool, and then all Categories are used as an automatic UI layer. Another option is to activate specific categories in the form of an "affirmative action".
For example, we can divide the community category by region, each region Set up matching pools of $25,000 such as North America + Oceania, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, India, Central Asia + Southeast Asia, so that more neglected regional projects can benefit from it. There are many possibilities! There is also a hybrid route where the "primary" pool of capital can refinance itself in the previous round!
Authentication
With collusion, fake accounts, and other attacks on Gitcoin Grants on the rise, Round 7 added an additional verification option, using BrightID, based on a decentralized social graph, and linking users of the project to Volume increased tenfold:
This is actually good, and besides helping BrightID grow, puts the project through a test: there is now a huge incentive to try and create tons of fake accounts! BrightID will face the daunting challenge of lowering the barriers to entry for common users while at the same time defending against attacks from fake and duplicate accounts. I look forward to seeing them take steps to meet the challenge!
ZK rollups for scalability
Finally, Gitcoin Grants adopted the ZK rollup technology ZkSync for the first time in this round to reduce payment fees:
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The main result is simply that ZK rollup has indeed succeeded in reducing fees! The user experience is also good. At present, many optimistic and ZK rollup projects are seeking to integrate with wallets, which can further promote the usability and security of L2 expansion technology.
Conclusion
Round 7 is critical for Gitcoin Grants. Matching funds are more sustainable. Funding is now large enough to fund quadratic freelancers enough to raise concerns about whether a project is getting "too much money"! Authentication is also moving forward. With the addition of the ZkSync ZK rollup function, payments are also more efficient. I look forward to seeing how Gitcoin Grants grows.
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