Gitcoin began in 2017 as a passion project for Kevin Owocki with the goal of empowering developers to earn while building open source, digital public goods projects. By that fall, Gitcoin gained the support of Joe Lubin and was brought into the ConsenSys family, where Kevin and the team experimented with novel funding models.

Now, over three years later, Gitcoin is the place where builders and protocols come together to develop and fund the open web. So far we’ve helped builders raise and distribute almost $20M through bounties, hackathons, and quarterly grants rounds. Gitcoin Grants is the largest implementation of Quadratic Funding, a radically democratic approach to allocating resources for public goods. As proud as we are of our past successes, we are even more excited for what comes next.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Gitcoin has successfully grown our treasury by $11.3mm. This investment was led by Paradigm, with additional investments from IDEO, 1kx, Electric Capital, Naval, Balaji, The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures, and many others. Their investment allows Gitcoin to spin out from ConsenSys and capitalize the company so we may better fulfill our mission. Gitcoin believes in the collective creation of open source, an open internet, and open economies.

The Gitcoin Team would love to express our thanks to ConsenSys for their support as we have matured into an independent organization. Also, hello and welcome to our new partners who each bring unique and incredible value to our ecosystem.

“The Paradigm team are some of the best mechanism designers in the space, and we are looking forward to partnering with them on advancing real world applications of Quadratic Funding.”

Kevin Owocki

Finally, we are deeply grateful for the participation and enthusiasm of the Gitcoin and greater Web3 communities. You are our compass, and we look forward to getting you more involved with things to come.

While the corporate structure of Gitcoin is changing, our accountability remains to the community, and our singular focus will always be to support open source and digital public goods. We are extremely excited to leverage these new relationships and our new structure to continue empowering builders. Paradigm, ConsenSys, and the rest of our partners share our vision of helping the open web build itself. As always, we are stronger together.

— Kyle & The Gitcoin Team