A dedicated domain sensemaking application by the previous Round Operators of the Gitcoin Grants Garden

Problem & Impact

One of the greatest strengths of Ethereum is its ability to help decentralized groups of people with a shared vision work together towards a common goal.

One of the greatest weaknesses of our prevalent economic systems is the poor management and chronic underfunding of shared resources, also known as the Commons or Public Goods.

This problem is exacerbated in the digital space where infrastructure is constantly evolving - key dependencies often break and don’t have adequate support to stay maintained.

The infamous xkcd comic says it all:

To date, much of the work on solving this problem has been focused on helping funders identify critical infrastructure at the ecosystem level so they can fund it appropriately. Projects like Tea Protocol (https://tea.xyz/), Deep Funding (https://www.deepfunding.org/), and Drips (https://www.drips.network/) all help with this approach.

However, most underserved public goods are already very well known by their communities, and are simply missing an organizational design that lets them support the infrastructure themselves. What they really need is a viable path to exit-to-community, made popular by Nathan Schneider. A structure, with no need for altruism, that gives control of the platform to its most avid users.

Addressing the Public Goods problem is considered by many to be the #1 global pain point cryptocurrency can solve - with its distributed, permissionless design capable of supplementing and/or replacing the existing public goods funding monopolies: governments and financial institutions.

However, due to the massive scope and extremely diverse nature of public goods, we need to first narrow this scope to a solvable subset - namely open source software in web3.

This DDA aims to address the critical gaps currently missing from the web3 open source software funding, which are mid-stage projects with traction and happy users, struggling to lock down the support needed for ongoing maintenance and key upgrades.

To identify these gaps, we first considered other well-functioning open source software sub-segments:

Proven routes for small, early stage projects:

• Quadratic Funding / Incentivized Donation events - Gitcoin GG1-GG23, Giveth QF, Octant
• Hackathons - like on Buidlbox and Devpost
• Ecosystem/Protocol Grants/Fellowship Programs - Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Guild, network ecosystem grants

Proven routes for large, late stage projects:

• Tokenization - projects with a large, passionate userbase can raise money by distributing community ownership through governance tokens. These projects can often convert this into a treasury that sustainably funds the project through yield and healthy treasury management.