Gitcoin & Giveth Partnership - QF integration + beyond!

GIVernance
1

GM family!

The purpose of this forum post is to kickstart the conversation around a comprehensive partnership between Gitcoin and Giveth.

TL;DR Coordination mechanisms are high upside for humanity. The design space for public goods is vast and both Giveth & Gitcoin are on the cutting edge of development and implementation in web3. Instead of building separately we can bet on pluralism and explore the design space together to create more shared outcomes and leverage.

Philosophical preamble

“Public goods are good”

We all need and want public goods - non-excludable goods & services like public education, infrastructure, open source software and the environment. Yet the creation & funding of public goods today is poorly coordinated - top-down, dependent on sacrifice, and lacking the necessary feedback cycles that allow for innovation.

Giveth and Gitcoin are both focused on “cracking the public goods nut” using web3 and bring complementary skills to the table. Gitcoin brings a wealth of experience in QF, sybil/collusion protection, and fundraising, has amazing branding and marketing, and a well-funded team building modular coordination mechanisms. Giveth brings DAO expertise, tokenomics experience, great design and development, as well as ready-made coordination mechanisms like GIVbacks, GIVpower and praise.

Giveth Galaxy

Giveth has built a zero-fee crypto donation platform for easy onboarding of IRL nonprofits to web3. It allows for continuous, year-round funding on Ethereum Mainnet and Gnosis Chain. Its project verification system ensures that “verified” projects have proven to be using donations raised to create non-excludable value (aka public goods). It uses donation legos like GIVbacks (rewards to donors of verified projects) and GIVpower (decentralized project curation) to encourage more donations to verified projects, educate about web3 and decentralization, and provide new ways for individuals to support public goods projects they love.

Giveth’s long-term goal is to empower nonprofits with web3 to the point where they could actually become DAOs with their own regenerative microeconomics. This would allow for decentralized governance over the creation of public goods (bottom-up value creation) and regenerative funding streams fuelled by issuance and not donations.

The Giveth Galaxy - including Giveth as well as orgs like TEC, Commons Stack Trusted Seed, and General Magic - have been exploring other web3 coordination tools to support these goals including bonding curves, liquidity mining, reputation, conviction voting and praise.

Gitcoin Galaxy

Gitcoin has built the largest public good crypto funding platform in web3, distributing $72M in total funding, and over $50M through its Quadratic Funding Grants program.

In the last year, the GitcoinDAO built the Gitcoin Passport to bring the best in pluralistic Sybil detection and security to the crypto ecosystem. Passport will not only be a critical component of ensuring legitimacy in the Gitcoin Grants Program, but in all systems that seek to make use of 1 Human 1 Vote collective intelligence mechanisms. Already Snapshot, Bankless, EthStaker, and others have integrated Passport to bring Sybil protection to their communities.

Also, in the last year Gitcoin’s been rebuilding its Grants product as the “Allo protocol”, a decentralized modular funding protocol, and the Gitcoin Grants Stack, a set of dApps to allow any community to run their own grants programs on top of the years of Gitcoin’s experience.

Soft-launching in December 2022, and now with 5 alpha rounds and $2M in funding distributed to causes like OSS, ETH Infra, Climate, and Unicef, the GitcoinDAO is in the final stages of bringing the learnings from the test rounds into the products and preparing for a launch at ETHDenver.

The new Allo protocol is already showing the composability of the decentralized future of Gitcoin with community leaderboards, round dashboards, external analysis of impact, collaborations with Protocol Labs to integrate Hypercerts, Supermodular building a Quadratic Lenster, and more.

There is a high potential upside for humanity, Giveth, and Gitcoin if we pool resources and explore the design space of coordination mechanisms together. Web3 coordination mechanisms that exist today like QF, GIVbacks, GIVpower or Gitcoin Passport are the 1st inning of web3 coordination tools. There is so much further we can go with this, and we should be serious about how we continue to explore this design space.

