In the beginning, it's all about survival. Sergej Kunz and Anton Bukov bounced through blockchain events and hackathons, taking their winnings from one event and moving on to the next. They took part in 17 hackathons around the globe and would sleep in the hackathon area or sometimes just not sleep at all.

Then, a typo in their Gitcoin grant application led to an extra $45k in grant funding going to the early development team of 1inch. This fortunate mistake was just one of the many contributing factors that helped them go from Gitcoin Grantees to Gitcoin Funders in just over two years. It has awakened an inspiration and a drive to give back to the world, and to the ecosystem that helped them build their own future. 

TL/DR

• The Gitcoin DAO is tasked with decentralizing Gitcoin Grants.
• The DAO created the Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream to make it so.
• The Workstream solicited decentralization proposals from ScopeLift and ChainSafe.
• Those proposals have been delivered, please read on for next steps.

In this post, we’re excited to introduce the GTC token and our DAO that will govern Gitcoin — two crucial components allowing Gitcoin to decentralize and build an equitable protocol for funding open source development.

When Gitcoin first started in 2017 we focused on the mission of growing and sustaining open source software. During my 10 years in tech startups I had seen that everything and I mean everything in the startup ecosystem was built on top of open source. From the protocols that are the substrate of the internet, to Linux, to WordPress (the most popular content management system in the world) billions of dollars in economic activity, and billions of users interact with open source every year.

On Wednesday, May 12, 2021 Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin sent 49 trillion Akita Inu tokens (AKITA) worth approximately $5mm at the time of this posting to the Gitcoin Community’s multisig wallet. This wallet is used to offer matching funds for Gitcoin Grants rounds. Gitcoin Grants is a quarterly crowdfunding campaign for open source projects. These projects get a portion of the match funds based on their fundraising success.