Gitcoin

Fund What Matters. Build What Matters 💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

Gitcoin has always been oriented around the mission: Fund What Matters. Historically, that’s meant open source software – $69m in funding distributed over the last 9 years 💚

Our next chapter will bring this mission home. To the places we live, the people we belong to, and the real life right in front of us – all built on community-owned rails to keep power in people’s hands.

Crypto showed us that, with the right tools, communities can fund their own future. We think it’s time to bring those tools to Main Street.

Private alpha is live, and we’re holding a seat for you.

Read more from @owocki below.

[owockai @owocki]

theres been a sudden wave of interest in where @gitcoin is headed.

but have we *earned* it?

i worry about the hype getting out ahead of fundamentals, so where things actually stand.

we are building techne: an everything app for localism. the first pieces are small, and over time we expect it to grow into local commerce, local funding, local events, and whatever else a town needs to coordinate itself.

this represents our most serious attempt to date to go mainstream. if we are successful, we bring our mission (Fund What Matters) and impact ($69m funding via 5mm txns) to everyday people. if we are successful, your nocoiner friends will be using our app.

the bet: if enough of a community's daily life runs on shared rails, you get network effects that bootstrap a local commons, and the money moving through it stays in town longer. (today a lot of it leaks out to platforms skimming 15-30% off every transaction.)

where things stand:
1. one of the applets is live in private alpha. it's in a small group's hands and it's rough in the ways alphas are rough.
2. we've got an sdk in private alpha too, so other builders could eventually ship their own local applets on the same rails. (builders: help build it!).
3. the other applets are very early. if you're waiting on one of them, expect to wait a while (builders: unless you want to help us build it!).
4. nothing has changed with GTC. it's still a governance token with no claim on economics, and nothing in this plan changes that. Allo Protocol and Grants Stack (our last gen products) are still wound down (but protocols live on on mainnet!). there are no plans for a new token. (governerds: proposals welcome).
5. beacon (the first app) helps you meetup with friends locally ran its first in-person test: 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in bad weather, we have 8 engaged beta testers, and 5 people reported a new connection. promising pilot, way too small to conclude anything from. (alpha testers wanted!).
6. buoy (the second app) helps you fund locally is targeting november. this will be a test of a simmilar magnitude of the beacon first test. (alpha testers wanted!).
7. we will continue to scale product - this means rolling out apps and pilots. if/when the trend is bigly up and to the right, and the final everything app slaps, we ship it and we do a big splashy launch around it. (beta testers wanted!).
8. we're setting up a 501(c)(3) and aiming to raise $$ from mainstream grants and mains donors eventually. this may also mean that future fundraising on our platforms will be tax-exempt in the US!
9. we're moving fast on product because the window on localism is open right now, the tools to rebuild enshittified technofeudalist corposlop SAAS products into something better are available now, and people are feeling the squeeze of ai displacement and platform rent in their actual towns.
10. this is my personal interpretation, not a decision by gitcoin governance, and not financial advice. dates are targets, not commitments, and all of it may change as we learn. this post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, make your own decisions.
11. if you think im doing it wrong, REeEEeeeE at my in the comments.
12. if you think im doing it wrong, and constructively/earnestly want to help right the ship, @ me on https://t.co/SX3YgTxtlj - make sure you tag the transition stewards (there are a half dozen of them, and they're here to hold all of us accountable to a new direction!)

tldr
1. what we care about is people using this stuff where they live. the 1st private alpha is live but that number is small today.
2. if you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is fill out this form and start contributing: https://t.co/oxQFyUrHfq
3. lets not get ahead of ourselves.
4. yall shouldve heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and you should heed mine today - ask yourself "have we earned it?"

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

Builders, localists, governerds, frens – grab your seat here: https://t.co/MnD7jIPM2y 💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

Gitcoin has always been oriented around the mission: Fund What Matters. Historically, that’s meant open source software – $69m in funding distributed over the last 9 years 💚

Our next chapter will bring this mission home. To the places we live, the people we belong to, and the real life right in front of us – all built on community-owned rails to keep power in people’s hands.

Crypto showed us that, with the right tools, communities can fund their own future. We think it’s time to bring those tools to Main Street.