Interoperability

Gitcoin and Giveth already have great social interoperability (and great memes). We’re super aligned in vibes, and effortlessly seem to coordinate together to produce value for our shared communities. As an example, check out this podcast on coordination mechanisms with Owocki & Griff that led to this extensive piece of work, this blog post and this comprehensive webpage.

There is room to improve regarding technical and economic interoperability. Here are some possibilities for collaboration that we’re already thinking about:

  • Running a QF round for Giveth verified projects iterating upon and improving its UI/UX.
  • Doing a large token swap for economic alignment
  • Using Gitcoin Passport for sybil resistance on Giveth
  • Developing a shared project registry so that novel funding mechanisms like QF or GIVbacks can traverse both protocols (allow projects/grants to “opt-in”)
  • Allowing projects from grants rounds to be seamlessly onboarded to Giveth to take advantage of year-round funding
  • Iterating upon Giveth’s project verification system and using it to support/vet grants
  • Using Giveth’s experimentations and research in tokenomics to support GTC
  • Sharing DAO governance techniques and best practices for greater efficiency
  • Sharing resources from a broad network of organizations including Commons Stack, General Magic (service DAO), praise, pairwise, etc.

Here are some points of possible divergence (divide & conquer):

  • Gitcoin/Supermodular focusing on building on top of grants - new form factors for QF, building a non-EVM quadratic funding tool called “simple grants”, working on R&D (focus on open source and sybil protection)

  • Giveth focusing on improving onboarding on IRL projects into web3 space, working with Commons Stack to build DAO toolkits

Practical Next Steps

As a 1st point of collaboration we are proposing to run a QF round on Giveth. Quadratic Funding has proved to be a very powerful mechanism for onboarding new users into web3, rallying the community around public goods, and generating significant funding for impact projects.

Running QF on Giveth would entail:

  • Integrating Gitcoin Passport into giveth.io
  • Making an easy application pathway for projects to apply to enter the round
  • Designing/building a UI for participation in the round (that doesn’t diverge much from our current donation flow)
  • Raising funds for QF matching pool (via donation.eth)
  • Compiling tx data for the rounds into a dune dashboard to be used for sybil analysis
  • Working with Gitcoin fraud review team team to review data and remove sybil attacks
  • Distributing matching funds by performing QF calculations and distributing payouts

Running QF on Giveth would allow us to stack donation legos (GIVbacks & QF together), improve the user experience for both protocols, explore any integration hiccupps to improve passport, and provide a starting point for collaboration between our teams.

I would love to move towards integrating with Allo protocol (Grants Stack) but since this would require bigger changes to our UX (for example, adding a cart feature, and adding smart contract txs admin bro for GIVbacks), and since Allo is still in its alpha phase, this above proposal is an MVP. We should see what changes are implemented for the Beta round, and maintain communication with the Allo team throughout.

With QF as a starting point for collaboration, we can explore the other ideas listed above like tokenswaps, a shared project registry, project verification, etc.

Gimme Yo’ Feedback

“If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together”

Coordination between our two teams/protocols/DAOs is bound to lead to some technical/social slowdowns, but the potential we unlock from pooling ideas, resources, and teams - and coordinating together around our shared vision - is immense.

This is just a jumping off point for further discussion. I would love to get feedback on any or all of the ideas from members of both Gitcoin and Giveth so that we can align on a clear vision and move towards the future with greater collaboration.

Major /praise to Kevin Olsen, Kevin Owocki & @griff for collaborating w/ me to brainstorm, write & review this forum post.

4 Likes
2

Well, it’s no secret that I have a lot of skepticism to this QF integration.

For me, I’m not really convinced that we could get the funding to keep the Matching Pool consistently topped up. I don’t see what would change dramatically enough that we could secure sustainable funding for QF rounds.

The only reason QF worked for Gitcoin is because it had money. This is the greatest motivator in the equation and how they came to dominate the market in terms of crypto-native funding platforms.

