Gitcoin Grants Round 5 (3/23 – 4/7) + A Virtual Hackathon (3/16 – 3/30).

This spring, Gitcoin is planning for bloom. We’ve got lots of momentum to buidl on from the start of 2020 and a great, worldwide community of builders and contributors to open source.

The next step? Bringing everyone together for Funding The Future.

The Foundation: Grants Round 4 + A Year Of Hackathons

Before we dive into the details, let’s take a quick look back at the growth of two of our signature events: Gitcoin Grants Rounds and Gitcoin Virtual Hackathons.

Gitcoin Grants

From the launch of Gitcoin Grants almost a year ago, we have hosted four rounds of Quadratic Matching — using an interesting formula to magnify voice of the individual in determining the usefulness of a project to the whole community. We saw the matching pools double each round with $25K, $50K, $100K, and $200K respectively being pledged to the Ethereum community across rounds.



Gitcoin Grants Round 4, our last in January 2020, was simply beyond our expectations. In case you missed our full report, everything’s explained here, and the key results that we’re buidling on next are these:

$200,000 were up for grabs between Jan 6th – Jan 21st 2020 (just a little over 2 weeks)

The Ethereum Community committed $143,642, resulting in a total of $343,642 donated for Ethereum Projects

resulting in a total of donated for Ethereum Projects We saw an insane amount of activity from the Ethereum community A jump 80 projects to 230 projects (yep, almost threefold!) From 477 unique contributors to 1,115 unique contributors From 1,982 contributions to 5,936 contributions (a massive +300% growth!)



Vitalik leaned in with his own account of these awesome events. Looking back, we still can’t quite believe what this amazing community has just accomplished.

The Hackathons

Since April of last year, Gitcoin has hosted 13 virtual hackathons with over 3,000 hackers, 250 projects built, and about $250K in total prizes for the hacking community. We saw projects like Enable and DeFi raise follow on funding. We saw hackers like Daniel O. and @cryptomental go on to jobs at Binance, ConsenSys, and the Ethereum Foundation. We saw Sachin Mittal earn $6,000 in one hackathon alone!

Most importantly, we saw hackers meeting each other. We’re doubling down here with a variety of social features for the next set of Gitcoin hackathons. We’re seeing the future of open source as one powered up by stronger social cohesion among contributors and funders and throughout all projects.

And all that leads into our next event: Funding The Future.

Funding the Future: A Hackathon + Gitcoin Grants Round 5!

You guessed it. Between March 16th – March 30th we’re inviting you to join our first ever double-stage event, where Funding the Future hackathon runs along with Grants Round 5.

We’re inviting you to 2 weeks of building the future of the decentralized web. We’re looking forward to projects which will further decentralized finance (DeFi), open source sustainability, and experiment alongside great projects building tools and products for the new internet.

At least 5 fantastic companies and 3 amazing community sponsors are joining to post prizes in the event, on top of some of the interesting prizes we’ll have for Gitcoin Grantees. Without further ado…

We couldn’t be more excited to unveil some of the prize ideas which these companies have. They are important projects to be built in Ethereum, and the seeds grow from the people who take the time to write them out for the rest of us to see. Register to see them, and to meet

The Community

Kickback, ConsenSys Academy, rDAI (via High Priests) and Pool Together headline our community sponsors — who will be posting more bounties, participating in our CLR round (more to come there 😉), and helping us run workshops for those of you who join.

We have a series of workshops in store, covering DeFi, ConsenSys 101 and more, along with a star-lineup of partners – ConsenSys Academy and Ethereal Summit. Check back on our landing page for the evolving workshop series, with something happening literally every day.

Lastly, we’d like to introduce you all to the Gitcoin Town Square. Town square is a place where you can interact with fellow hackers, builders and sponsors. Just login to Gitcoin and you’ll be there! Now that you’ve been introduced, we hope you join the Funding The Future Hackathon and introduce yourself to other hackers!

For Funding The Future, we’ll be running a $500 micro-CLR experiment for the most active hackathon participants. Sharing resources, helping form teams, and starting conversations with our mentors are all ways to add value to the event for yourself and others.

Check it out and join the convo!

An example of people getting micro-tipped in miniCLR 3, earning $40 for $2 in tips.



What you need to do: Join us! Sign up for Funding the Future right here, right now.

Part 2: Gitcoin Grants Round 5

Thanks for reading this far. Gitcoin Grants is back!!! Here are the details:

Update 3/12: Given the volatility right now, Gitcoin has decided to move Gitcoin Grants Round 5 to run 3/23 – 4/7. The hackathon will run as planned from 3/16 – 3/30. Funding The Future is 3 weeks as a result, hope to see you all (virtually) there.

Infrastructure Pool – $125,000 allocated to support Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets and the ever important UX.

allocated to support Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets and the ever important UX. Community Pool – $75,000 granted to support media, community, and marketing projects

Some New Things (!): We’ll be introducing several new engagement ideas for projects in this exciting new round. To give you a quick tasty teaser:

We’ll open up how the community shares feedback, by adding the option to express negative voting for the media round (but definitely not for the tech round)

We’ll update our formula, to introduce a $25 fixed pairwise constant

We’ll also tweak the system to support medium to long term contributions (“subscriptions”), that spread across multiple rounds

Perhaps most importantly (and simplest), we ask that you send a comment with every donation you make. The signs of appreciation and the opportunity for partnership and serendipity via small statements on a Gitcoin Grant usually matter more than the money itself!

Come One, Come All 🙂

To get ready for our double-stage event, read up on our latest hackathon analysis here and our rundown of Grants 2020 here. Then be sure (and double-check) to sign up for Funding the Future!

With the many reasons (social, technical, public health, political) why Ethereum should be a remote community first and foremost, it’s clear to us that future growth & success depends on creating a space where projects are supporting each other with their dollars, their words, and with efforts to collaborate effectively.

We hope you share our vision and we’ll be waiting to see your breakthrough ideas and passion shine, we hope to see you on Gitcoin March 16th!

Keep on buidling for the future!



P.S. Got questions? Feedback? Wild ideas? We know you do, so come share them over on Townsquare!

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