Proponents of public goods push green pill in crypto development

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin, an Ethereum-based funding marketplace, and author of “GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate The World.”

Why it’s important: What gets funded on Gitcoin, with its democratized project funding model, is effectively a snapshot of the priorities within the crypto software developer community. And its solarpunkian founder is optimistic about a crowdsourced future.

Context: Gitcoin has delivered $65 million in funding to the industry via bounties, grants, tips and other products since its inception, generating roughly $6 million quarterly to fund various projects over the past six quarters, according to Owocki.

• Matching Pool has drawn participation from major investors including Coinbase, a16z, Polygon, Starkware, and Aave Grants, helping the likes of decentralized exchanges Uniswap and 1inch get off the ground. (It is also endorsed by Vitalik Buterin.)

What he says: “The [original] The idea was to create a place for open source software developers to ‘git coin’ — pun intended — for their work,” Owocki told Axios. Now, the site’s core offering is grant funding.

The big picture: Owocki is an advocate of “taking the green pill” – a pushback against the “dough” culture of meme tokens and gambling – while advocating the use of crypto to create an economic system that increases in resource capacity over time .

• For Owocki, the internet is one public good, the metaphorical tree that everyone can benefit from.

Of the note: Ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism versus a proof-of-work mechanism is important to Owocki, because it makes the blockchain more sustainable.

Between the lines: Gitcoin Grants complements crowdfunding with square funding, using math to automatically allocate capital into matching pools based on the number of contributors. Simply put, Gitcoin puts a premium on the interests of the many rather than, say, a wealthy few.

• This is how it works: Two projects want to find a matching pool of $100,000. They raise the same amount, $500, with one raising from five individuals and the other from just one. The former project’s match would be $8,333 compared to the latter’s, $1,667, because it received more votes.

Flashback: Gitcoin’s success is partly due to Owocki’s sensitivity, which he describes as: “flexible on the details and dogmatic on the mission.”

• “We were working on the broad thesis that there’s going to be trillions of capital in the open source system, and some of that will come back to the developers,” he said. “What we didn’t know was the mechanism through which that capital would reach software developers.”
• In fact, Gitcoin started with bounties and landed on grants, but it is also powered by other offerings such as ads and NFTs, Owocki said.

What’s up: “Bounties and grants reflect the current market situation from a technical perspective. There are many ethereum 2.0 clients being funded on Gitcoin Grants,” Owocki said.

What will be next: A Crypto Advocacy round on regulation focused on building support for organizations “at the forefront of good crypto policy and in defense of the open web.”

• “The advocacy round will be the largest we’ve seen in the history of Gitcoin Grants,” says Owocki.

Context: Advocacy has become more important recently as regulators crack down on the industry. For example, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFACs, which sanctioned Tornado Cash, pushed the issue of privacy to the fore.

• “The real question for me is [if] you have a regulator in a jurisdiction that’s going to ban addresses on the global network, the network then changes the infrastructure,” Owocki said, “or it goes around that sanction, or if you think it’s censorship, you censor it.”
• Coin Center, a Washington DC-based research and law firm, is going to challenge this action in court on the grounds that you cannot regulate speech.

Dates to see: Gitcoin Grants’ 15th funding round is set for Sept. 7 – Sept. 22. The merger will take place in the middle of it.