Can you explain more about Gitcoin Grants?

Gitcoin Grants launched in January, and we’ve done a little bit over $100k in grants since then. Gitcoin Grants is basically a decentralized Patreon that’s meant to fund open source software. The idea is that if you’re a team that’s providing value to the world, it can be a crowdfunding presence for you. I think blockchain has a couple different advantages here. Patreon suffers from a deplatforming problem that a number of social media platforms suffer from. You won’t see that on blockchain because it’s an immutable ledger.

We recently launched CLR Matching on Gitcoin Grants. According to Glen Weyl, CLR is the mathematically optimal to fund public goods that the community cares about. The way it works is that Gitcoin will match your contributions to open source software, for example ETH 2.0 and ETH 1X. The CLR matching algorithm ensures that projects who have a broad base of support are funded, rather than those with just whales supporting them.

How does Gitcoin play into the future of work?

If you believe in the premise of blockchain, and that we’re moving from an industrial economy to an information economy, it seems to follow that the way do work will change a lot. I think that elastic workforces — which is what Gitcoin is powering — is certainly one of those things, but I’m also excited about nested capitalism and other value streams that blockchain can enable for 21st century workers.

The gig economy is empowering in many ways, but gig apps have developed a bad reputation. We’re really excited about this new category that we’re calling dynamic workforce assembly. The primary difference is that the gig economy is just gigs. Dynamic Workforce Assembly (DWA) is a gradient between small tasks to part-time contracts, to being-full time. If you believe that blockchain will change the way we pay each other, then it follows that in the future many many jobs will be paid through blockchain technologies.

The other trend that I’m really excited about with the future of work is nested capitalism: Instead of viewing an organization as a large monolith, viewing it as a network. Joe Lubin always talks about how we’re building an organism in Web3, and I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. I’m excited for what the world looks like in 5–10 years out when these ideas have more traction.