After discussion we surfaced some reasons not to do it:

We might want to get more experience as Grantee before acting as grantor.
Dispersing and requesting money puts us in a weird spot when fundraising if done at the same time.
If we downsize the round too much we only annoy people by either being too selective or "slicing-the-pie-too-thin" so everyone walks away with $100 each or worse.

https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/gg21-community-round-proposal-template/19015

Round Application

Name (or Topic/Theme) of Proposed Round:

"Make Ethereum Cool Again" with 2077 Collective!

Social Handle of Org on X: @2077Collective

Discord: 2077Collective

2077 Collective strives to act as "Ethereum Unofficial Marketing Departament". Our mission when running this round is to sponsor projects that either promote or explain Ethereum.

Eligibility Criteria:

Projects or individuals that promote or explain Ethereum.

Two main themes we are interested in are "adoption" (What are cool things that people do on ethereum now?) and "roadmap" (Where is Ethereum L1 headed next?)

Eligibility criteria:

Project has a marketing component, it is not a purely technical work or dApp
Project can show evidence of past work
Project promotes Ethereum as a whole, instead of shillling particular token or app
No projects focused on financial advice (e.g. "TOP 5 TOKENS TO BUY ON ETHEREUM"), gambling or any other theme prohibited by Gitcoin rules.

Notes:

We want to promote quality content about Ethereum. Priority should be given to organizations and individuals that explain why Ethereum is great (or where it could be improved) over tribal bullposting ("Ethereum for $10k is in the code!").
L2s are part of broader Ethereum ecosystem so work relevant to L2s is welcome as long as it touches L1 (e.g. "How blobs make Ethereum transactions cheaper")

Round History

How many times has this round been run during a Gitcoin Grants round?

This is first time 2077 Collective will run a round.

Gitcoin used to run flagship "Web3 Community and Education" rounds for educators/journalists but has shifted focus towards software and dapps.

With Optimism shifting focus away from Public Goods and towards superchain, this seems to have created a funding gap in Ethereum ecosystem that no one has been willing to fill. Untill now, that is.

Team Running This Round

Our team consists of 4 people responsible for the following areas:

Emmanuel [operator] - payouts, socials
Daniel - social media
Ciefa - partnerships
DistributedDoge - reviews, reports

We will ask additional 2077 Collective community members for help as needed. On that note, big thanks to Ceci Sakura for providing feedback.

Emmanuel, founder of 2077 Collective, is an experienced technical writer and vocal Ethereum advocate.
Daniel is a Community Builder and Technical Project Manager. He used Gitcoin to raise funds for DeSci initatives.
Ciefa has background in marketing and compliance, currently in charge of business development for 2077 Collective.
DistributedDoge works as data analyst and used gitcoin as grantee in Citizen rounds #2 and #3.

Alignment with Gitcoin’s Mission 1 and Essential Intents:

Gitcoin may have ambition to deploy to "any EVM community" but fact of the matter is that most of those are either using Ethereum or benefiting from innovation happening on Ethereum L1.

If we want cryptocurrency to win we have to build (on solid foundation), but we also need to tell people what we are currently building and why should they care.

Sponsoring good work that promotes Ethereum is explicit mission of the 2077 Collective, hence why we want to run a Gitcoin round that rewards people and organization that do so.

Anticipated Size of the Matching Pool:

$20-80k

Collective is expecting to spend $20k from own treasury
Remaining $60k to be raised from combination of other sponsors e.g. Arbitrum, EF Foundation, maybe Gitcoin Top5 matching

2077 Collective Multisig: eth:0x825001ac81d9348f71f2dadd717335ac0ab4a9fe

At time of writing main chunk holdings is 100ETH from Vitalik, but there are more supporters listed on the website.

Advisors for This Round:

Sejal Rekhan, wrote some of the Gitcoin grantee onboarding materials offered to help us by reaching out on Discord.

Funding mechanism

Since this is first time we are running a round, best mechanism for us is something that both donors and operators are already familiar with.

Quadratic Funding would work - no strong preference to flavour but we can use "cluster-matching" to get more equitable outcome at end of the round.

~10% matching cap or lower (depends on size of final matching pool)

We would prefer to use passive model-based Gitcon Passport check instead of having to bother grantees/donors with collecting Passport Stamps.

Community Size and Engagement:

Collective officially launched in July, but growth since then is pretty steady:

~420 Discord members
~1900 followers of 2077Collective twitter
~5800 followers of Eawosikaa twitter
~10+ initiatives being developed by members of collective. Live examples: Etherpedia, EIP-wiki, Ethereum2077

Type of Projects to Fund:

Newsletters (WeekInEthereumNews)
Books (Upgrading Ethereum)
Podcasts (Peep An EIP)
Guilds (ScribbleDAO)
Courses (RareSkills)
Builders and Influencers (jtriley_eth)

Anyone doing a good job promoting Ethereum or contributing to discussions about its future, regardless of the format, is welcome to participate.

Retroactive projects (i.e. those that did good job in the past - no matter if completed or on-going) can be funded no strings attached as reward for previous track record.

We welcome "proactive" projects but due to limited resources we will have higher expectations - every project in round has to show some evidence of effort (e.g. "I cannot yet afford to make T-shirts but I have a design ready") and present clear milestones on how to achieve the goal.

Estimated Number of Eligible Grantees:

300-600 eligible to apply
60-90 applicants
20-40 approved after review

Optimistic estimate compared to past "community rounds" run by third-parties but also conservative if compared to "Web3 Community and Education" round.

We would like to reach out and invite about ~10-20 grantees to seed the round with quality projects, but leave enough spots so that remaining part can join via open application.

Impact Assessment Plan:

Encourage proactive grantees to create KarmaGap profile + milestones.
Encourage grantees to join 2077 Collective project tracker on Notion.
Collect social media profiles of grantees (twitter, farcaster).

From our side, first goal in running this round is to see if it will attract new members and projects to join 2077 Collective discord and start contributing.

Second goal is to find projects that did good job promoting Ethereum and reward them in retroactive fashion to encourage those projects to carry on, as well as others to step up.

Additional Considerations:

2077 Collective got some recent press coverage from Binance and other, outlets thanks to recent donation from Vitalik so it feels prudent to promptly deploy some of that money to do something good for Ethereum community.

Potential Conflicts of Interest:

We do not anticipate conflict of interest.