Gitcoin To Test Decentralized Funding Protocol

Gitcoin, a crowdfunding platform for the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems, plans to retire its centralized grants platform and transition to a decentralized protocol.

On Jan. 10, Gitcoin launched its “alpha test season” in partnership with Fantom, a Layer 1 blockchain, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to test the new protocol.

“This new protocol will enable funders to set up a grants program anytime and add more flexibility to grantees who can apply across different rounds and donors who want to provide micro-funding that helps influence the size of grants given to impactful projects,” Gitcoin said. 

“In the long run, our tools will allow projects and communities to experience the benefits of community-driven funding at scale.”

Gitcoin’s first alpha round will support 200 grantees working on Ethereum infrastructure, Open-Source technology, and climate solutions. Gitcoin has allocated a $1M matching pool to the round.

The round will run from Jan. 17 through Jan 31.

Gitcoin also emphasized that the new donation interface may produce errors during the testing phase, urging users to report any issues encountered to the team.

Gitcoin is the largest quadratic funding platform in the world, with its grants program having distributed $38M in funding to date.

Quadratic funding uses a pool of assets that is used to match donations from the community. The funds mobilized to match donations diminish as donations increase in size, boosting the impact of smaller donors.

Akita Inu Sales

On Dec. 20, Gitcoin completed a year-long token distribution that converted a donation of 23.3 trillion AKITA tokens into 3,801.88 Ether ($5.05M). Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and chief scientist, donated the tokens after Akita Inu’s founder airdropped the tokens to his wallet in a bid to generate publicity for the project.

“This ends a years-long saga: Gitcoin was able to slowly turn a very large donation of Dog Tokens into over 5M in ether, without dumping it, and while helping and respecting the original Akita community,” tweeted Alex Van de Sande of the Ethereum Foundation.