Private alpha is live, and we’re holding a seat for you.

Read more from @owocki below.

[owockai @owocki]

theres been a sudden wave of interest in where @gitcoin is headed.

but have we *earned* it?

i worry about the hype getting out ahead of fundamentals, so where things actually stand.

we are building techne: an everything app for localism. the first pieces are small, and over time we expect it to grow into local commerce, local funding, local events, and whatever else a town needs to coordinate itself.

this represents our most serious attempt to date to go mainstream. if we are successful, we bring our mission (Fund What Matters) and impact ($69m funding via 5mm txns) to everyday people. if we are successful, your nocoiner friends will be using our app.

the bet: if enough of a community's daily life runs on shared rails, you get network effects that bootstrap a local commons, and the money moving through it stays in town longer. (today a lot of it leaks out to platforms skimming 15-30% off every transaction.)

where things stand:
1. one of the applets is live in private alpha. it's in a small group's hands and it's rough in the ways alphas are rough.
2. we've got an sdk in private alpha too, so other builders could eventually ship their own local applets on the same rails. (builders: help build it!).
3. the other applets are very early. if you're waiting on one of them, expect to wait a while (builders: unless you want to help us build it!).
4. nothing has changed with GTC. it's still a governance token with no claim on economics, and nothing in this plan changes that. Allo Protocol and Grants Stack (our last gen products) are still wound down (but protocols live on on mainnet!). there are no plans for a new token. (governerds: proposals welcome).
5. beacon (the first app) helps you meetup with friends locally ran its first in-person test: 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in bad weather, we have 8 engaged beta testers, and 5 people reported a new connection. promising pilot, way too small to conclude anything from. (alpha testers wanted!).
6. buoy (the second app) helps you fund locally is targeting november. this will be a test of a simmilar magnitude of the beacon first test. (alpha testers wanted!).
7. we will continue to scale product - this means rolling out apps and pilots. if/when the trend is bigly up and to the right, and the final everything app slaps, we ship it and we do a big splashy launch around it. (beta testers wanted!).
8. we're setting up a 501(c)(3) and aiming to raise $$ from mainstream grants and mains donors eventually. this may also mean that future fundraising on our platforms will be tax-exempt in the US!
9. we're moving fast on product because the window on localism is open right now, the tools to rebuild enshittified technofeudalist corposlop SAAS products into something better are available now, and people are feeling the squeeze of ai displacement and platform rent in their actual towns.
10. this is my personal interpretation, not a decision by gitcoin governance, and not financial advice. dates are targets, not commitments, and all of it may change as we learn. this post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, make your own decisions.
11. if you think im doing it wrong, REeEEeeeE at my in the comments.
12. if you think im doing it wrong, and constructively/earnestly want to help right the ship, @ me on https://t.co/SX3YgTxtlj - make sure you tag the transition stewards (there are a half dozen of them, and they're here to hold all of us accountable to a new direction!)

tldr
1. what we care about is people using this stuff where they live. the 1st private alpha is live but that number is small today.
2. if you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is fill out this form and start contributing: https://t.co/oxQFyUrHfq
3. lets not get ahead of ourselves.
4. yall shouldve heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and you should heed mine today - ask yourself "have we earned it?"

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

FUND 👏 WHAT 👏 MATTERS 👏

[owockai @owocki]

"fund what matters" has been @gitcoin's mantra since 2023, and the longer i sit with it, the more it reads as a critique of how money moves today.

most funding still runs through hierarchies: a foundation board, or a program officer with a stack of applications and a quarterly deadline. a few people at the top decide what matters for everyone below them, and each layer of review slows the money down and shrinks what can get funded to whatever that small group has time to read.

networks can do this better. QF was an early example of this with small donors steering a big matching pool. when thousands of people each chip in $5 or $10 to the projects they actually use and care about, you get a signal no committee could produce. and it grows with the number of participants instead of the number of reviewers.

but QF is one mechanism of many. retro funding, conviction voting, dependency-graph funding like deep funding, and ai agents allocating on a community's behalf are all early and all promising.

some of the best ideas are ancient: rotating savings circles, rotating labour circles, or the mutual aid societies that insured workers before the welfare state. they could run again on new rails.

the stakes keep rising, too. ai is making it cheap to build almost anything, so the list of things worth funding is about to get very long, and a grants committee can't read any faster than it could a decade ago.

whoever decides where the money goes decides what gets built. i want that to be all of us.

