For those in tune with the largely open-source nature of many popular Ethereum projects, Gitcoin Grants offers a silver lining to collect capital in an altruistic manner.

Gitcoin Grants Round 5 is now live. Join us in supporting #COVID19 and @ethereum projects with $250K in total matching funding over the next two weeks. Let's fund our public goods, together. ⚡️🏥🌳https://t.co/EOsXjQLcYf — Gitcoin (@gitcoin) March 23, 2020

Based on the principle of quadratic funding, Gitcoin uses its CLR matching pool to reward projects based on the number of individual donors, rather than the collective sum of those donations.

What this means is that a project which receives 100 $1 donations will receive drastically more of the matching pool than a project which receives 1 $100 donation.

With Round 5, Gitcoin is offering a pool of $250k for matching, split as follows:

Public Health – $100,000 to support COVID-19 research, response, and recovery projects

– $100,000 to support COVID-19 research, response, and recovery projects Tech – $100,000 to support Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets and X.

– $100,000 to support Ethereum infrastructure projects spanning ETH 2.0, decentralized finance (DeFi), crypto wallets and X. Community – $50,000 to support media, community, and marketing projects.

As the largest matching pool to date, we expect this round of grants to have the highest participation – assuming donors still have the capital to share following Ether’s recent price volatility.

What’s more is that with the emphasis on Public Health, we’re likely to see a vast amount of new projects spawn – generally incentivizing innovation in light of the most widespread pandemic’s the world has seen in many years.

New Features

In light of the feedback from Round 4 just a few months back, Gitcoin has taken it upon themselves to instil a suite of new features tailored at a better donation experience.

Negative Voting

“We’ve added the option to express negative voting for the Media round (not for the Tech Round), in order for members to express both positive and negative feedback if necessary.”

For those unaware, last round brought up some controversy that certain media members *should not* be entitled to either the donations, matching or some combination of both. With this, members can donate against any given grant in which that amount is deducted from the grants matched funds.

Long Term Support

Looking to support a project in the long-term without going back and donating to them each round?

With this update, users have the ability to donate to projects across future matching rounds in real-time.

In theory, this should allow projects to continue to take advantage of your support without requiring them to remind their donors to go back and support the grant again during each new round.

Grants Feed

By adding an activity feed for all those who donate to various grants, Gitcoin has continued to explore different gamification mechanisms to further encourage donations.

Gitcoin has also encouraged donors to add a message with all grants donations – effectively promoting the message that it’s more about the signal than the capital itself.

Moving forward, we expect more forms of gamification to empower top donors and grant recipients.

Grant Partnerships

Outside of what Gitcoin has added themselves, we’re seeing a number of projects leverage their products to further evangelize donations. Some of the newly launched initiatives include:

The Giving Block, making crypto donations seamless for our public health partners

PoolTogether, who will be giving away one free ticket to PoolTogether to all donators during a *to be determined* 72 hour period

rDai – who launched High Priests, which you can use to pledge support to Gitcoin Grantees alongside respected members of the ecosystem.

We’re also aware of a number of other initiatives, all of which will either help people contribute to Gitcoin Grants or reward them for doing so without breaking quid-pro-quo guidelines.

In summary, we’re seeing a lot of projects which have benefitted from previous grant rounds take a step back from requesting additional donations, as to ensure that the matching pool is being properly allocated to those projects which need it most.

What to Expect

Over the next week, we’ll be keeping an eye out on all the grant submissions (many go live a few days after the launch of the round) and allocating funding to our favorite Round 5 projects.

If you or your project are looking for some feedback on your grant, shoot us a DM! We’re happy to offer some insight and do what we can to help position your project in what we believe to be the most effective way possible.

Until then, we’ll see you on the activity feed!