---
# System prepended metadata

title: The History of Giveth

---

# The History of Giveth
Giveth has a rich history, from humble beginnings to grand visions, building the Future of Giving. Here we share our story in hopes of inspiring other communities that want to work in a decentralized way. 
## 2020
### December
Amin was able to make Giveth TRACE beautiful, functional and stable within the last year - and now assembles a team of rockstars to help him make it even better. There are two distinct teams now, working on two distinct DApps.

Dani brings in a bunch of enthusiastic people to build out the Community and Communications Circles. Giveth is now in "full swing" again.

### July
The pace is picking up again. The first design phases for "Giveth 2"(Giveth.io) are finished by Marko. 

Some old team members flock back to the mother goose to work on developing the new DApp (Giveth.io). Organizational patterns are re-introduced and more people are sought after to grow the team again.

### February
While Griff attends EthDenver 2020 as a judge, he meets Willy who, together with a couple of friends, realized their own donation platform during the hackathon. Their app is called "Coz" (Cause) and wins the "Impact Track". Full of enthusiasm, Griff captures the crew with the idea to build a new DApp - a new Giveth together with the Coz team.

## 2019
### Winter
Amin - a contributor to the DApp who surfaced through Gitcoin is starting to "freshen up" the DApp little by little.

### July
The crypto bear market takes its toll. It had become more and more quiet with the Giveth team as funding continued to be scarce. The decision is made to continue in "maintenance mode" - essentially quitting all of Giveth's non-essential operations. Feature development on the DApp is halted and Comms Circle goes into submarine mode, emerging only to sparsely tweet from time to time.

### May
The Giveth team has a big meeting at their new headquarters in Barcelona. We spend almost a week reshaping roles and goals for Giveth. The agenda is seemingly endless and we touch all the points that are important to us, the DAO, the DApp and how we want to shape the future of Giveth and the Commons Stack.

### April
A delegation from Giveth and other friendly devs tramp to the biggest hackathon in the world (they claim) - ODYSSEY in Groningen, NL - to hack together on some core concepts of the newly imagined "Commons Stack".

### January/February
We meet up at our headquarters in Barcelona because it is time to move to a bigger place! Together we empty the big apartment and move to a huge inner city house that is still known and operated as `the Giveth House` to this day as a place open to all friends of Giveth.

## 2018
### October
`Devcon 4`, the Ethereum developers conference, is coming to Prague and Giveth is present again with a huge delegation. Many new and old acquaintances are made and important connections within the blockchain space are formed. A blockchain enthusiast called Willy is handed a T-shirt by Lorie and Dani - this is actually a significant event as demonstrated later in our history.

### August
`Camp Decentral` is erected at Burning Man, Black Rock City - giving talks about crypto, blockchain and digital sovereignty all week.

### July
A collaboration with Aragon begins (which will be short lived) and is a great learning experience for both teams involved.

### June
Another, smaller scale meetup follows shortly. We discuss many internal things and try to resolve differences about the direction Giveth wants to take going forward.

DAppNode is being split off the core Giveth team as a separate team with Edu leading development, Dapplion coding full stack and Jordi as a guardian angel and first product owner.

### March
Although the market entered a bear phase, gas cost remains high enough for us to be prompted to organize an initiative around scaling Ethereum mainnet. We invite the most promising teams in Ethereum to meet up and talk about different ways to increase transaction throughout and reduce fees for users. The mini-conference is called "Scaling Now" and takes places over two days, featuring workshops and speakers from projects such as: `Aragon`, `Status`, `Web3 Foundation`, `POA Network`, `TrueBit`, `Swarm City`, `Cryptokitties`, `Spankchain` and many more.

We meet an enthusiastic young engineer who calls himself Dapplion. He will become one of the driving forces of the DAppNode project. 

### February
Some members meet up in Chiang Mai, Thailand to stay and hack together.

Inspired by Truebits "Merry Merkle" a small, easily forkable donation app is deployed - the "Donation Leaderboard".

Edu realizes a portal to record contributions as videos, called the "Wall of Fame".

