DAOrayaki DAO Research Bonus Pool:

Funding address: DAOrayaki.eth

DAOrayaki DAO Research Bonus Pool:

Funding address: DAOrayaki.eth

Total bounty: 100 USDC

Original Author: owocki

Types of research: Gitcoin, DAO

Original Author: owocki

Original: A brief history of Gitcoin from 2017 - 2021

Hello everyone,

A Brief History of Gitcoin 2017-2021

Hello everyone,

I've been telling a few new members of The DAO about the oral history of Gitcoin, and the purpose of this post is to write the history of Gitcoin all at once so that everyone can see it.

So now for the history introduction:

An incomplete, subjective, high-level history of gitcoin

Origin period (2008 - 2017)

1. I went through techstars 5 in 2008. Since then, from 2008 to 2017, I have been CTO, VP of Engineering or Principal Engineer for several startups in the techstars portfolio.

2. During that time I hired about 40 software engineers and from that experience I observed two things

Everything I (or my colleagues) builds is derived from open source software.

Recruited personnel basically do not bring value-added, or often negative value-added

1. During that time, I was the organizer of Boulder Startup Week (Boulder Startup Week: a week-long celebration of entrepreneurship and technology held every May in Bouler, Colorado). In 2014 in the development track, in 2015 in the field of data science, and then in the field of "future of technology" - mainly cutting-edge technologies artificial intelligence, virtual reality, machine learning, blockchain.

2. During that time, I was also trying to create a side project on "The Future of Tech Space". Some of these items are

3. VR Meditation App

4. VR Hunting App

5. AI-powered crypto trading app

6. Boulder Blockchain Meetup

7. A tool called adblock-to-bitcoin

8. A tool called youvegoteth

9. A short stint with a blockchain hedge fund

some other items

2017 - Gitcoin MVP

MVP of Gitcoin

Through meticulous trial (and failure), I stumbled upon the origin of gitcoin - what would become the most rewarding project of my career.

1. I (perhaps naively) thought it was a tool that would solve these two problems I encountered during my time as an engineering lead:

2. Funding Open Source Software

Not using a recruiter as an intermediary

Funding Open Source Software

I launched the MVP of gitcoin in fall 2017 and managed to convince consensys to fund the project.

I attended Devcon 3 in Cancun and started at Consensys in Fall 2017.

2018 - Experiment and grow

Joining Consensys is a point of growth for Gitcoin. We took the project from a project of me and a friend in Colorado to a top project with access to the Ethereum ecosystem, and we went from a part-time team to a full-time team.

The acceleration provided to Gitcoin by joining consensus is critical to enabling network effects - markets and communities. I think Gitcoin might have failed if I hadn't joined consensusys.

I'm very proud that our mission from the beginning is still consistent today through the years. Our mission is to grow and sustain open source.

In 2017, we realized that bounties could not fully accomplish our mission. Bounties are similar to gig jobs, they are too transactional and happen infrequently, so they have no stability. They don't match the way many open source contributors work. It's just too transactional. We started experimenting with a few different product areas - code fund, gitcoin labs, kudos and gitcoin grants.

The beginning of a bear market (December 2018 - March 2019)

In December 2018, ETH fell from $1.4 million to $80, a drop of 95%.

Rumor has it that consensusys, funded by ETH Holdings, is starting to tighten its belt. The restructuring of consensys took place in December 2018.

Over the next 2 years, this introduced several more existential questions - regarding the focus, transaction model and resources of consensusys, Gitcoin and the wider Ethereum ecosystem.

Fortunately, we are ahead of many other projects in the Ethereum space. Over the last year we've struggled to find market fit and luckily we're well positioned at the low end.

We are also fortunate that everyone in the ecosystem needs developers (even in a down market), and serving developers has been a core focus of Gitcoin for many years.

We launched the Gitcoin Hackathon, which allows us to showcase at a time when two things, revenue and growth, are important to Consensys.

Gitcoin Grants has until now been a subscription service for funding public goods, and has finally made Quadratic Funding the core of Gitcoin Grants.

Gitcoin Grants Round 1 launched with a $25,000 matching pool and was a huge success.

Since then, we have focused on growing Gitcoin Hackathons + Gitcoin Grants.

Secular Bear Market - (March 2019 - January 2021)

The next few years are a battle for growth and budget. We are like cockroaches, refusing to be wiped out by a long bear market.

These years have been years of struggle.

We made several tough decisions, including saying goodbye to people who don't have a risk appetite for bear markets, and closing projects (labs, code funds) that we don't see a future in.

