So basically what Getcoins trying to do is we're trying to
build the ultimate capital allocation engine for these
ecosystems and allow people to deploy these tokenized
treasuries to allocate them to fund what matters in their
communities. We're seeing a lot of adoption
by L twos and LSTS and projects that want to use get coin
grants. The power of get coin grants in
their own communities, get coins.
Flagship product over the years has been this thing called
quadratic funding, and the reason why quadratic funding is
powerful is also one of its vulnerabilities.
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Welcome to Epicentre, the show which talks about the
technologies, projects and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Ants.
And today I'm speaking with Kevin Awaki, who is the founder
of Gitcoin and a grant distribution project originally
on Ethereum and now on a whole lot of other chains as well.
Kevin, you've been on Epicentre before.
Welcome back. It's so glad to be back.
Thanks for having me. Cool.
It's been a while since you've been on, I think like two or
three years, so give us your and Gitcoin's back story in a
nutshell. Yeah, for sure.
Well, you know one of the cool things about having been in the
space for the last seven years and I think this is my third
Epicenter episode is that I actually the first Epicenter
episode I did was within a month of the launch of Gitcoin Grants,
which has been the platform that has helped the Ethereum
community fund $60 million worth of open source software and
public goods for the Ethereum community.
And that was that was January 2019 that we launched Get Coin
One Point O and that was about the time that I that I appeared
on Epicenter the first time I over the last Over the last
couple years we have been progressively decentralizing Get
Coin and I'm here today to talk about the Get Coin two point O
white paper which outlines our vision for a decentralized Get
Coin. So hopefully taking the power of
Get Coin grants and that $60 million worth of Ethereum public
goods that have been funded on the platform and putting in the
power of any community that is based on top of the EVM.
So progressively decentralizing and progressively having more
impact over time. Perfect.
We'll talk about all of that in just a little bit.
Gitcoin leadership has kind of changed somewhat over the years.
So I know you were gone for at least a little bit.
So what's your current involvement?
So my current title is Co founder and I am acting CTO of
Grants Lab, which is the organization that is pushing for
the software development at the Gitcoin.
Dow Gitcoin, as I said in the intro, has been progressively
decentralizing over time. In 2021 when the Get Coin Dow
launched, we launched the GTC token and the GT and and that
was sort of like a transfer of power from AT.
At the time, Get Coin was a corporation and I was the CEO of
it. So all of the decisions sort of
rolled up to me. And when it became a Dow, the
decisions transferred over to the token holders who were
ultimately responsible for the fate.
And as part of the transfer of power, our legal team felt that
it was necessary for me to disaffiliate from the project
for at least a little while. And I think I was in total
disaffiliated for 15 or 16 months.
During that time, I was working on a project called Super
Modular, which basically at the time we thought that we would
kind of the setup would be similar to how the Etherium
Foundation builds the Etherium protocol and Consensus Joe Lubin
startup builds things on top of it, things like Metamask or or
Gnosis. That was kind of the setup
between the Get Coin Dow and Super Modular.
Super Modular was building software in the Get Coin
ecosystem and Get Coin was building the core protocols
which makes me I guess like one one thousandth of a Joe Lubin.
But we were just building stuff in the in the get coin ecosystem
for a couple years and and after that time I ended up
reaffiliating with the project as of I think it was September
of 2023 and I'm glad to be back in the fold and helping push the
the core protocol forward. We're seeing a lot of adoption
by L twos and LS TS and projects that want to use get coin
grants, the power of get coin grants in their own communities.
So it's quite an interesting time to be helping people fund
what matters in their communities, because lots of
people with tokenized treasuries that are trying to build active
communities around them. I have to admit that last time I
tried participating in the funding round and I've
participated in many, many, many funding rounds because you've
had like 20 or something, right? I I must admit, I gave up.
I didn't make it. I did not actually make any
contribution contributions at all.
I think it was like in the late summer or fall last year and I
failed at authenticating enough ways to kind of get a Git Coin
Passport or something, something that wasn't necessary to kind of
contribute earlier. Tell us about the Git Coin
Passport and why you felt it needed to be introduced.
And I know this wasn't just me. So basically, I know lots of
other people kind of seem to have the same problem on Twitter
at least. Sure, Yeah.
Well, certainly value your honest feedback in the road to
progressive decentralization has not been without setbacks.
And sometimes there have been many happy to talk about any and
all of them. So basically, get coins.
Flagship product over the years has been this thing called
quadratic funding. And the reason why quadratic
funding is powerful is also one of its vulnerabilities.