If it’s a zero sum game of crypto funds going into matching pools then why would Giveth have a strong enough case over Gitcoin to get a bigger slice of the pie? A better framing is why would Gitcoin give up their market dominance of QF funding to prop up Giveth’s?

What would be different than how we already do things to say that one platforms success would not come at the expense of the other?

I just don’t get the angle, why would they spend all these resources helping us? What are the concrete benefits for Gitcoin? I appreciate all these high-minded goals from founders, but the trickle down into how this all plays out between our DAOs, shareholders and active contributors I just don’t believe this will work out in the medium to long term.

There are so many political, technical or legal issues that could come up at any point and torpedo this whole proposal and make this into an immense waste of time.

I think the biggest existential challenge for Giveth right now is to secure sustainable funding for ourselves as a DAO, how does shifting our resources into this help us move towards this goal?

2 Likes
3

In contrast, I love this proposal. I love the meme of web3 shifting the weights from 80% competitive/20% collaborative to 80% collaborative/20% competitive.

I think DAOs optimize for resilience sometimes at the cost of efficiency. I stand by the quote “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together”. Funding public goods is a HUGE challenge and any ONE organization can’t tackle it alone. I’m happy to see more intention for a collaboration between Giveth and Gitcoin as organizations with shared values and vision.

I do believe that many paths may not work out and time & resources will be “lost” (not really lost, as paid the cost of learning), but I also consider we could find a collaboration that boosts public goods funding.

@mitch brings very valuable points. IMO those points are not a good reason to halt the collaboration, but things to consider and address moving forward. Some of the answers might need to be found faster like answers to technical, legal and political issues or what might be the sustainable source of funding for each team and how each DAO can focus on the value they are adding. Others might be figured out in time, like what organization is adding more value in what after all.

Finally, I also agree with the importance of securing sustainable funding for our DAO. But also, having more cookers wouldn’t make that better. I think it’s important for DAOs to move in several directions at the same time, the trick is to be well-coordinated when doing it.

I think this MVP is suitable to start. I, personally, would also be very excited to see a shared project registry and a tokenswap. But let’s take one step at a time. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

Thank you, @karmaticacid ! I agree with @mitch and @Cotabe.
I LOVE the idea of Gitcoin & Giveth building together. That comes from a deep philosophical root that I won’t unpack at the moment (you all know it anyway). I also wonder about the real impact though, as Mitch writes skeptically.

One of my initial concerns is regarding the Gitcoin Passport - what a pain in the a**!

If we are trying to reach IRL people and projects, forget it. Getting muggle-folk to donate in crypto is hard enough. Asking them to create a kind of Gitcoin Passport, totally not going to happen.

3 Likes
5

I will follow up on my own remark to add that I hugely favor this collaboration and that the obstacle I present is already addressed by Cotabe: things to consider and address moving forward. :smiley:

2 Likes
6

Imagine if we could have a QF round for Turkey/Syria right now… if we could throw up a project the represents a pool and go ask Vitalik and other crypto whales to throw into it and get a bunch of projects to onboard 9like we are already doing) and in 1 week we run a round.

Having the ability to run a round whenever we want on our own UI will help us match large, cause focused funders with smaller funders that want to allocate larger amounts of the pool to their favorite projects.

4 Likes
7

The way I could see it working in the short term is just tying it to GIVpower. I remember we discussed this before, regarding distributing the Giveth matching pool project funds based on GIVpower ranking.

I think it would incentivize donations to the matching pool project (personally I don’t donate to it, because I honestly don’t know what the plans are for it), and it would push forward the meme of using GIVpower to support a project without donating (making GIVpower a lot more gamified and exciting).

1 Like
8

Thanks for your comment @mitch - I always appreciate your skepticism.

Here are some of my thoughts:

Funding the matching pool

For this 1st round, Kevin Owocki has already offered to donate to the matching pool, and we spoke as well with Scott Moore from Gitcoin (who has done a lot of work fundraising) and he offered as well to support us in fundraising.