We promoted Scott Moore to co-founder and partner lead. Scott was definitely a big part of our success during this time and still is a big part of our success today.

We have been relentlessly focused on growing Gitcoin Hackathons and Gitcoin Grants, and have begun to see a lot of success in doing so, growing 30% quarter-over-quarter for most of this period.

During this time, my co-founder Vivek Singh conceived and launched KERNEL - a web3 native accelerator and university, a very successful new venture that continues to generate dividends today.

During this period, we have seen tremendous growth. We survived. But we only make a few short-term decisions to survive. We exited this period with a lot of technical and organizational debt.

New Dawn (January 2021-April 2021)

When the market turns from bearish to bullish, and our growth continues -- things really turn around.

Well-informed sources have been saying that we "established ourselves as a vital pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem," but I failed to raise funds for Gitcoin during the prolonged bear market.

When January 2021 rolled around, all of a sudden, investors seemed genuinely interested. We were able to raise $11 million from one of the top funds in the space and spin off a separate company called Gitcoin Holdings from Consensys. In particular, I felt Paradigm would be the most mission-aligned funder we could possibly work with – which is why we chose them.

• I will be forever grateful to Mesh, especially Joe Lubin and Michael Kriak, for keeping us alive through the long bear market, but now is the time to become independent and start a new chapter for Gitcoin.

• Now is the time to start investing to pay off the debt of the long bear market and move towards realizing Gitcoin's ultimate potential.

• We rebuilt the team.

• We hired a new leader to run Gitcoin, enabling Vivek to focus more on KERNEL.

We brought on several new contributors who could help us transition from a scrappy 0-to-1 startup to a 1-to-10 growing startup.

We quietly hatched plans to turn Gitcoin into a DAO governed by its community.

Just DAO it (May 25, 2021)

May 25th, 2021 is the day that will change Gitcoin forever. That day we retroactively airdropped GTC to the community and launched GitcoinDAO.

We believe that "a government's legal and moral right to use state power is justified and legitimate only with the consent of the people or society exercising that political power."

We don't want to build another web2 startup. The big idea behind starting a DAO is to have Gitcoin governed by its community.

Our dream is to build GitcoinDAO into a boat that can take us to quadratic land: a better world of public goods and digital democracy. In this world, we rewrite the laws of economic gravity to coordinate value creation and value capture to solve coordination failure, and kill Moloch - the god of coordination failure.

Have a double DAO it on DAO (May 25, 2021-present)

After the release of GTC, a lot happened. A few notable ones:

We launched https://gov.gitcoin.co/ and started the long road to decentralizing Gitcoin.

1. During this time, several workflows were proposed by the community and subsequently launched.

2. Workflow is the way work is organized in DAO. Workstreams have their own budgets, leadership structures, tools, and processes on a per-workstream basis. Anyone can propose a workflow following the proposal process. The currently active workflows are:

3. Moonshot Collective is a DAO rapid prototyping workflow

4. Public Goods is focused on our mission of funding public goods.

5. Fraud Detection & Defense is responsible for preventing fraud on Gitcoin Grants.

6. Decentralize-gitcoin is a mechanism for the gradual decentralization of Gitcoin.

Memes, Merchandise, and Marketing is the DAO marketing arm.

dCompass - Build DAO-native positioning tool.

I wrote a post titled The GitcoinDAO Egregore is Rising, all about the way things are coming together.

New tools such as the decentralized Grants Alpha and Steward Report Cards were launched.

During this time, Gitcoin Orbit remained our mission, but the DAO began to become the primary venue for contributors to contribute to the mission.

We started to really hit our stride towards our mission and get results.

Statistics as of 15/12/2021:

Since its launch in November 2017, Gitcoin has helped 59,956 funders reach 262,688 grantees. Gitcoin has facilitated 1,572,067 complete transactions for 9,700 unique moneymakers.

To be continued (2022+)

GitcoinDAO is still evolving and emerging.

In my opinion, the future should continue to move towards greater scale and more decentralization.

We've gone from 0 to 1, we're on our way to 1 to 10, and we're starting to set up our site to go from 10 to 100.

If you want to keep up with the latest, I invite you to read the weekly GitcoinDAO digest or read What is Gitcoin, a post I update every month.

our north star

While you're here, you should check out our latest discussion on Gitcoin Mission & Vision, especially this awesome north star vision statement by @Pop & Company.

Gitcoin DAO is built for human flourishing.