How Gitcoin 2.0 Could Someday Help Reward People for Doing Good - Ep. 624

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In this episode, Laura interviews Meg Lister, GM of Grants Labs at Gitcoin, and Kevin Owocki, co-founder of Gitcoin. 

They discuss the evolution of Gitcoin from a centralized platform to a decentralized suite of protocols, Gitcoin 2.0, which allows any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based ecosystem to fund its public goods. They also talk about the various funding mechanisms available, including quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, and conviction voting. 

Learn more: What Is Retroactive Public Goods Funding?

The team is also exploring more futuristic concepts such as private voting systems, angel investing 2.0, and impact attestations. The ultimate goal for Gitcoin is to create a capital allocation infrastructure that funds what matters to communities, whether they are towns, states, countries, or online interest groups.

Show highlights:

• Kevin's background and how he came to found Gitcoin and why Meg joined the company
• The differences between Gitcoin 1.0 and 2.0
• What quadratic funding is and why it is important in the blockchain ecosystem
• The problem of sybil attacks and how Gitcoin Passport aims to solve it
• Why Gitcoin has changed its approach to put more focus on scaling Ethereum rather than other types of grants
• How Gitcoin is trying to solve capital allocation efficiency with Allo (Capital Allocation) Protocol
• What streaming quadratic funding is and how it differs from traditional quadratic funding
• How retroactive public goods funding (RPGF) works
• What conviction voting is and how it addresses some of the current problems in DAOs
• Which projects are using Gitcoin Passport and what for
• Why Gitcoin is so focused on the Ethereum ecosystem and whether they will launch in other chains
• What the purposes of the GTC token are and how it could become a flywheel for Gitcoin
• How Gitcoin can become sustainable long-term, since it's free to use at the moment
• The features that are coming down the line for Gitcoin, including privacy and onchain "angel investing" 
• What the future could look like if Gitcoin succeeds in its mission, according to Kevin

Thank you to our sponsors!

• Polkadot

Guests:

• Kevin Owocki, Co-founder of Gitcoin
• Meg Lister, GM of Grants Labs at Gitcoin

Links

Gitcoin

• Gitcoin 2.0 Whitepaper, co-authored by Kevin Owocki and Meg Lister
• Public Goods Funding: The New Meta | Kevin Owocki - Gitcoin, presentation at ETH Denver 2024
• Gitcoin Entering the End Game 
• Gitcoin’s Citizen Grants program
• Impact report
• CoinDesk: Why Crypto’s Most Altruistic Project Is Going (Kinda) Corporate
• Blockworks: Gitcoin is restructuring to focus on grants for the Ethereum ecosystem 

Allo Protocol

• Announcement thread

Web3 Ecosystem Funding

• State of Web3 Grants Report
• Web3 Innovations in Public Goods Funding
• How To Fund Innovation: A Guide to Web3 Grants, Meg Lister for BeIn Crypto

Quadratic funding

• ORIGINAL WHITE PAPER, co-authored by Vitalik Buterin 

Retro PGF

• Unchained: What Is Retroactive Public Goods Funding?

Passport

• Introducing Passport - Digital Identity as a Public Good 

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