Gitcoin Grants Seventh Round Review: 857 Projects Received $274,830 in Donations
source|vitalik.ca
Author | Vitalik Buterin
source|
Author | Vitalik Buterin
The seventh round of Gitcoin Grants has come to a successful conclusion! This round saw unprecedented interest and increased donations: 857 projects received $274,830 in donations and $450,000 in matching funds.
This round of donation categories has changed again, divided into "dapp technology", "infrastructure technology" and "community". The following are the final results of this round of Grant:
DeFi contributes matching funds!
ChainlinkIn this round, our matching amount is much higher than before. This is due to the first high level of participation in various defi projects in addition to the regular matching funds provided by the Ethereum Foundation and some other players:
, a smart contract oracle project
Ethereum Foundation
Optimism, layer2 optimistic rollup scheme
SynthetixEthereum Foundation
YearnBalancer, a decentralized exchange
Three Arrows Capital, a synthetic asset platform
Defiance Capital, a mortgage lending platform
Future Fund, investment fund
, investment fund
Yam, this is definitely not an investment fund
$MEME, meme coinbantg, Mariano Conti, Robert Leshner, Eric Conner, 10b576da0
, defi project
Some individual donors: ferretpatrol,
These programs provide substantial matching funds, some of which have been used in the current round, and some funds are set aside as a "contingency fund" in case the matching amount becomes smaller in future rounds.
This is a very important milestone for the ecology, because it shows that Gitcoin Grants is less dependent on a few funders and is moving in a more sustainable direction. But it’s worth asking, what is the driving force behind these funders? Is this sustainable?
There are several underlying motivations that may come into play to varying degrees:
To some extent, people are naturally selfless. Due to the rapid rise in interest and token prices, this round coincides with the defi projects being flooded, so donating some of them seems to be the "right choice"
Many members of the community have taken a critical attitude towards defi, viewing it as an unhelpful casino, which has a negative impact on Ethereum's lofty goals. Participating in public welfare is a statement of the defi project. They hope to become contributors to the ecology and help its development
If you put aside this negative perception, defi is a highly competitive market, and its development depends largely on community support and network effects, so forming goodwill in the ecosystem is very valuable for projects
The best developing defi projects capture enough revenue from such public goods that it is in their own interest to contribute
In DeFi projects, there is a high degree of "co-ownership", that is, holders of certain tokens also hold other tokens and ETH. So, even if it's not entirely in the project's interest to fund heavily, it might be in the interest of its token holders, who may also hold the tokens of the funded project and therefore push the project to fund.
Of course, the question we still need to think about is: How sustainable are these incentives? Could this altruistic and public relations incentive only happen for a one-off outbreak of this size, or could it be more sustainable? Is there any hope that the size of the quadratic financing match will be $2-3 million from here on out? If the answer is yes, then this will be great news for the diversification and democratization of public goods funding in the Ethereum ecosystem.Zero Knowledge PodcastThe quality of media recipients has generally improved
Both the last round and this round have presented a strange phenomenon, the status of the “controversial” community grantees in the previous rounds began to decline by itself. In theory, it seems that such grantees should continue to enjoy support from advocates, while critics remain powerless about it. Rather the fact that the biggest media category winner of this round is relatively uncontroversial and a popular mainstream member of the Ethereum ecosystem. Zero Knowledge Podcast (
) as an excellent podcast, even if it's aimed at a relatively small and somewhat technical audience, received a lot of funding in this round.
What happened? Why has the quality of media grantees improved naturally? Perhaps the self-correction ability of the quadratic financing mechanism is stronger than we imagined?Banklessoverpayment
For the first time in this round, the big winners in each category received massive funding. The White Hat Hacking project in the infrastructure category received $39,258, the community category
Podcasts took in $47,620. One way to think about this is: Are these grantees overfunded?
To be clear, I do think it would be highly inappropriate to try to establish some kind of ethics that dictates that contributors to public goods can only earn a certain level of compensation, and not go far beyond that. In contrast, those who issue tokens always earn a lot of money, this possibility is completely natural and fair for public product contributors (in addition, the amount of this round is converted to about 200,000 per year dollars, and it’s not even that high).
However, we can ask a more pragmatic question: Given the current reward structure, is it better to donate an extra dollar to the most funded project or to the underfunded but very valuable project? Significant? Projects like Turbogeth, Nethermind, and RadicalXChange can still do a lot with little money. Since this round of matching funds has reached such a large scale for the first time, we have to pay attention to this issue.
Especially if matching funds get larger in the future, will the ecosystem be able to properly allocate funds and avoid overpayment of certain projects? Or, if excessive concentration of funds cannot be avoided, is the result really that bad? Perhaps the possibility of being the center of attention in a grant round and receiving a $500,000 windfall can incentivize public good contributors to participate!
These answers, which we have yet to know, may be revealed for the first time as the scale of the experiment continues to expand.
But since then things have gone even more paradoxically. Halfway through the seventh round the "
collection” function
So what is it? We trust radical quadratic democracy to distribute within each category, but ignore the distribution between categories? We trust it to allocate between each category without letting people make more granular decisions in it? I suggest that in round eight, these philosophical challenges should be considered more deeply and a more principled approach developed.
Authentication
One solution is to only set up a fund matching pool, and then all categories are used as an automatic UI layer. Another option is to activate specific categories as an "affirmative action". For example, we can divide the community category by geography, and set up a matching fund pool of 25,000 US dollars in each geography, such as North America + Oceania, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, India, Central Asia + Southeast Asia, so that more can be ignored regional projects benefit from it. There are many possibilities! There is also a hybrid route, where the "primary" pool can refinance itself in a previous round!BrightIDAuthentication
With collusion, fake accounts, and other attacks on Gitcoin Grants on the rise, round seven added an additional verification option using a decentralized social graph-based
, and increased the user base of the project tenfold:
This is actually good, and besides helping BrightID grow, puts the project through a test: there is now a huge incentive to try and create tons of fake accounts! BrightID will face a daunting challenge of lowering the barriers to entry for common users while at the same time defending against attacks from fake and duplicate accounts. I look forward to seeing them take steps to meet the challenge!ZkSyncZK rollups for scalability
This ZK rollup technology to reduce payment fees:wallet integrationwallet integration
epilogue
, which can further promote the usability and security of L2 expansion technology.ZkSyncThe seventh round is crucial for Gitcoin Grants. Matching funds are more sustainable. Funding is now large enough to fund quadratic freelancers enough to raise concerns about whether a project is getting "too much money"! Authentication is also moving forward. along with
Disclaimer: ECN's translation work aims to deliver high-quality information and learning resources for the Chinese Ethereum community. The copyright of the article belongs to the original author. Reprints must indicate the source of the original text and ethereum.cn. For long-term reprints, please contact ethereumcn@gmail.com Authorize.
