Today’s the day! We’re excited to announce Gitcoin Grants Round 10 began this morning at 9:00 AM MST. Through the past 9 rounds, and with the support of the Web3 community, we’ve helped distribute over $10 million to over 1,600 key ecosystem projects. These projects represent a wide variety of public goods, from Ethereum infrastructure and DeFi, to media publications and artistic ventures.
Today’s the day! We’re excited to announce Gitcoin Grants Round 10 began this morning at 9:00 AM MST. Through the past 9 rounds, and with the support of the Web3 community, we’ve helped distribute over $10 million to over 1,600 key ecosystem projects. These projects represent a wide variety of public goods, from Ethereum infrastructure and DeFi, to media publications and artistic ventures.
All of this success is made possible through the generosity of our community and the support of our Funders League — pillar organizations committed to building and funding digital public goods. This group includes Badger, Ethereum Foundation, Optimism, and Yearn as founding members, and some new faces for Grants Round 10 including ENS, Unstoppable Domains, Aragon, DoraHacks, CMS Holdings, PastaDAO, and Teller. Huge thanks to all of these projects for supporting public goods!
Gitcoin Grants is our quarterly fundraising event that enables open source projects of all sizes to seek and receive community funding. It contains two parts, a crowdfunding round and a large matching pool of funds. Based on the results of the crowdfund, grant projects are awarded a percentage of the match pool.
Our core mission is to grow digital open source development because we believe it’s an essential force for good in the world. And we know the best way to promote open source development is by providing opportunities for earning while building it. On Gitcoin builders can earn year round in sponsored hackathons and through bounties, but during Grants Rounds there is a focused coordination of project launches and community investment that expands earning opportunities. There’s no better time to start and fund open source projects.
But that’s not all! Gitcoin Grants is the largest experiment in Quadratic Funding in the world. Quadratic Funding is a mechanism that ensures that the projects our community values the most get the most funding. We believe QF is the optimal way to democratically decide how to prioritize allocation of a limited pool of resources. Quadratic Funding is a compelling solution for any community looking to coordinate, fund, and build public goods projects, and Grants Rounds are a great opportunity for all of us to test it out together.
Grants Round 10 would not be complete without an accompanying Hackathon. And so far we have over 2300 people signed up to participate. This is huge! Hackathons help bootstrap the next wave of grants projects. As a project that came in part out of a hackathon ourselves, we’re excited about the potential for events like these to exponentially grow Web3 development, and showcase just how far public goods funding can take us.
If you’re not sure what you want to do yet, or just want to jam, please join us in the community Discord, where grantees, contributors, and hackers will be hanging out during the round!
In May of this year we launched the GTC governance token in order to decentralize Gitcoin. GR10 is one of the first opportunities our community will have to use the token to govern. They will decide round sizes, round distribution, payouts, and more. So far the community has ratified round size and distribution. The funds that have generously been donated by our Funders League will be distributed to the following categories:
Grants are for open source projects looking to fundraise and benefit from the Quadratic Funding mechanism. Start by creating a page for your project (or yourself!) and let your community know where to find your grant. Donors will signal support for your project by contributing funds to your grant. Then, the Quadratic Funding algorithm determines what percentage of the matching pool is allotted to each project.
If you’re a grantee, the key thing to note is that both the number and amount of contributions to your project influence the total amount of the match pool allocated to you. If you’re a contributor, even a small contribution can have a huge impact on the amount of matching funding a grantee gets, so if you like a project, even 5 DAI can go a long way!
Gitcoin Grants is all about communities working together to help fund and signal support for public goods. We all benefit from public goods, and Quadratic Funding is an optimal way of democratically allocating resources to them.
Head over to this Quadratic Funding tool to play with the nuts and bolts of QF!
GR9 saw over $1,400,000 raised through crowdfunding from over 12,000 donors, plus $500,000 contributed by the Funders League, and $150,000 in hackathon prizes. That’s over $ $2,00,000 paid to developers building Web3 public goods projects!
As mentioned above, Gitcoin launched GTC to decentralize governance to the community, through Stewards. Community Stewards will be heavily involved in Grants Rounds moving forward, deciding round size and allocation, ratifying payouts, and even helping to prevent fraud, sybil, and collusion attacks against Quadratic Funding. For GR10, the Stewards ratified these round categories: Infrastructure, DApp Tech, Community, Latin America, NFTs, and DGov. Interested in participating in Gitcoin governance? Get involved by joining a workstream, or join the discussion here. Not sure to begin? Meet the Gitcoin community in Discord.
Speaking of preventing Sybil and other attack vectors, the best way to ensure the integrity of Quadratic Funding is through robust identity verification. In prior rounds, verified users were given a small Trust Bonus that ultimately made their donation more impactful. In GR10, we are expanding the Trust Bonus to further incentivize users to verify their identity and ultimately help defend QF against Sybil attacks. Learn more about it here.
After debuting in GR8, this is the third ever Gitcoin Grants Hackathon. This combined event is a chance to rally the community around building and funding projects they care about. Read more here.
We’re offering a full slate of webinars, workshops, and community discussions around Grants and Hackathons. Meetups take place through Airmeet, beginning Wednesday, June 16th. Signup here to stay in the loop. Or follow the event calendar here. Join the kickoff Chill N’ Shill event here.
We’d also like to give a huge thanks to the Funders League for continuing to support open source public goods development. Our membership keeps growing! We can’t thank you enough for your support, and we hope the rest of the Ethereum community will thank you too.
Individual Donors
If your organization is interested in joining the Funders League, please reach out here!
With the launch of Grants Round 10, we hope that the Gitcoin platform and community will help you connect and engage with the amazing, flourishing Web3 ecosystem, so that we can all create valuable relationships while growing open source, together.
—The Gitcoin Team