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Review of Gitcoin’s 4th round of secondary financing: Is it reasonable to get more than 20,000 US dollars to operate Twitter?

Vitalik Buterin

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A total of 20 projects have been funded in this funding round, with some new twists on the horizon.

Original title: "A Review of Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Round 4"

Original author: Vitalik Buterin

Original source: Hackernoon

As the "arsenal" of Ethereum, Gitcoin has a steady stream of <success-feedback-success> The benign model supports the development and sustainability of Ethereum. Projects developed under the auspices of Gitcoin are the focus of the community. Recently, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, reviewed Gitcoin’s fourth round of secondary financing. A total of 20 projects were funded in this financing, and some new changes have emerged. The following are some key points selected by Rhythm, and the original text can be found at the link at the end of the article.

In general, the difference between the third round of financing and the fourth round of financing is that the third round is mainly technical category projects, and also includes a small number of other category projects, such as EthHub; the fourth round has two different categories, one is still technology projects, with a matching pool of $125000, and the other is media projects, with a matching pool of $75000 .

The latter covers media-related content such as documentation, translations, community events, and news coverage, which is Exploring deep questions related to institutional design and political science offers new insights.

Rhythm Note: Quadratic financing is a decentralized governance mechanism that enables the community to allocate funds to basic public projects in a certain way , choosing the public projects they consider most valuable. As the core of secondary financing, the matching fund pool is supported by enterprises, individuals and even blockchain protocols, and the funds collected in this part can be used to amplify individual donations to different projects, even up to 27 times.

Technical projects: smooth as usual

Compared with the third round of Grant, the main changes of technical projects are:< /p>

(i) Increased funding for Tornado.Cash;

(ii) The importance of eth2.0 clients has declined, and various practical applications have increased.

Tornado Cash is an Ethereum anonymous transaction platform based on trustless smart contracts. As the Ethereum community is currently very worried about the protection of user privacy and security (Rhythm Note, here Vitalik linked the news that Jeffrey Wilcke, the co-founder of Ethereum, has sold a large amount of Ethereum), and is eager to find a solution. Tornado.Cash is in just a few It went from strength to strength within the month, accumulating a whopping $31,200 in prize money. If this amount of money can be received every two months, then Tornado.Cash can pay two employees $7,800 per month, which means that for the first time, the goal of "quadratic freelancers" has been achieved.

In addition, projects that have received funding include Dappnode, Sablier, DefiZap, and Uniswap.

Overall, the Gitcoin Sustainability Fund received over $13,000 in funding, addressing The problem of insufficient funds in the previous round of fundraising. All in all, this fundraise provides sufficient financial support for projects that can meet the real needs of the community.

Compared with previous rounds of fundraising, this There is another major breakthrough in financing. That is, most of the funds in this round have turned to the other direction, that is, projects other than the Ethereum Foundation funding projects, rather than eth2.0 clients.

Media projects: sudden emergence

From the picture above, the media projects that have obtained financing include the Week In Ethereum News (a news media that collects Ethereum), and There are 10 subjects including Twitter account @antiprosynth.

Among them, "@antiprosynth" is a member of the Ethereum community who is very active on Twitter, promoting Ethereum A forum to refute misinformation from Bitcoin maximalists, he sought funding from the Gitcoin QF crowd to support his twitter campaign.

Surprisingly, at its peak, the data showed that he expected a match of over $20,000, which naturally sparked controversy and many criticized it , and questioned whether Twitter accounts are a legitimate public good.

On the face of it, a guy getting paid $20,000 to run a Twitter account is ridiculous indeed. After all, perhaps this is how effective marketing works in 2020, and what we need to adapt is our expectations. Some argue that supporting this community member is an overpayment, as Twitter hype provides far less long-term value than something more substantive like an EthHub or Zero Knowledge podcast, etc.

Fortunately, in the next ten days, more donations flowed into other candidates, "@antiprosynth" The matching amount on Ethereum has also dropped to $11,316, which is still a pretty high amount, on par with EthHub and lower than Week in Ethereum. And the debate over whether such funding is justified is ongoing.

Over the past few months, fundraising for public goods has become a major topic of discussion in the crypto community. We are seeing more discussion of strategies for providing long-term funding sources for larger quadratic matching pools. If we want the Ethereum community to play a leading role in addressing the challenges of raising funds for public goods with a market-based, neutral and credible decentralized solution, then we need to have more discussions to meet various challenge.