Type: Report
Authors: Gitcoin Research
Sources:
- Ethan Roland & Gregory Landua — Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-capital Abundance
- Permaculture and the 8 Forms of Capital — Resilience.org
- GreenPill — 8 Forms of Capital: The Fascinating World of Economies, Societies, and Value
The Problem with Measuring Everything in Dollars
Public goods funding has a measurement problem. Not a lack of measurement — an excess of the wrong kind.
When Gitcoin Grants runs a quadratic funding round, the output is measured in dollars: how much was donated, how much was matched, which projects received the most funding. When Optimism runs a RetroPGF round, the input is denominated in OP tokens and the impact is evaluated largely through quantitative metrics — GitHub commits, user counts, TVL influenced. When impact certificates are issued, they represent claims on future value that is almost always conceived in financial terms.
These measurements are not wrong. They are incomplete. They capture one form of capital — financial — while systematically ignoring seven others. And the things we fail to measure, we fail to value. The things we fail to value, we fail to fund.
The Eight Forms of Capital, a framework developed by Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua in their work Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-capital Abundance, offers a lens for seeing what our current metrics miss. Originally rooted in permaculture design principles, the framework identifies eight distinct types of capital that flow through any healthy system. Applying it to public goods funding reveals how much value is being created — and destroyed — outside the narrow window of what we currently measure.
The Eight Forms
1. Financial Capital
Money, currencies, securities, and other instruments of financial exchange. This is the form of capital that dominates how we think about funding, value, and impact. It is the most liquid, the most fungible, and the most legible form of capital — which is precisely why it is overweighted.
Financial capital is a medium of exchange, not a measure of value. A project that receives $100,000 in grants is not necessarily more valuable than one that receives $10,000. The funding amount reflects the project's ability to attract financial capital through existing mechanisms, which depends on factors — marketing skill, social connections, narrative appeal — that are only loosely correlated with actual impact.
In public goods funding, financial capital is both the input (what funders contribute) and the metric (what is measured). This circularity creates a blind spot: the system is optimized to produce financial outcomes and measure financial outcomes, missing the majority of value that public goods create.
2. Material Capital
Non-living physical resources: tools, buildings, infrastructure, raw materials, hardware. In the digital public goods context, material capital includes servers, network infrastructure, hardware wallets, and the physical equipment used to develop and deploy software.
Material capital is often invisible in public goods accounting. When a core protocol developer uses their personal computer, an office they pay for, and internet infrastructure maintained by others, that material capital subsidizes the public good being produced. None of it shows up in the project's funding metrics.
This matters because material capital requirements create barriers to entry. Projects in regions with expensive infrastructure or unreliable internet bear hidden costs that are not reflected in funding allocations. A funding system that accounts only for financial capital systematically disadvantages contributors in under-resourced contexts.
3. Living Capital
The biological resources and ecological systems that sustain life: soil, water, seeds, forests, biodiversity. In the regenerative economics tradition, living capital is considered the foundation of all other forms — the ultimate source from which all value derives.
At first glance, living capital seems distant from digital public goods. It is not. The crypto ecosystem consumes significant energy and rare-earth materials. The people who build public goods depend on food systems, clean water, and breathable air. More importantly, many public goods projects — particularly in the ReFi (regenerative finance) space — are directly aimed at restoring living capital: reforestation projects, biodiversity monitoring, regenerative agriculture.
Funding mechanisms that evaluate these projects purely on financial metrics miss their primary output. A reforestation project's value is not in the tokens it generates but in the living capital it restores. Impact certificates and attestations are beginning to address this, but they remain early and rudimentary.
4. Social Capital
The networks of relationships, trust, and reciprocity that enable cooperation. Social capital is the goodwill generated by serving a community, the favors owed and returned, the reputation that opens doors.
Social capital is arguably the most important form of capital in the public goods ecosystem — and the most poorly measured. Gitcoin Grants rounds are profoundly shaped by social capital: projects with well-connected founders, large Twitter followings, and strong community relationships consistently attract more donations. The mechanism amplifies social capital through quadratic funding, where broad community support matters more than large individual contributions.
