On Wednesday, May 12, 2021 Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin sent 49 trillion Akita Inu tokens (AKITA) worth approximately $5mm at the time of this posting to the Gitcoin Community’s multisig wallet. This wallet is used to offer matching funds for Gitcoin Grants rounds. Gitcoin Grants is a quarterly crowdfunding campaign for open source projects. These projects get a portion of the match funds based on their fundraising success.

Vitalik received a large supply of dog-themed crypto tokens including AKITA and gifted them to several Ethereum ecosystem projects and charities.

Gitcoin is in the process of entrusting governance over its treasury and roadmap to the community. While the Gitcoin Team is thankful to Vitalik, we are unsure how these tokens will impact Gitcoin’s mission to build and fund open source projects. In keeping with the Gitcoin Team’s commitment to decentralization, the Gitcoin community itself will decide how to best use them.

The process of decentralizing Gitcoin’s governance began with the multisg which is now managed by a collection of Ethereum’s most trusted community members. But over the next several months and years, the Gitcoin Team will empower the community to take an increasingly active role in governance through Community Stewards. The Gitcoin Team anticipates that their first major order of business will be to decide what to do with Vitalik’s generous gift.

For more information about Gitcoin, please visit gitcoin.co, or join the conversation in Discord. To learn more about Gitcoin’s progress towards decentralization, please visit gov.gitcoin.co.