For longer term, I’m intersted in avenues like this 1inch proposal to set up consistent funding streams with other orgs that are essentially public goods legos - 1inch jumps on the supporting public goods train, and fees get funelled into matching pools.

Also, if you recall this point…

… Giveth & Gitcoin have complimentary skill sets. I think we can draw from their experience on fundraising to generate consistent funding for our QF rounds, and in exchange support them in places we have more expertise - like tokenomics.

Why is QF cool?

Money is ofc a huge factor in why QF has been a success on Gitcoin, but it’s important to also consider the impact of the product itself. QF uses

  • Set rounds - short bursts to time where projects are motivated to market donating on Gitcoin in full force. Communities get amped up and lots of donations flow (not just from those who preliminary funded the matching pool)
  • Community voting/preferece - projects are incentivized to get as many unique donors as possible, and this fuels energy into onboarding new people into web3 (a huge goal of ours). I personally got into the space because @Danibelle helped me set up a wallet and taught me how to donate to Giveth in a gitcoin grants round. and…

Leon Edwards Look At Me Now GIF - Leon Edwards Look At Me Now GIFs

Anyway, these are both huge opportunities for meeting our goals of:

  • Getting more donors & great projects using Giveth
  • Onboarding more people to web3

On Collaboration

Integrating a basic version of QF in Giveth is meant to be a jumping off point for greater technical & economic interoperability. The true goal, imo, is to work more closely with Gitcoin so the tech we’re building can actually be shared with each other.

How cool would it be if projects who got added to gitcoin grants automatically also became giveth projects and could raise funding continuously there even after grants rounds ended? Or if projects added and verified on Giveth could easily just apply to be part of Gitcoin QF rounds?

Both orgs want to use web3 to facilitate the creation and funding of more & better public goods. The end goal is a victory for humanity & earth… it doesn’t make any sense to me to say that one platform’s success would come at the expense of the other… We should just work together to get there.

image
image697×500 96.9 KB

Concrete Benefits for Gitcoin

Again, this goes back to the idea of complimentary skills and a shared end goal. Here are some things we are good at, and I think we can use to support them:

  • An awesome project verification team/system
  • Tokenomics / DeFi experience
  • Fantastic and always improving DAO processes
  • Praise
  • GIVbacks
  • GIVpower
  • An epic team of devs
  • UI/UX experience - opportunity to improve upon existing user flow for QF

We need to work together, and talk with each other, to see what the true needs are and what we can do to help. If we start briding our teams via the QF integration, we amplify those connections and can keep moving forward together

Resource Allocation & Giveth’s Funding Needs

Agreed. We need funding.

Also - a lot of investors & grant-givers are looking at our stats - how many people are donating? how much is being donated? how many (and which) projects being added? Adding QF is a great way to up all those numbers and increase our chances of getting funding with better stats.

Also, we have a great crew on grants - Yass, Cotabe, Jake, Suga - They are also not the same people who will be working on this integration at the onset… Here’s we’re looking at - me, MoeNick, Amin, Cherik, Mohammad… You feel me?

Finally, in the long term, if we create more technical interoperability with Gitcoin, we can pool resources and do more together. For example, if we, in the medium term, work to use a shared project registry - when we build anything on top of that infrastructure we could share the cost of smart contract audits because it would be mutually beneficial for both orgs.

Extra comments

I completely agree - as we all saw in the alpha round, this is huge. Improving the UX of passport is critical to making it a success for sybil protection. If we move forward with this integration, it would be top of my list to investigate and support however possible.

Totally! I think having GIVpower somehow influence the way matching is distributed is really interesting. I would love to see how we could use this also as a lego on top of QF - maybe it could could as some kind of multiplier…

3 Likes
9

Notes from the gov call - 02/13

  • Instead of “splitting the pot” between platforms, we need to consider how to grow the total pot of crypto donors & donations.
  • Improving upon QF & onboarding more fiat donors to crypto is a big win for both protocols.
2 Likes
10

I think QF is one of the most powerful fundraising mechanisms I’ve seen in web3 (even just psychologically speaking) and I would be super excited to see it on Giveth as I think it could really encourage more donation volume - people donate where they think their money will go the furthest. And it’s a much more powerful message to combine GIVbacks with QF.

