$200K in radical funding for Ethereum

We’re excited to launch Gitcoin Grants Round 4! Starting 2020 strong on January 6th, make your voice heard to help us allocate two separate CLR pools.

The Community Pool ($75,000). Supports media, community, and marketing projects

Supports media, community, and marketing projects The Infrastructure Pool ($125,000). Supports Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets, UX.

What projects will get funded? The beauty is we’ll all decide, together.

Vote with as little as $1 here.

How It Works

As with previous rounds, Gitcoin Grants Round 4 uses the Liberal Radicalism mechanism for quadratic funding to allocate the $200K matching pool(s).

While ‘radical’ refers to exploring innovative techniques to fund our public goods, it also refers to the ‘radical’ (square root) based matching mechanism used to determine the match. This mechanism, sometimes called Quadratic Funding, uses the sum of the square roots (radicals) of donations made to a project to determine it’s match.

In practice, weighting the donations as radicals elevates the voice of people who make smaller contributions. ‘Under the radical,’ many small contributions matter more than a few big ones.

To Gitcoin, this continues to be an exciting mechanism as we consider how blockchains might be useful in the social challenges of funding public infrastructure.

Namely, we wonder what benefit society might derive from a well-funded internet infrastructure layer upon which the next generation of the internet can be built, solving some problems from today’s .

For those interested in learning more, here are a few recommendations:

Round 4 Logistics & Goals

Round 4 will be open from January 6th, 2020 — January 21st, 2020. Any contributions made during this two week period will be used to direct the match. We reserve the right to extend the dates; but hope to ring in the new year with a bang. Given a larger match, we have bigger goals for this period.

2,500 unique contributions by Ethereum community members

$75,000 in community contributions towards these 42 projects

Top 10 projects receiving at least $10,000 in funding, each

Gitcoin’s 2020 CLR Plans

Gitcoin plans on running at least quarterly rounds in 2020, with a planned 4 CLR rounds. The hope is the regularly scheduled rounds will help grantees use these funds not only as additional donations, but as a strong source of funding for their operations in the Ethereum community. A rough (draft) schedule is below.

Q1 Match: January 6th — January 21st

January 6th — January 21st Q2 Match: March 16th — March 30th

March 16th — March 30th Q3 Match: June 15th — June 29th

June 15th — June 29th Q4 Match: September 14th — September 28th

The goal is to allocate at least $1.5MM to Ethereum infrastructure during this time.

Celebrate Our Open Source Community

While the quantifiable goals matter deeply, we also simply hope to celebrate the beginning of a new decade, together.

By showing public support for projects doing work you appreciate, the benefits go much deeper than money — but by growing closer to one another along the way, and showing appreciation for work which inspires.

To make your voice heard, make a small donation to a project on Gitcoin Grants. Let us know what it is on Twitter, Reddit, or elsewhere. We’ll be listening, and are excited to see what you choose to support.

“There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.“

— Rumi, The Red Book

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