Gitcoin DAO Strategic partner OKX: How to better stand with global developers?

preface

GitcoinDAO was founded with the mission of funding open source software developers who could create value. Using the novel quadratic financing (QF) approach (developed by Vitalik Buterin, Zo Hitzig, and E. Glen Weyl), Gitcoin has built a donation platform and distributed funds based on the collective wisdom of the community. Some of the earliest Gitcoin Grants have grown into notable success stories in the Ethereum ecosystem, including. Uniswap, WalletConnect, POAP, Yearn, Ethers.JS, Bankless  And so on. With the growth of Gitcoin, GitcoinDAO entered into a strategic partnership with industry leaders this past November to promote community-managed open source project funding.

Major partners of Gitcoin. OKX is the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and the leading Web3 ecosystem. Working with Gitcoin will expand GitCoin's global reach to more effectively serve the Asia-Pacific region and other emerging markets. OKX's commitment to user security, transparency and product innovation is critical to Gitcoin and all developers. Through OKX's existing set of decentralized Web 3 products, Gitcoin can advocate [funding for public goods] to a larger audience and jointly drive open source encryption innovation.

We take this opportunity to do business with you. Gitcoin Steward Bob Jiang  And head of OKX Ventures. Jeff Ren  Had a deep conversation. Bob Jiang has been involved in Gitcoin's community governance as Steward and is one of the most active voices for Gitcoin in the Asia-Pacific region. Jeff Ren is a well-known technology investor in Hong Kong. He has been rooted in the cryptocurrency field for many years, enabling dozens of top-notch projects.

They spoke systematically about the future of the Gitcoin/OKX partnership, shared their insights into industry trends, and shared their vision of how to advance the partnership in the Asia Pacific developer community.

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1. What is the starting point of Gitcoin's choice to expand so many strategic partnerships in community governance today? How does this help GitcoinDAO grow?

Bob Jiang:  Let me start with a brief introduction of the focus of GitcoinDAO's development. After launching some restructuring programs this year, we will focus on the construction of the Grants Protocol. There are three main roles in the fundraising activities of public goods projects: project providers, donor users, and matching donors.

Since the second half of this year, the market has been depressed, and we hope to be a beacon for developers in the industry, giving more confidence and support to project parties. Bringing in more industry leaders at this point in time will help keep the Gitcoin community afloat, keep it healthy and reach out to more project parties. Previous collaborations have been at the product level, such as product development and resource exchange among developers. This time, for example, in the cooperation with OKX, in addition to the underlying technological innovation, we can have some entry points in the promotion of Grants Protocol. More OKX Ecosystem projects and opportunities for users to learn about and participate in Gitcoin activities, and we look forward to the Eco-donation wheel led by OKX and OKC Chain.

2. What are the considerations behind OKX joining Gitcoin as a community governance advocate?

Jeff Ren:As one of the oldest crypto exchanges in the industry, serving our users is our number one priority. In addition, we are also developing a series of Web3 decentralized products. In the process, we understand the experience of developers and the pain points of marketization. The Web3 infrastructure was built in conjunction with our native ecology. Based on this point, we have been focusing on how we can continue to support and improve the Web3 open source community building, and bring product development help and guidance to more developers.

Since 2020, we have hosted many events for the developer community, such as the "Decentralized Application" Hackathons held by OKC Chain in 2020. Demo Days have been held in Silicon Valley, Boston, Hong Kong and Singapore to provide an opportunity for the community to learn from each other and share product innovations. Gitcoin has been bringing vitality and fresh blood to the Web3 world through crowdfunding donations over the years, which is also in line with OKX's core philosophy and development path. We hope to work with Gitcoin to serve the larger developer community.

3. As a builder of the open source community, Gitcoin and OKX are deep cultivators of the crypto industry. In today's market environment, what are the words for developers and their strategies for the future?

Bob Jiang: I've personally been fascinated by this Gitcoin vision since 2018. Kevin Owoki, the founder of Gitcoin, saw that developers were not being compensated in the open source community and came up with a number of ways to fix the problem. So from the very beginning, Gitcoin has been offering rewards, and in 2019 it will start offering matching donations. With the adoption of quadratic financing, project parties can get support from the community and other funds matching. So Gitcoin has been a leading voice in the developer community, helping to address the issue of compensation for developers. In the past, now and in the future, our biggest direction is to support the open source community and public goods.