But social capital is double-edged. When it becomes the primary currency of funding allocation, it creates a system where access to networks matters more than quality of work. New entrants, contributors from underrepresented regions, and those who lack social media presence are structurally disadvantaged — not because their work is less valuable, but because they have less social capital to convert into financial capital through existing mechanisms.
A mature public goods funding system would measure social capital explicitly — tracking not just who received funding but what relationships were built, what trust was generated, and how the social fabric of the community was strengthened or weakened by each funding round.
5. Intellectual Capital
Knowledge, ideas, frameworks, and the capacity for understanding. This includes both codified knowledge (documentation, research papers, educational materials) and tacit knowledge (expertise, design intuition, architectural judgment).
The public goods ecosystem produces enormous amounts of intellectual capital. Research papers on mechanism design. Documentation for open-source protocols. Educational content that onboards new contributors. Governance frameworks that other DAOs adopt and adapt. Analyses of what works and what doesn't in capital allocation.
Most of this intellectual capital is unfunded or underfunded. A researcher who publishes a paper on quadratic funding that shapes how millions of dollars are allocated may receive no compensation at all. A developer who writes comprehensive documentation that saves thousands of hours of debugging across the ecosystem may be less valued than a developer who ships a flashy new feature.
Retroactive funding mechanisms are better positioned to capture intellectual capital because they can evaluate the downstream impact of knowledge production after the fact. But they still struggle to measure the diffuse, long-term influence of ideas that shape how entire communities think and act.
6. Experiential Capital
The embodied knowledge that comes from practice — the "street smarts" of the permaculture tradition. This is the difference between knowing how quadratic funding works in theory and having run twenty rounds of it. It is the feel for what a healthy community looks like, the instinct for when a governance proposal will fail, the pattern recognition that comes from years of building in a particular domain.
Experiential capital is transmitted through mentorship, apprenticeship, and participation — not through documentation or formal education. It is what makes a senior contributor irreplaceable in ways that their code commits do not capture.
In public goods funding, experiential capital is almost never measured. A project run by first-time founders and a project run by veterans with decades of combined experience are evaluated on the same metrics. The veterans' experiential capital — their ability to avoid common mistakes, navigate governance conflicts, and adapt to changing conditions — is invisible to the funding mechanism.
This has practical consequences. Projects fail not because they lack financial capital but because they lack experiential capital — the knowledge of how to manage a team, scope a roadmap, engage a community, and adapt when plans go wrong. Funding mechanisms that account only for financial inputs miss this entirely.
7. Spiritual Capital
The values, beliefs, and sense of purpose that guide action. In the permaculture tradition, spiritual capital is what gives people a reason to show up, to persist through difficulty, and to orient their work toward something larger than personal gain.
This is the most uncomfortable form of capital for a technically oriented community to discuss. But it is arguably the most important for understanding why public goods get funded at all. The entire regen movement is built on spiritual capital — a shared belief that technology should serve collective flourishing, that the commons deserves protection, that building for others is meaningful work.
Spiritual capital is what distinguishes a public goods contributor from a mercenary. It is what keeps maintainers working on critical infrastructure when they could earn far more in the private sector. It is what draws thousands of people to Schelling Point conferences, GreenPill podcast episodes, and regenerative economics research — not for financial return, but for the sense of participating in something meaningful.
When spiritual capital is depleted — through burnout, disillusionment, or the perception that the ecosystem does not value their contributions — contributors leave. And their departure is a loss that no amount of financial capital can replace, because the motivation to do the work cannot be purchased.
Public goods funding mechanisms rarely account for spiritual capital. They do not measure whether a funding round inspired or demoralized its participants. They do not track whether contributors feel valued, purposeful, and connected to a larger mission. They should.
