In late 2023, the GreenPill Network ran one of the first real-world experiments combining hypercerts with quadratic funding, enabling its global network of local chapters to mint onchain impact certificates for their community activities and receive funding based on demonstrated contributions. The experiment, conducted during Gitcoin Grants Round 19 (GG19), used a custom fork of Grants Stack integrated with the Hypercerts protocol, built in collaboration with RaidGuild and the Hypercerts team. While the round was modest in scale -- 170 donors contributing $552 in direct donations plus $2,237 in matching -- it generated foundational lessons about the practicalities of impact certificate design, minting workflows, and evaluation that have shaped subsequent hypercerts development.
Background
Hypercerts are an onchain primitive for representing claims of impact. Conceived by Protocol Labs researchers and formalized in a 2022 whitepaper, hypercerts function as "carbon credits, but onchain and for any impact vector." Each hypercert encodes a claim about who did what work, during what time period, and with what scope of impact. They can be fractionalized, transferred, and evaluated, creating a foundation for retroactive funding markets where funders pay for verified past impact rather than speculative future proposals.
The GreenPill Network, founded by Kevin Owocki in 2022, is a decentralized collective of local chapters focused on regenerative cryptoeconomics. With over 15 active chapters worldwide -- from Nairobi to Berlin to Bogota -- GreenPill operates as a distributed network of community organizers running local events, education programs, and public goods initiatives. This distributed structure made it an ideal testbed for hypercerts: each chapter produces distinct, locally-scoped impact that is difficult to compare using traditional grant evaluation methods but well-suited to structured impact claims.
The challenge was practical: could a network of non-technical community organizers actually mint hypercerts for their work, and could those certificates serve as useful inputs to a funding round?
The Mechanism / Program
Technical Infrastructure
RaidGuild, a Web3 development collective, forked Gitcoin's Grants Stack to build a GreenPill-specific tool that integrated hypercerts into the grant application workflow. The key innovation was that every chapter applying to the GG19 community round was required to mint a hypercert representing their claimed impact as part of the application process. These hypercerts were then displayed on a custom-forked explorer page where donors could review both the standard grant application and the structured impact claim.
The Hypercerts protocol itself is built on the ERC-1155 semi-fungible token standard, allowing each hypercert to represent a unique claim while being divisible into fractions that can be distributed to contributors or sold to funders.
The GG19 Round
The GreenPill community round ran during GG19 (November 2023) as a quadratic funding round on the forked Grants Stack. Each participating chapter:
- Defined their impact claim -- specifying the work performed, time period, geographic scope, and beneficiaries.
- Minted a hypercert -- creating an onchain token representing that claim.
- Applied to the round -- submitting a standard grant application augmented with their hypercert.
- Received QF-allocated funding -- based on community donation patterns, with quadratic funding amplifying broad support.
The round attracted 170 donors who contributed $552 in direct donations, with $2,237 in matching funds distributed across participating chapters.
Evaluation and Documentation
The experiment was documented in a detailed retrospective published in December 2023 by co-authors Sejal Rekhan, Lanzdingz, and Bitbeckers. This analysis examined the minting process, donor behavior, and the extent to which hypercerts influenced funding decisions.
Outcomes
- Hypercerts successfully minted by non-technical users. Local chapter organizers with varying technical backgrounds were able to define impact claims and mint hypercerts as part of the application flow, validating the usability of the integrated tooling.
- 170 donors participated and contributed $552 in direct donations with $2,237 in matching, a modest but meaningful first round for a novel mechanism.
- Impact claims were heterogeneous. Chapters submitted claims ranging from local meetups and education workshops to ecosystem development and community onboarding, testing the hypercert framework's flexibility across impact types.
- Donor behavior was not strongly influenced by hypercert data. Preliminary analysis suggested that donors made allocation decisions based on familiar signals (project descriptions, team reputation) rather than the structured impact claims encoded in hypercerts.
- Technical integration proved feasible. The forked Grants Stack successfully handled hypercert minting within the application flow, demonstrating that impact certificates can be embedded in existing funding infrastructure.
Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Hypercert design complexity for grassroots organizers
Defining a well-scoped impact claim -- with clear boundaries around time, geography, beneficiaries, and contribution type -- was conceptually demanding for chapter leaders accustomed to narrative-based grant applications.
Solution: The GreenPill team provided templates and guidelines for impact claim definition. Future iterations could benefit from structured wizards or AI-assisted claim generation to reduce cognitive overhead.
Challenge: Donors did not engage deeply with hypercert data
Despite hypercerts being visible on the forked explorer, most donors appeared to make decisions based on familiar project-level information rather than structured impact claims.
Solution: This pointed to a need for better impact visualization tooling -- a challenge that GreenPill and Hypercerts subsequently addressed through their Optimism Grants Council-funded Impact Visualization Platform, selected as a finalist in early 2024.
Challenge: Small scale limited statistical significance
With 170 donors and $2,789 in total funding, the round was too small to draw robust conclusions about whether hypercerts improved allocation quality or donor decision-making.
Solution: The team framed the round as a learning experiment rather than a definitive test, using qualitative feedback and process observations to guide future iterations.
Challenge: Comparing heterogeneous impact claims
A meetup in Nairobi and a developer workshop in Berlin produce fundamentally different kinds of impact, making cross-chapter comparison difficult even with structured claims.
Solution: Rather than forcing a single evaluation metric, the experiment revealed the need for category-specific evaluation frameworks -- a design direction that influenced subsequent hypercerts tooling development.
Lessons Learned
- Minting is not the hard part; evaluation is. The technical process of creating hypercerts proved manageable, but making those certificates useful for funding decisions requires better visualization, context, and evaluation frameworks.
- Impact certificates must meet donors where they are. Structured impact data is only valuable if it is presented in formats that donors actually use when making decisions. Simply displaying hypercerts alongside traditional grant applications was insufficient to change behavior.
- Grassroots networks are ideal testbeds for impact primitives. The GreenPill Network's distributed, heterogeneous chapter structure provided a rich testing ground that exposed edge cases and design requirements that would not surface in more homogeneous settings.
- Forking existing infrastructure accelerates experimentation. Rather than building a standalone hypercerts funding platform, the team forked Grants Stack and integrated hypercerts into an existing workflow, dramatically reducing development time and leveraging familiar UX patterns.
- Impact certificates are a long game. A single round cannot establish a functioning impact market. The experiment was a necessary first step in building the habit, tooling, and evaluator infrastructure required for hypercerts to influence funding at scale.
Conclusion
The GreenPill Hypercerts experiment was a pioneering attempt to bridge the gap between impact certificate theory and grassroots funding practice. While the round was small and hypercerts did not yet demonstrably influence donor behavior, the experiment validated key technical assumptions, surfaced critical UX and evaluation challenges, and directly shaped the roadmap for subsequent hypercerts development. As the Hypercerts Foundation, GreenPill Network, and Gitcoin continue to iterate on impact-based funding mechanisms, this early experiment provides a grounded reference point for what works, what does not, and what remains to be built.
Sources
- Lessons from GreenPill Network's Hypercerts Impact Funding Experiment -- Gitcoin Governance Forum
- Better Impact Funding: The GreenPill/Hypercerts/Gitcoin Combo Move -- Gitcoin Governance Forum
- Hypercerts Overview -- Hypercerts Documentation
- Hypercerts: A New Primitive for Public Goods Funding -- Protocol Labs
- Updates from The GreenPill Network: March 2024 -- GreenPill Mirror
