What is Gitcoin?
Gitcoin is an online community using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to re-invent the way public goods are funded and helps people work on open-source and public goods projects full-time.
Founded on the belief that coordination problems lie at the heart of society’s most significant challenges, Gitcoin is re-shaping the future of public goods funding by connecting those building public goods directly to those who fund them.
Gitcoin has allocated over $60 million in funding to almost 3,000 projects since it began in 2017.
How Does Gitcoin Work?
Builders working on public goods projects both online and offline can request funding by creating a Gitcoin grant.
This grant then goes through an approval process to ensure it meets Gitcoin’s funding criteria before being submitted into a funding round.
When the funding round goes live, anyone can donate cryptocurrency to help fund the project, connecting donors and builders from all around the world.
Gitcoin has also pioneered a unique mechanism that leverages blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to automatically allocate additional funding to the best public goods projects.
How Does Gitcoin’s Grant Funding Work?
Gitcoin amplifies the funding received from donors by distributing additional funds to projects from its own pool of funds.
Prominent donor’s like the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin have donated large sums of cryptocurrency to Gitcoin’s fund to support its mission.
Gitcoin calculates how much additional funding to distribute to projects by looking at how much a project receives as well as the number of donors who make a contribution.
Gitcoin has worked out that bad projects are less likely to receive significant donations from a large number of donors. On the other hand, high quality projects are more likely to receive donations from a large number of donors, reflecting the positive impact a quality project has.
Those looking to go deeper into how this mechanism works should check out wtf is quadratic funding?
Why are people in Web3 so excited about Gitcoin?
Gitcoin is built upon Ethereum’s globally distributed network and is helping people from all around the world come together to coordinate and build things for the public’s benefit. This cross-border coordination is something which has historically required far more resources and bureaucracy to achieve.
The more effective Gitcoin is at allocating resources to the best public goods projects using its novel funding mechanism and borderless participation model, the more we can expect to see quality public goods being made possible thanks to Gitcoin.
Explore the public goods projects on Gitcoin and keep up to date with news and events by following Gitcoin on Twitter or joining the Gitcoin community on Discord.