Our Benefactors - The Daily Gwei #74
Our Benefactors - The Daily Gwei #74
May the whales of Ethereum bless you on your journey to decentralization.
Gitcoin Grants matching round 7 is going live today and it’s set to be the biggest round ever with over $400,000 of matching funds ready to be deployed as part of the round. The best thing about this? This round will be the first one where an Ethereum-based project has given more funding to Gitcoin than the Ethereum Foundation!
yEarn isn’t the only Ethereum ecosystem member stepping up to the challenge either - funds such as Defiance Capital and Three Arrows Capital have pledged $50k and community members like Banteg and Mariano Conti have pledged $10k. Andre Cronje is also calling on other industry heavyweights to pledge some amount of money to this round. And it worked too - with Kain pledging that Synthetix is in, Future Fund pledging to support, and Fernando from Balancer following Andre’s example.
The rockstars of Gitcoin (source: https://gitcoin.co/grants/)
As an avid user of Gitcoin over the last couple of years, this outpouring of donations absolutely warms my heart. Obviously a lot of people in the Ethereum community made significant gains on their crypto holdings over the last few months so to see these people giving back in such a generous way is a super positive sign. This is basically how we can sustainably fund all kinds of projects in Ethereum - be that technology or community/media - no need to implement something controversial like block reward funding (which I discussed here).
This type of capital allocation from a wide, diverse and global community of people is only possible on networks like Ethereum. We can move money as fast as we can move data - someone in Australia (like me) can effortlessly donate some money (in ETH, DAI, USDC or any other token) to projects that are based anywhere in the world. And during the Gitcoin Grants matching rounds, these donations can be matched by up to 200x thanks to the quadratic funding mechanism which let’s even small donors feel empowered.
For this round, Gitcoin is using zkSync scaling technology to make the checkout/donation process as smooth as possible so there’s no need to worry about high gas costs eating into your donations. Unfortunately, the high gas fees had an adverse effect on Gitcoin grants matching round 6 which led to any people having a really poor experience and ultimately less money being raised than expected. In saying that, I’m really bullish on this round now that they’ve got zkSync integration!
So, as I mentioned at the start of this piece, matching round 7 starts today which means you should go peruse all of the grants here and donate to the projects that you use/interact with frequently (make sure to donate only when the round starts). A little goes a long way so don’t fret if you’ve only got a few DAI to spare - the quadratic matching mechanism will take care of the rest!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.