Gitcoin Opens the Dog Food to Fund its DAO

In a fresh move to bootstrap Gitcoin’s DAO, holders of the protocol’s GTC token voted to add a $50K category to its grants program.

Gitcoin, a funding platform that supports open source development, typically concentrates on what it calls Grant categories. These include “Infrastructure Tech” and “Dapp Tech.” But Gitcoin released its DAO last month “to decentralize and build an equitable protocol.” So Gitcoin has stepped in to support its own dissolution by using its own grants to develop and test products, a practice developers call “dogfooding.”.

“Dogfooding further reinforces our understanding of the value quadratic funding provides, while offering a case study for other ecosystems who might want to leverage it in the future,” Austin Griffith, the proposer of the category, wrote on Gitcoin’s forum.

Quadratic funding, or QF, aims to be the “mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community,” as Gitcoin explains. In essence, this means that public goods which receive support from more people, will receive more support from a pool which matches individuals’ donation.

Building Gitcoin

For example, with a $1K matching pool, if one grant received five one dollar donations, while another received one five dollar donations, the first grant would receive $833.33 of the matching funds.

As of May 25, Gitcoin Grants had provided nearly $16M of funding to public goods, according to a blog post outlining its new DAO and GTC token. Public goods range from media producers like DeFi Dad to pieces of software.

Gitcoin, on its 10th round of grants, will offer a “Building Gitcoin” section on this round, alongside six other more general categories, including “Community” and “Dgov,” or decentralized governance systems.

Gitcoin Grants

“It’s basically gitcoin the company putting up the 50K in funding to be used to fund teams building gitcoindao,” Gitcoin CEO Kevin Owocki told The Defiant.

There are currently 11 Building Gitcoin grants with the leading recipient simply titled “Decentralized Gitcoin Grants.” The grant’s objective is to “move gitcoin grants closer to decentralization and being managed and run by the Gitcoin DAO,” and is set to receive an estimated $28.9K from the matching fund.

The matching fund came from Gitcoin Holding Inc. “It’s just taken from our bank account,” Owocki said.