Originally published as "An Introduction to Gitcoin Grants and Quadratic Funding"
In Web3, very few projects are as closely tied to the idea of public goods funding as Gitcoin. Since its founding in 2017, it has acted as a community-led laboratory for innovation: testing new ways to allocate capital, refining them over 23 grant seasons, and helping thousands of projects find early support.
Quadratic funding (QF) remains Gitcoin’s most emblematic mechanism, amplifying small donations by giving greater weight to broad community support. But over time, Gitcoin has developed a plurality of approaches for allocating resources. In addition to QF, there have been retrospective rounds that reward proven builders, and cause- or ecosystem-focused rounds that channel funds into domains like climate, open science, and community education. Together, these formats show how communities can coordinate to direct resources toward what they collectively find most meaningful.
With Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24) just around the corner, it’s a good moment to reflect on how Gitcoin has grown into a cornerstone of the public goods funding space, to look at what’s happening in its ecosystem today, and to highlight how you can get involved, whether as a donor supporting impactful projects or as a builder seeking funding.
Started by Kevin Owocki and with early involvement from Scott Moore and Kyle Weiss, Gitcoin’s early mission was to pay open-source developers for their work. The first few years were heavily centered on bounties and hackathons, helping coders get crypto rewards for solving problems or building new features.
In 2019, the company introduced Gitcoin Grants, pioneering quadratic funding for the Ethereum community. This model turned Gitcoin into the first large-scale experiment in community-driven funding for digital public goods.
In economics, public goods are resources that are non-excludable (anyone can use them) and non-rivalrous (one person’s use doesn’t diminish another’s). Open-source software works like that: it creates immense value but is hard to monetize since anyone can use it for free. This creates the “free rider” problem where lots of people benefit, but few feel compelled to pay for upkeep, leaving public goods chronically underfunded.
Gitcoin quickly evolved into a key player in the Ethereum ecosystem, directing support toward core infrastructure like developer tools, decentralized marketplaces, and community education. Many projects that are now household names got their first boost through its Grants program, including 1inch, Uniswap, Optimism, Dune Analytics, Bankless, POAP, and many others. And each Gitcoin round became a snapshot of where the community’s energy was going, whether it was infrastructure, developer tools, or cultural projects.
“Gitcoin Grants is establishing itself as a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem that more and more projects are relying on for some or all of their support.” - Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum
In recent years, Gitcoin has moved beyond simply running grants to building infrastructure for others. It developed the Grants Stack and Allo protocol, enabling communities to run their own funding programs, and created Gitcoin Passport to verify donors as real people (later spun out as Human Passport under Holonym). By 2025, Gitcoin has helped distribute over $67 million to more than 5,000 projects.
The most recent round at the time of writing, finalized in May 2025, distributed over $1.2 million to 235 projects. Full results are available here.
Quadratic funding was proposed in 2018 by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and economists Zoë Hitzig and Glen Weyl as a new way to fund public goods. At its core, QF is a matching mechanism: projects raise contributions from the community, and a separate pool of funds, usually provided by larger donors or sponsors, is distributed using a quadratic formula. What matters isn’t just how much money a project raises, but how many people choose to support it.
This design means that many small donations can outweigh a few large ones. For example, ten people giving $1 each to a project will unlock more matching funds than one person donating $10. In practice, this amplifies the voice of the crowd: projects with broad, grassroots support receive more matching funds than those backed by only a handful of wealthy donors. Gitcoin describes QF as “the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community.”
In a QF round, there are three main actors: the grantees (projects applying for funding), the everyday donors (individuals contributing even small amounts), and the matching funders (larger sponsors who provide the matching pool). A grantee might be, for example, a new Web3 education initiative or an open-source tool for climate research. Everyday donors then contribute whatever they can, which can be as low as $1 in ETH or DAI, and those contributions signal collective support. The matching fund, raised before the round begins, ensures that the projects with the broadest backing are rewarded with the largest share.
This structure makes even the smallest contributions meaningful, since they directly influence how matching funds are allocated. It’s what has made QF so emblematic for Gitcoin: a model that puts power in the hands of communities rather than just large funders.
One challenge with quadratic funding is the risk of Sybil attacks where someone creates fake accounts to simulate broad support and capture more matching funds. In Gitcoin Grants, that could mean one actor setting up dozens of wallets and making small donations to a single project, tricking the system into giving it extra money. To prevent this, Gitcoin uses Sybil resistance: systems that verify donors are unique humans, not bots or duplicates. This ensures each person only gets one voice, keeping outcomes fair and authentic.
Supporting projects on Gitcoin has two main parts: connecting your on-chain identity and making your donation.
Connect your on-chain identity: While this step is optional, Gitcoin will encourage you to do it. Connecting your identity helps prove that you’re a unique human and not a bot, which makes the system fair for everyone. It works through a tool called Human Passport. Instead of asking for personal details, it links things like your ENS name, LinkedIn, GitHub account, or other verifiable credentials. The more of these you connect, the higher your score. A stronger score can give your donations more weight in matching rounds, so even small contributions can unlock more from the matching pool.
Make your donation Donating is simple once you’ve connected your Web3 wallet:
Your donation then goes directly to the projects. During an active round, it also counts as a “signal” of community support, which influences how much of the matching pool those projects receive. In this way, even small contributions become part of a larger collective decision, shaping which projects the community chooses to lift up.
Recently, Gitcoin has shifted its strategy to enter a new phase: Gitcoin 3.0, billed as a Network-First Funding Festival and a pillar in Ethereum’s coordination engine. Instead of centering almost entirely on quadratic funding rounds, Gitcoin 3.0 introduces a plurality of allocation mechanisms, structured community sensemaking, and a stronger emphasis on tailoring funding to specific domains.
The centerpiece of this shift is structured sensemaking. Community members contribute problem briefs that analyze Ethereum’s most pressing challenges, assessing their impact potential, fundability (typically $50K+), and Gitcoin’s unique role in solving them. These briefs are then clustered into “domains,” which form the basis for focused, domain-specific funding campaigns during Gitcoin Grants 24.
This process is part of what Gitcoin calls Dedicated Domain Allocation (DDA). Instead of a one-size-fits-all model, DDA matches the funding mechanism, whether quadratic funding, retroactive rounds, direct grants, or venture-style grants, to the nature of the problem in each domain. The goal is not only to distribute funds, but to do so in a way that moves the needle where it matters most.
One of the community proposals discussed on the Gitcoin forum is called Ethereum Localism. It explores how Gitcoin’s funding mechanisms like quadratic funding and onchain governance could be brought into neighborhoods and cities. The idea is to channel resources into real-world initiatives such as local climate action, community currencies, or education projects.
Basically, Gitcoin 3.0 is a deliberate pivot toward network-led coordination where the community helps define what’s important and determines how to fund it most effectively. It marks a progression from just experimenting with mechanisms to building an ecosystem of tools, and now to aligning capital with clearly defined challenges.
Gitcoin has shown that public goods don’t have to remain chronically underfunded. They can be sustained when people pool their signals and resources. For those watching how Web3 can serve impact, Gitcoin is less a finished model than a living experiment, one that keeps expanding the imagination of what collective funding can unlock.
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