Web3 and Society – Web3 and the Frontiers of Funding

The programmability of money and growth of new online communities driven by an interest in decentralized finance and governance has given rise to new experiments in public funding and a “flipped” system of grantmaking dependent on measuring impact rather than proposals. 

Perhaps the most successful experiment in the space, Gitcoin, has disbursed $50M to open source projects across fields such as in climate, education, and community.

Protocol Labs, the organization that develops the InterPlanetary File System and Filecoin, researches new techniques and categories of funding and aims to provide alternative paths towards developing and evaluating the impact of science.

In this salon, we’ll cover the theory and application of quadratic funding, the core idea behind Gitcoin, and emerging ideas in the retroactive public goods space.

• Why are public goods difficult to fund?
• What is the history of quadratic funding, and how does it apply to the problem of funding public goods?
• What is the class of retroactive public goods funding ideas?
• What are impact markets and Hypercerts?
• Can these ideas be applied to the physical world, or are they relegated to the online space?
• What might new institutions for funding breakthrough work look like as compared to our traditional structures?

Recommended Readings:

1. A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods – Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, E. Glen Weyl
2. Vitalik Buterin on Funding Public Goods | Protocol Labs
3. Hypercerts: A new primitive for public goods funding | Protocol Labs

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