In the last year or two, we have gradually expanded our focus from "electronic public goods" to all public goods. Such as climate change, peace, education and so on. We recently launched a new round of donations with UNESCO to use the power of Web3 to positively impact the world. Kevin has written two books, one is Green Pill and the other is Impact DAO, both of which emphasize positive impact, making Gitcoin a positive platform to connect people from different fields. And in the process, the capabilities and voices of developers in the cryptocurrency space will be heard by the larger world.

Jeff Ren: Since its inception in 2017, OKX has experienced several market fluctuations. We don't think we should lose faith in blockchain technology because of market volatility. The latest volatility is due to the influence of a few bad actors. In the face of Black Swan events, we as an industry need to constantly improve ourselves. For example, some risks can be exposed early through technological improvement, on-chain data review, market education, and community co-construction of on-chain products.

This event also strengthened our attention to product technology and risk awareness as ecological participants, and paid more attention to participating in the decentralized blockchain project of ecology. We also want to invite quality projects and developers to build ecology with us. In a depressed market environment, we hope to be a compliant, stable and innovative existence, providing support to developers with the same values. We just announced that we will launch a $100 million project eco-support program with the OKC Chain. In order to promote the healthy development of the industry, OKX will provide ecological, technical and liquidity support to qualified projects.

4. The Gitcoin community integrates 300,000 developers from all over the world. In such an environment, how involved are different communities (e.g., Europe and the United States, Asia Pacific, South America)? What are the pain points?

Bob Jiang:We once did a statistic that the Asia-Pacific region was actually the third or fourth largest in terms of the distribution of donors. In the Asia-Pacific region, especially in China, there are about 100 projects. Among them are the Mask Network, which has made great achievements. From Grant 4-5 as the project party to Gitcoin as the supporting donor, we are very pleased. Plancker DAO and Scroll_ZKP also supported the Greater China round, which was very successful in August.

Overall, however, participation in Gitcoin has been low in the Asia-Pacific region, especially among indie developers. At present, in the European and American developer communities, the offline interaction between the project and the donor community is more active. We also hope that the voice of the Asia-Pacific region will be heard in the coming year and that Gitcoin will become a bridge between Asia Pacific developers and the rest of the world through more online and offline activities.

5. OKX has invested heavily in funding technological innovation and community building. What is the effect so far? What are the industry feedback and next steps?

Jeff Ren:  In addition to continuously improving the user experience and technological innovation of the centralized exchange, we are also actively developing Web3 products and have built project libraries covering OKC chain, Web3 wallet, NFT market and DeFi. Among them, OKC is one of our main Bridges in the Web3 community. From the introduction of EVM virtual machine technology and Cosmos compatible IBC cross-chain scheme, it can be seen that the purpose of launching OKC is not to replace any chain, but to realize open source interoperability, co-prosperity and co-construction. The projects developed on the OKC chain can simply and efficiently realize the value intercommunication, user intercommunication and scene application intercommunication of the blockchain.

From the perspective of the roadmap, OKC is still in the process of improving its development. We welcome comments and suggestions from the existing 200 + projects and interested ecological participants so that we can make corrections. Our Demo Days and Hackathons around the world also continue to provide opportunities for the community to network and learn.

6. Given that OKX will start to participate in GitcoinDAO, what are the future cooperation directions that can be explored?

Bob Jiang:I'm looking forward to working closely with OKX in the future. From my perspective, there are two major directions of cooperation.

Dig deeper into the developer community. Let more Gitcoin developers join the OKX ecosystem and develop their own products with the OKX ecosystem. OKX and Gitcoin can help developers promote and develop their products through offline hackathons and online seminars.

Highlighting OKX's strengths and global reach has helped Gitcoin reach more developers and project parties. Especially in the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to Greater China, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, can have more in-depth community cooperation. I hope that participants in Gitcoin and OKX can take this opportunity to learn from each other, communicate and achieve achievements, and have a closer relationship.

Jeff Ren:We hope to use this opportunity to send a positive signal to the wider developer community. The collaboration with Gitcoin allows more users and projects in the OKX ecosystem to actively participate in Gitcoin fundraising and activities. Through a series of online cooperation and offline activities, we will help Gitcoin to be more widely publicized and promoted around the world, so that the developer community will have a higher awareness of Gitcoin.

At the same time, we look forward to being an active DAO contributor and a reliable eco-partner. Daily participation in forum discussion and community governance, as well as supporting proposals and budget management, fully support and multi-latitude promotion of various initiatives in GitcoinDAO

This article is based on contributions and does not represent the views of BlockBeats.  

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