The Beacons of Gitcoindor - The Daily Gwei #19
The Beacons of Gitcoindor - The Daily Gwei #19
Using Gitcoin as a way to gauge community sentiment.
Gitcoin Grants matching round 6 is in full swing at the moment and will last for another couple of days. The gist of it is that you can donate to projects/teams/individuals that you want to support and it’ll be matched by “sponsors” who have provided capital. The real powerful thing here is that the matching amounts can be quite lucrative - sometimes up to 200x for a 1 DAI donation!
Today’s piece isn’t going to be about the matching round, instead, I’ll be expanding on my tweet above. Basically, I think that Gitcoin is the best tool we currently have to gauge community support in an sybil-resistant way. This is because the Gitcoin team has run 5 previous matching rounds where they’ve had to deal with collusion and people trying to game the system so they know a thing or two about how to identify it. Additionally, many users have built up a reputation on the platform via donations/other activity and these users are generally extremely active within the Ethereum community.
The EIP-1559 grant has so far received over $28,000 DAI worth of donations (and $36k DAI worth of matching) from 340 unique contributors in just 4-5 days which I believe is a record for any grant on the Gitcoin platform. I think that this is a very strong signal from the community that they want this EIP to be integrated into the Ethereum mainnet. It’s also worth noting that this EIP already had broad support long before this grant was set up and that the people working on EIP-1559 already have funding from other sources - the snippet below from the Gitcoin grant explains this more clearly.
Of course, not everyone was onboard with the idea of using Gitcoin as a platform to raise money and signal support for an EIP. There were concerns around how something like this could make the Ethereum governance process look like a “plutocracy” in that people could go to Gitcoin with an EIP, get funding from vested interests, and then have that EIP prioritized based on this.
The very clear counterpoint to this argument is that ProgPoW (a controversial EIP) actually raised tens of thousands of dollars via Gitcoin (for a technical audit) but was still vehemently rejected by the community.
There were also further concerns about how this grant is taking donations away from other projects in the tech section of Gitcoin Grants because (due to the way the matching works) once the matching limit is reached, projects play a sort of “tug-o-war” with eachother and their projected match payout may drop significantly. Though, this is just part of the core design of the matching mechanism and doesn’t really have anything to do with the EIP-1559 grant itself.
I’m curious to see if future EIPs are put onto Gitcoin to measure community support but I’d say most of them probably won’t be. If you actually look at most EIPs, they are quite technical and are not something most people are really interested in closely following. Hell, the only reason most people are interested in EIP-1559 is because of the fee burning mechanism which they believe will increase ETHs price!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
If you’d like to support my on-going work to bring you a fresh Ethereum-packed newsletter every week day, feel free to make a donation on Gitcoin here (during the current matching round a 1 DAI donation is currently being matched on my grant by 36 DAI)!
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.
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