### January
The Flagship Giveth TRACE DApp is released at the height of the Ethereum bullrun - which unfortunately means the system we built is not affordable anymore for those seeking funding. At the time of release, the gas fees rise to a point where starting a campaign costs around USD 80 in gas fees.

Therefore Giveth becomes one of the first DApps trying out new approaches. Because no really usable sidechains exist at this point, we decide to try an experiment: to let most interactions occur on the Rinkeby testnet and bridge them to the Ethereum mainnet.

## 2017
### December
Reduction of roles - especially those requiring regular contribution. The team is still in the process of finding the right way to organize themselves. For now the team is organized in four Circles:

  - **Governance** (modeling the DAC, organization & administration of the team, Reward DAO)
  - **Communications** (for the external communications of Giveth)
  - **Dapp Development** (all aspects concerning the Giveth DApp and its integration with the Ethereum blockchain)
  - **Social Coding** (as a laboratory for open source culture, tool and infrastructure-focused software development)

  Due to the new budget, certain people have to change their roles within the team. Governance meetings are ongoing and holacracy is still the preferred organizational structure. The team's effort as a decentralized community is ongoing. In finding what works best, we realize it takes a whole lot of adapability and trust when structures are in a constant flux (in our case established through familiarity between members). It takes bravery to look upon emerging technologies and dive in, looking for consensus. Alas, this is the nature of an exploratory venture.

### November
`Devcon 3`  - The team is doing an amazing job representing and promoting Giveth at Devcon. The effort is amazing and inspiring. We feel the full transcendence of every single team member and the Giveth DAC radiates as the sum of our parts align.

Discussions about Governance structure, projects and budgeting that had been initiated before Devcon are discussed in the aftermath of the conference. A consolidation and reduction of roles is considered.

### October
Preparation for `Devcon 3`. The team concentrates on organizing and preparing for the event, every Circle is contributing in its own way and the team is making a big effort.

Governance meetings are maintained, the general structure of Holacracy is working well.

### September
Team meeting in Barcelona is held to organize and align the team efforts for `Devcon3` where we want to present the DApp to the Ethereum developers community.

Reorganization of roles and Circles commences and the resulting structures are getting clearer. This is still an experiment; the team is not yet at the “end” of its exploration.

### August
The team decides to be organized in a [holacratic](https://www.holacracy.org/) way. Circles are created and governance meetings are held every week.

The Reward DAO (a system to reward contributors for their work) is reworked and given stronger focus.

The Dev Team lays the groundwork for the new Giveth DApp in architecture and re-organization of code.

### July
Team meeting in Barcelona to set a governance structure for team organization and to talk about the Giveth culture and the technology that has to be built.

**From now on the Giveth team understands itself as a Decentralized Altruistic Community**, as Unicorns, finding their way to #maketheworldabetterplace.

### June
Meeting of core contributors in Berlin to talk about the concept and vision behind Giveth.

### Q2
A first version of the Donation Application (DApp) is launched on the Ethereum mainnet.

### Q1
A first project website is published under https://giveth.io

## 2016
In the second half of 2016, Giveth is founded by Griff Green, Jordi Baylina and a couple of other members of the White Hat Group. They wrote the MiniMe Token contract, Vault contract and MilestoneTracker contract.  Near the end of the year Vojtech Simetka and Grace Torrellas join to round out the team and the Giveth Slack is created.

# Offline Meetings

Quarterly, most of team meets in person at a dedicated team meeting or a very big conference. The list below shows our past/future events.
- **2019/08 Black Rock City**
- **2019/06 Barcelona**
- **2019/04 Cardona, Catalonia**
- **2019/02 Barcelona**
- **2019/01 Chiang Mai**
- **2018/10 Prague** Devcon4
- **2018/08 Black Rock City**
- **2018/06 Barcelona**
- **2018/04 Toronto** Edcon
- **2018/03 Barcelona**
- **2018/01 Chiang Mai**
- **2017/11 Cancun** [Devcon3](https://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon3/) 
- **2017/09 Barcelona**
- **2017/07 Barcelona**
- **2017/05 Berlin**
- **2017/01 London**