8. Cultural Capital
The shared stories, myths, art, music, aesthetics, and worldviews that bind a community together. Cultural capital is the collective sense of identity that makes a group more than the sum of its individuals.
The Ethereum ecosystem is rich in cultural capital. The solarpunk aesthetic. The language of "public goods" and "coordination failure." The memes, the inside jokes, the shared references to Vitalik's blog posts and EIP proposals. The rituals of governance — proposal discussions, snapshot votes, community calls. The mythology of the ecosystem's founding and its aspirational future.
This cultural capital is not incidental to public goods funding — it is foundational. The reason quadratic funding works at Gitcoin is not just because the math is elegant. It is because the community has developed a cultural identity around the idea that funding public goods is important, that small contributions matter, and that participating in a grants round is a meaningful act of community membership.
Cultural capital is produced by artists, writers, podcasters, event organizers, community managers, and storytellers. It is almost never funded proportionally to its importance. A single meme that onboards thousands of people to the regen movement may have more impact than a research paper that reaches hundreds. But the meme creator receives nothing while the researcher might eventually receive a retroactive grant.
Applying the Framework to Public Goods Funding
The Eight Forms of Capital framework does not just describe what exists. It prescribes what should change.
What We Currently Measure
Most public goods funding systems measure:
- Financial inputs (donations, matching funds)
- Financial outputs (TVL, revenue, token value)
- Quantitative activity metrics (GitHub commits, user counts, transaction volume)
What We Should Also Measure
A multi-capital evaluation framework would additionally track:
- Social capital: Network effects, trust relationships, community engagement, mentorship
- Intellectual capital: Knowledge products, documentation quality, research influence, educational impact
- Experiential capital: Team experience, track record, domain expertise, lessons learned
- Cultural capital: Narrative influence, aesthetic contributions, community identity building, meme production
- Living capital: Ecological impact, resource consumption, regenerative outcomes
- Spiritual capital: Contributor motivation, mission alignment, burnout indicators, sense of purpose
- Material capital: Infrastructure dependencies, hardware requirements, physical resource access
Design Implications
Accounting for multiple forms of capital has concrete implications for mechanism design:
Impact attestations could be expanded beyond financial and quantitative metrics to include attestations of social capital creation ("this project built a community of 500 active contributors"), intellectual capital production ("this research informed the design of three subsequent protocols"), or cultural capital generation ("this podcast onboarded 10,000 new participants to the regen movement").
Retroactive funding could weight evaluations to account for non-financial forms of capital. A project that produced limited financial returns but generated significant intellectual and social capital — like a research group that published foundational work or a community that mentored dozens of new contributors — would be evaluated on its full multi-capital impact rather than narrow financial metrics.
Quadratic funding could incorporate multi-capital signals into its matching formula. Instead of matching based solely on the number and size of financial contributions, the mechanism could incorporate signals of social capital (community endorsements), intellectual capital (peer review assessments), and experiential capital (track record evaluations).
Impact certificates (Hypercerts) could represent claims on multiple forms of capital simultaneously. A Hypercert for an educational program might represent not just the financial value of skills transferred but the social capital of the community built, the intellectual capital of the curriculum developed, and the experiential capital of the practitioners trained.
The Conversion Problem
One of the central insights of the Eight Forms of Capital framework is that different forms of capital can be converted into each other — but the conversions are often lossy, slow, and culturally mediated.
Financial capital can be converted into social capital (by funding community events), intellectual capital (by funding research), or material capital (by purchasing equipment). But the reverse conversions are harder. How do you convert social capital into financial capital? Through fundraising, which depends on the very social networks being leveraged. How do you convert intellectual capital into financial capital? Through commercialization, which often requires compromising the open nature of the knowledge being produced.
Public goods funding exists precisely in the gap between forms of capital that are easy to create but hard to convert. An open-source developer generates enormous intellectual capital (code, documentation, knowledge) and social capital (community, reputation, trust). But converting these into the financial capital needed to sustain their work requires mechanisms — grants, donations, retroactive funding — that are awkward, unreliable, and undersized relative to the value produced.
