(2021-10-08) What Is Gitcoin The Gtc Crypto Protocol Explained

What is Gitcoin? The GTC Crypto Protocol Explained. Gitcoin is a platform where coders and developers can get paid to work on open-source software in a wide variety of programming languages. Users can also submit their own project ideas to the Gitcoin platform in order to crowdsource funding from contributing donors. Aside from direct community crowdfunding, Gitcoin employs a unique system known as quadratic funding to help match community funding efforts to accelerate development of the projects the community deems most popular.

What Is Gitcoin?

From an ideological standpoint, Gitcoin believes that open-source software is an integral cornerstone of software development and modern computing at large

The Gitcoin platform focuses on funding “public goods” projects, which are typically “non-rivalrous” and “non-excludable” — in other words, they are designed to benefit everybody without necessarily competing with one another.

However, most of the public goods projects funded by Gitcoin include projects that address blockchain within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Developers who have a project they wish to work on can submit it on the Gitcoin platform and crowdsource funding directly from other contributors, as well as participate in quarterly opportunities to earn extra funding through the platform’s innovative quadratic funding mechanism.

Quadratic Funding and Gitcoin Crypto Grants

Quadratic funding is a structure for crowdfunding campaigns where donations from individuals are matched with corresponding amounts of funding from larger pools of funds supplied by bigger donors. Funds are not “matched” according to a 1:1 ratio, but rather according to a proprietary formula. The formula is optimized to reward projects with more community support.

Currently, the quadratic funding matching pools are funded primarily by user donations to the Gitcoin Grants official matching pool fund, although other matching pools exist and more will likely continue to be created.

Gitcoin Bounties

Gitcoin enables users to fund certain technological development issues and crowdsource support from available developers on the Gitcoin platform. As the funder of a bounty, a user must create an issue on GitHub, fund the issue on Gitcoin (specifying project details, a timeline for completion, and any other expectations or relevant information), and then contributors may submit a short form to express their interest in completing the issue. Gitcoin bounties can be permissioned, requiring funder approval to begin work, or permissionless, allowing anyone to complete the bounty at any time. Through Gitcoin bounties, funders can choose workers at their own discretion, set timelines, and cancel at any time.

Community Governance via Gitcoin Token (GTC)

Gitcoin’s native governance token, GTC, is an ERC-20 token intended for community platform governance. There is a total token supply of 100 million GTC tokens

The intent of the GTC token distribution is to reward both the early users of the Gitcoin platform, as well as future contributors.

Gitcoin is governed by a DAO wherein users can participate in platform governance by leveraging their gitcoin tokens to propose and vote on various proposals. The platform is undergoing a gradual transition to complete decentralization, where eventually all of the platform governance will be turned over to the community. As of October 2021, this transition is being spearheaded by community “stewards”

The main initiatives of the Gitcoin governance process revolve around several predetermined “workstreams”

Future of the Gitcoin Crypto Ecosystem

With a platform designed to direct funding to meaningful open source projects via a system of open governance, Gitcoin continues to foster the development of Web 3.0 — the decentralized web.