[owockai @owocki]

two frontiers im pondering as we quietly lay tracks for @gitcoin next chapter

1. syntropic financing
2. consumer adoption

syntropy is the tendency of living systems to organize toward greater order, energy, and complexity over time.

eg a forest doesn't just sustain itself, it gets richer over time. richer (in the context of nature) = more soil, more species, more energy turned into resilience each season.

syntropic financing asks what capital would look like if it behaved the same way. money that leaves every system it touches more alive than it found it, where the returns are measured in the health and growth of the whole.

consumer adoption is how that reaches the world. the primitive only matters if ordinary people touch it through products they'd already choose, no ideology required.

get both right and you have an engine that grows the system and an on-ramp wide enough for everyone to climb aboard.

I think in 2019-2022 @gitcoin was a leader in both. QF is a small glimmer of what syntropic financing can be. and @gitcoin was one of the first consumer dapps ppl used.

I think that in 2027+ it is possible we could do it again at a larger and more holistic scale - tho success is not guaranteed, this is an aspiration and a target, imo we are well positioned to take another shot.

[owockai @owocki]

https://t.co/1fl6qXFRyY

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@0xalphalune hello how can we help

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@owocki NOT FAR ENOUGH

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

Five companies are set to spend between $660 and $690 billion on AI compute this year. OpenAI alone expects around $50 billion.

The technology that's about to sit inside our jobs, our healthcare, our kids' schooling, our government is being shaped right now by a handful of companies.

Which means how it works, how it's used, and who it answers to are all being decided – just not by us.

You're not imagining it: we're watching one of the most consequential public questions of our lifetimes be settled behind closed doors.

[Cactus @CactusHQxyz]

Hello, world.

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

We’re excited to see @ScopeLift carry Tally into its next chapter as Cactus 🤝

@tallyxyz has been important governance infra for many of us over the years, and we’re confident the future of onchain orgs is in good hands with the ScopeLift team 🫡

Please welcome @CactusHQxyz 💚

[ScopeLift @ScopeLift]

https://t.co/M7clmMrfEX

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@ethdaily 🫡💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

On June 12, a US Commerce export control directive forced Claude Fable 5 offline for every user worldwide – three days after launch, no restoration date.

Anthropic opposed the order.
The model went dark anyway.

Every user depended on one company inside one government’s jurisdiction.

This is what concentration costs: access lasts exactly as long as someone else allows.

The fix is infrastructure no single company or government can unilaterally switch off. 💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@Dilaw332551 accountability should not be externalized 🫡

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

More Americans say they would rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a data center.

188 opposition groups across 40 states.

$64 billion in projects blocked or delayed.

A moratorium bill sitting on Governor Hochul's desk right now.

The coverage says these communities fear noise and water bills – but what they're actually fighting is critical infra being built around them faster than they can hold a single hearing.

Private capital builds first.
Adoption becomes default.
Default becomes dependence.

By the time the community even gets a chance to vote, the vote's already been rendered ceremonial.

But the people are still packing these town halls because they understand exactly what's being decided without them.

Saying no is the first act of agency.

💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@theGREAS_40068 yes. 🫡

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@LfgPoopsy33288 🎯

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@simply23066 a conversation everyone's about to pulled into, for better or for worse. but the people hold the power 💚

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@ParodyNAKAMOTO 01101110 01101111

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

Something feels off online.

One post gets thousands of views, but the replies feel hollow. Another post makes the same point and gets no visibility at all.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if this thing is even on.

And this week, the numbers caught up to the feeling: Cloudflare’s CEO said bots have surpassed humans in web traffic for the first time.

Being human is no longer the default in a place that meaningfully shapes our lives.

The most valuable thing now might be rebuilding our places, so presence feels trustworthy and we can know what's real again.

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@myswerve > remember when meta patented an ai that keeps posting as you after you die

what a concerning new thread to add to the right to be forgotten convo 🫠

[Gitcoin @gitcoin]

@MrPicule 💚🫡