I also strongly believe in DAO stacking, and if together with Gitcoin we can align our complementary development efforts and strategies, I think this could work. It really comes down to the partnership in my opinion and how we agree to do that. I’m not sure it would go well if we were to run similar rounds simultaneously, for example, so a lot of things need to be addressed. The goal being to ensure more collaboration over competition, with both orgs tied to shared KPIs.

The passport to me implies creating yet another hurdle for donors, when we are already facing an onboarding hurdle as is. The current passport requires someone to have already been active in the space for quite a while - this is huge blocker as I see it. I don’t think this would encourage donors to onboard, I think it’s the opposite. So this would require a lot of improvement and simplification to allow for new donors just entering the space. If we integrate fiat donations, can the passport verification be skipped completely for fiat donors?

3 Likes
11

Yo! I have more general perspective to offer.

I think there is a lot of potential there! And I also believe it can bring a lot of value to both Giveth and Gitcoin. Certainly there will be some types of benefits. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a litle beta demo experiment focused on QF and begin experimenting first before commiting to anything huge and or longterm.

I also think that if we keep rewarding the most highly ranked projects it will be destructive for many small projects, not only because we dissapoint them as the bigger player who should help them become stronger (help those little newbies in the space who are ligitimately verified and doing meaningful work, but don’t have a big donors or supporters base, yet absolutely too deserve the chance to dao-fy in future), but also making them less likely to succeed and could demotivate their onboarding efforts into web3, therefore less likely to dao_fy in future.
With that said - why don’t we reward those least ranked projects that actually need the most help and support. That would be to @aabugosh giwpower idea…

I’m a big believer in this quote:

“If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together”

And I would love to see this become a little working group with focus on one first baby step and its potential ripple effect and start experimenting. :heartbeat:

12

I think you’re misstating part of the problem. We do reward all of the ranked projects - just incrementally less. No matter your ranking from top to bottom you WILL yield GIVbacks to your donors.

Favouring rewards to lower ranked projects gives a free pass to lazy project owners and low quality projects. One of the ideas behind GIVpower is to incentivize project owners to create high quality projects on the platform and for them to be accountable for promoting and actively doing their own outreach.

14

Wow, I didn’t want to argue with you @mitch but it seems inevitable now, lol.

I’m sorry but the only one party that gets rewarded here is the donor, not project as far as I know. Now the project that is ranked low has potentially less benefit to offer to the donor right?!

Projects lower in the rank doesn’t equal lower quality. That is a very false statement.

I just have another angle of viewing things, I also take in consideration some feedback from projects on giwpower so far and the psychological effect raking has created - for some projects it’s already hard to get higher in the rank - I mean they worry about getting funding…how to get enough support, new donors…and this seems to make them feel like we make it even harder. And truly, we do…I mean who has the most givpower and how do they use it?! Just contemplate on it little longer from little different angle… people still don’t even fully understand what it can bring to them. And I think we made it look way more important than it should be.

Also, with your statement “a free pass to lazy projects” you clearly didn’t understand my point and maybe I shoul do a better job explaining. Forget what I said about QFing bottom up.
In this matter I am simply standing on projects side and looking for ways we can support them, not further our plutocratic approach. I am just saying that there must pretty sure be a third way, which is not so obvious but will be far more interesting… and I will spend some time thinking about it, because I do care…and think in depth about these things.
I am strongly against QF for the highest ranked projects. period.

I just don’t think that this is the way. And I am judging from the perspective I am able to have thanks to the specific type of work I do - which is reviewing, listing, verifying projects and then looking at their evolution. I would much rather see completely different approach using the QF and leave out ranking and givpower.
Something like cause pools and short term campaigns…maybe we can learn from Gitcoin.

Now back to the partnership topic…

3 Likes