Public goods funding in Ethereum
In blockchain communities, there are more public goods than private goods
- Open source client code
- Protocol research
- Documentation
- Community building
How do we fund them?
Two questions in funding public goods
- Where does the money come from?
- What mechanism decides who receives it?
Where does the money come from?
- Individual donations
- Corporate donations (eg. Blockstream hiring Bitcoin core devs)
- One-time premine and/or presale (eg. Ethereum)
- Ongoing issuance and/or redirected fees (eg. Zcash)
Thesis: public goods funding needs to be long-term and systematic.
This means we need funding to come not just from individuals, but from applications and/or protocols
What mechanism decides the recipients?
- Centralized small committee
- Quadratic funding
- Something else?
MolochDAO
Gitcoin Grants
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Retroactive funding
- Instead of funding projects in anticipation of future work, fund them in recognition of work done
- Investors could invest in public-good projects early, and also get rewarded when they succeed
Optimism retro funding round
The future of funding
- More large-scale application and layer-2 protocols on Ethereum funding public goods
- More work in non-coin-driven decentralized governance
- Ecosystems forming around these funding mechanisms, as people become more and more confident that they are here for the long term
Public goods funding in Ethereum
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