A Quick Recap

Embarking on GG19, we were driven by the heartbeat of Gitcoin's evolution.. The nineteenth Gitcoin Grants round was designed to preserve the core essence of what we do while transitioning towards a suite of decentralized products and keeping the soul of our organization vibrant. Our essential intents for GG19 included a recentering on core values, improving both program quality and user experience, increasing transparency, and progressive decentralization.

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Let’s talk numbers. In a testament to the impact of collective intelligence on capital allocation, this edition witnessed the distribution of $1,094,662 across 471 innovative projects. Adding to the excitement, we hosted an unprecedented 9 community and 9 independent rounds simultaneously, setting a new Gitcoin record for the most concurrent rounds ever! Read on for more details on results, payout information, and reflections on the round.

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Program Round Results

Across 3 program rounds, 57,363 unique donors made 268K contributions and raised $494K (refer to the Grants Data dashboard for additional details). 

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Note: The number of contributions and estimated total contributed amount in the following sections indicate eligible donations counted for matching calculations after Sybil detection.

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Ethereum Infrastructure

The Ethereum Infrastructure round comprised 28 projects with 82,365 contributions from 14,406 unique donors, raising approximately $58K. The matching pool for this round was $200K. 

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For the complete list of grants in this round, view this sheet.

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Web3 Community and Education

The Web3 Community and Education round comprised 310 projects with 52,285 contributions from 16,707 unique donors, raising approximately $138K. The matching pool for this round was $200K. For the complete list of grants in this round, view this sheet.

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Web3 Open Source Software

The Web3 Open Source Software round comprised 139 projects with 133,859 contributions from 26,250 unique donors, raising approximately $297K. The matching pool for this round was $200K. For the complete list of grants in this round, view this sheet.

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Wen Payouts?

The matching funds for the program rounds have been distributed and should show in grantees’ wallets! Check out this video for cashing out your funds from PGN to ETH Mainnet. We had a proactive governance discussion and a subsequent snapshot vote to approve the transfer of matching funds. Consequently, there was no formal vote to ratify these results; however, we had five days for review and discussion on the forums. 

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(Note: If you were a grantee in a community or independent round, please check with your round operator for the payment schedule)

Key Improvements in GG19

More than just an upgrade, GG19 broke new ground in web3 grants funding.

• Passport sliding scale for matching: GG19 introduced a lower score threshold for matching with a new sliding scale. The match rate increased proportionally from a score of 15 (50% matching) to 25+ (100% matching). 76.0% of wallets qualified for this round, an increase of 4% from the last round.

• Matching estimates: Donors could now see an estimate of their donation’s impact on a project’s matching amount.

• Explorer landing page: The new Explorer home page made it easier to discover rounds with improved search and sort functionality.  Donors were able to conduct a granular search for projects across rounds.

• Collections: Curated collections offered a way for donors to delegate funding decisions

• Report cards: Available for each round, the report cards provided round operators with a new channel to communicate publicly about their rounds with a real-time infographic on the round performance. You may access the report card on the round’s landing page in Explorer or look up the round at https://reportcards.gitcoin.co/ (includes Community and Independent rounds).

• Passport UI improvements: A sleek new interface made it easier to see how you can earn points to increase your unique humanity score.

• Passport scoring improvements: We are continuously refining the stamp scoring models to counter Sybil strategies, making it more challenging for fraudulent users and user-friendly for genuine individuals.

• Towards credible neutrality in Sybil detection: In GG19, we continued the adoption of a variant of quadratic funding that uses clustering to move Sybil and collusion resistance natively inside the mechanism and reward projects with more diverse and pluralistic communities. GG19 is the first round in years without closed-source elimination of Sybils/donors.

• Grantee communication: We enhanced our grantee communications by completing all project reviews before the start of each round and providing detailed reasons for non-approval. Grantees could submit additional information for reconsideration, either for the round they applied or another round they qualified for. 

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• Improving credible neutrality in eligibility: We also opened up the Web3 Community & Education round (with minimal criteria for round-specific eligibility), addressing concerns about past processes' subjectivity. Genuine projects, irrespective of their size or history, had a fair shot at funding based on community preferences.

• Accelerated payout: GG19 will have the quickest payout schedule, reducing the timeframe from months to weeks since the conclusion of the round.

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Learnings and Reflections

GG19 marks another successful chapter in the book of web3 grants that we are writing collectively. For round-specific deep dives and reflections, see these posts for Eth Infra, OSS, and Community and Education. Some key topics include:

• PGN adoption: We recognize that the current functionality of PGN has created friction for many users. As the new L2 is still in development, the absence of a multi-sig, a DEX, and restricted bridging options post user experience issues for donors and grantees this round. 
• Multi-chain donation: We also heard your feedback on making contributing easier when donating to projects across chains during multi-round cart checkout.
• Passport scoring: New grantees have found achieving the necessary Passport Scores for maximum match challenging. 50% of the users didn’t get a Passport Score over 20, meaning half the donors didn’t maximize their match.
• Scale for Community and Education round: We look forward to utilizing attestations, impact certificates, and other onchain data to manage the growing scale. Identifying and verifying projects in the Web3 Community and Education round continues to be challenging due to the number of submissions combined with limited evaluation data points (in the absence of a Github repo). 
• Streamlining project eligibility in OSS: We continue to explore tools and approaches that can draw upon attestations, onchain data and code repositories to streamline the OSS round's eligibility process. For example, we are excited about tools like Open Source Observer that help funders measure the impact of open source software contributions and Grantee Accountability Protocol that assists communities in maintaining grantee accountability.
• Appeals process: We will prioritize precise communication of deadlines for appeal submissions to ensure clarity regarding the timeframes for necessary actions.

What Lies Ahead?

We're not just evolving; we're crafting a legacy. Transitioning the grants tooling from Gitcoin 1.0 to 2.0, we have executed our vision to redefine the future of community-led capital allocation: To empower any EVM-based community to adopt secure modular protocols and plural mechanisms to fund what matters most to them. 

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In the coming year, we're excited to intensify our focus on decentralization and community involvement, ensuring that our evolution aligns seamlessly with the diverse needs of our community.