The Eight Forms of Capital framework suggests that this conversion problem is not a flaw to be solved but a fundamental feature of how value works. The goal is not to make all forms of capital fungible with financial capital. The goal is to build systems that recognize and reward all forms of capital on their own terms.
Degenerative, Sustainable, and Regenerative Systems
Roland and Landua's framework distinguishes three types of systems based on how they treat multi-capital stocks:
Degenerative systems extract capital faster than it is replenished. They deplete financial capital through Ponzi dynamics, social capital through exploitative relationships, intellectual capital through closed-source enclosure, living capital through resource extraction, and cultural capital through homogenization and erasure.
Sustainable systems maintain capital stocks at current levels. They do not deplete but they do not grow. They are static — preserving what exists without building toward abundance.
Regenerative systems create more capital than they consume, across multiple forms simultaneously. They build financial sustainability while also strengthening social networks, producing knowledge, cultivating shared culture, restoring ecological health, and nurturing the motivation and purpose that keep participants engaged.
Public goods funding mechanisms should aspire to be regenerative — not just in the financial sense of sustaining projects, but in the multi-capital sense of building all eight forms of capital simultaneously. A truly regenerative funding round would not just distribute money. It would strengthen community bonds (social capital), produce knowledge about what works (intellectual capital), train participants in governance (experiential capital), reinforce the culture of public goods funding (cultural capital), and deepen contributors' sense of purpose and connection (spiritual capital).
Some funding rounds already achieve this. Gitcoin Grants rounds are cultural events as much as financial ones — they bring communities together, generate discussion, and reinforce the identity of the regen movement. But this multi-capital generation is incidental rather than intentional. It is not measured, not optimized, and not rewarded.
Practical Steps Forward
Moving from a single-capital to a multi-capital framework requires changes at several levels:
For Mechanism Designers
Design evaluation frameworks that explicitly account for non-financial forms of capital. This does not require quantifying everything — qualitative attestations, narrative evaluations, and peer assessments can capture forms of value that numbers miss. The goal is not precision but visibility: making non-financial capital legible so that it can be valued and rewarded.
For Funders
Expand impact evaluation criteria beyond financial and quantitative metrics. Ask not just "how many users?" but "how strong is the community?" Not just "how much TVL?" but "what knowledge was produced?" Not just "what was the ROI?" but "are the contributors thriving?"
For Projects
Document and communicate the full range of capital your work produces. If your project builds community (social capital), produces documentation (intellectual capital), mentors new contributors (experiential capital), or creates cultural artifacts (cultural capital), make these outputs visible. Funding mechanisms can only reward what they can see.
For the Ecosystem
Invest in measurement infrastructure for non-financial forms of capital. Impact attestations, reputation systems, community health metrics, knowledge graph analysis, and contributor well-being surveys are all tools that can make multi-capital evaluation practical. This measurement infrastructure is itself a public good — and it should be funded as one.
Conclusion
The Eight Forms of Capital framework is not a complete theory of value. It is a corrective — a reminder that the financial lens through which we currently evaluate public goods captures only a fraction of the value being created and destroyed.
Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua developed this framework in the context of permaculture and regenerative agriculture, where the primacy of living capital is obvious. A farm that maximizes financial returns while depleting its soil is degenerative regardless of its profit margin. The same logic applies to digital ecosystems: a public goods funding system that maximizes dollar throughput while depleting the social capital, intellectual capital, and spiritual capital of its participants is degenerative regardless of how much money it distributes.
The challenge for the public goods funding ecosystem is to build mechanisms that see all eight forms of capital — that fund the social fabric as well as the code, the cultural narrative as well as the protocol, the experiential wisdom as well as the documentation. This is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for building systems that are genuinely regenerative rather than merely financially sustainable.
The first step is to see what we have been missing. The Eight Forms of Capital framework provides the lens. What we build with that lens is up to us.
