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dGrants FAQ
In May of 2021 Gitcoin released GTC in order to decentralize Gitcoin governance to our community. Much has already been written about why this is important, including in our announcement post here, but in general we believe decentralization is the best way to fulfill our mission to build and fund the open web. By turning governance over to the community we increase Gitcoin’s legitimacy, getting not just consent but also administration from those we serve.
The launch of GTC simultaneously created a DAO with a treasury governed by Community Stewards. The DAO shares our mission and has the resources to empower the community to build for the public good. But part of their commission is to be inward looking, to create the systems and tools necessary for Gitcoin to decentralize. Of course, the process of decentralization is complicated, so the DAO created a special “Decentralize Gitcoin” Workstream to garner the human-power to make it so.
The first place the Decentralize Gitcoin Workstream will concentrate their efforts is Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin has several live products users interact with, but Grants is our most powerful mechanism for funding public goods. Like all Gitcoin products, Grants is built like a Web2.5 app — somewhere in between centralized and decentralized. To give you an idea of what it looks like, Grants incorporates Web3 technologies like smart contracts, but it’s hosted in a centralized manner like a Web2 app.
What we’re looking to do is turn Grants into an open source protocol, one which anyone may fork and build on top of (dGrants). That way projects may benefit from using the Quadratic Funding algorithm and related technology to run their own grants programs. Users may freely create and fund grants without being censored. Once the Grants protocol is available projects may build their own UX and curation model on top of it as well, giving their communities a unique experience. The workstream will provide working reference implementations of a Grant Explorer UI and curation module which can be forked and modified if desired.
A grant is an open source public goods project that has the opportunity to receive community funding and find user traction.
Grant rounds are collections of grants that are subject to additional funding through a matching pool for a given period of time (e.g. quarterly for Gitcoin Grant Rounds). They are not any different from a "matching round". On top of the individual amount these projects raise from contributors, there is also a portion of the grant round matching pool that is awarded to each grant based on a quadratic funding model.