And quadratic funding is a mechanism invented by Glen Weil
from Microsoft, Vitalik Booter and the founder of Ethereum and
Zoe Hetzig. And basically the way it works
is that, Frederique, if you have a grant that raises $100 for
$100 from 100 contributors, and I have a grant that raises $100
from 1 contributor, you're going to get 99% of the matching pool
because we're trying to fund what matters to a broad swath of
the Ethereum community. So that's really powerful
because it means that lots of people will come out of the
woodwork to contribute to these grants because even giving a
dollar can get matched with 10s or hundreds of dollars from the
matching pool, depending on how big the matching pool is and how
many other contributors there are to the grant.
OK. So that's really powerful.
We're we're we're pushing power to the edges of the Ethereum
community by funding with quadratic funding.
But that power is also a drawback.
OK, so the the vulnerability in this, and since your listeners
are in the Ethereum community, I'm assuming they're adversarial
thinkers. If if I have $100 to my grant
with only one contributor, and you have $100 to your grant with
100 contributors, and you're getting 99% of the matching
pool, I have a rational incentive to make up 100
different identities in order to contribute to my grant and get
more of the matching pool. So that's what's called a Sybil
attack. It's a sock puppet attack and
that's why we've introduced Get Coin Passport into the system to
allow people to verify their identity and increase the cost
of forgery in so that your identity cannot be falsified.
Now the problem that we ran into and and keep in mind this is all
like live beta software we're we're kind of trying to figure
it out as we go along is that as we increase the cost of forgery
for attackers we accidentally increase the cost for real users
to verify their identity with Get clean passport.
And not only do we have to, we have to walk this line where we
make the system not civil like we have to make the system civil
resistant, but we have to make it privacy preserving and we
have to lower the friction for end users.
So that that's a little bit about why Passport exists and
the problem that we are trying to solve.
And the thing I'll say is that the Passport team has heard
everyone's feedback loud and clear and we they are working on
a no friction way of verifying civil resistance.
I can get into that if if it's interesting to your listeners,
but GG20 get Coin Grants 20 is coming up in April, and I would
encourage everyone who gave up during get Coin 19 or get Coin
18 to give it another try because we've been putting a lot
of work into making the friction way less for people, and I'll be
curious to hear if it paid off. The nice thing about Bitcoin
grants is that we've run 20 rounds and it's it's an
iteration every single round we take the feedback from our our
community and the feedback from metallic and other game
theorists and try to fold it into the next iteration of
Bitcoin grants. So it's a deeply iterative
evolutionary experiment, and we value your feedback because it
helps helps us make it suck less next time.
Tell us. Tell us what you've changed to
make it less painful. Yeah, so there's two things.
They're both really data science heavy.
So we've been investing in some like PhD level data scientists
to #1. There's a there's a stamp called
the East stamp, which basically goes out and uses a lot of
complicated data analysis and machine learning to look at all
the Unchained signals behind your address and to figure out
if you're a Sybil attacker or not.
So like something that that algorithm would find is that if
there's a hundred accounts that are all funded by the same
account, that's probably a Sybil attacker.
That's probably someone who's just gassing up a bunch of
different accounts so that they can that they can Sybil attack,
Get coin grants. So for the end user that is a
just one click connect and sign your message in order to get
above the matching threshold on get coin grants to get that
stamp. And you know before well you
tell me what your experience was in in in GG19 or GG20.
But before you would have to go through and click a bunch of
stamps in order to get up to the threshold and now it should just
be a couple of clicks using that machine learning algorithm.
And then the second thing that I just want to talk about really
quickly is this new algorithm that it was invented by Joel
Miller who is a data scientist and on the get coin team called
cluster mapping. And basically what cluster
mapping does is it it it's a it's a way of clustering
contributors who contribute to the same grants together and
treating them as though they're the same identity.
And so basically if someone's Sybil attacking a get coin grant
and they make up 100 new accounts and they all those 100
counts only contribute to the same get coin grant for the
purposes of the QF algorithm, they are just one identity and.
And basically if if I was a Sybil attacker trying to attack
Get coin grants, then I would have to contribute to a bunch of
other grants in order to make my identities unique and uncluster
them from each other. And basically what this does is
it takes the energy of the attackers, the funding of the
attackers and make sure that they're funding a bunch of
public goods on get coin in order to attack the system.
So it kind of takes like Karate Kid style, takes your opponent's
momentum and uses uses it against uses it against them in
a in a way. So yeah, in some cluster mapping
and the EAT stamp are the two ways that we're really reducing
friction using cutting edge data science behind the scenes in
order to prevent Sybil and collusion attacks on QF, but
also keeping the user friction low.
I totally understand the approach.
Is there a way to kind of escalate this if I feel
misclassified? So say, for instance, I told my
50 friends that they should definitely give to, say, Rothke,
and they they do, but they only give to Rothke.
So we see there's like 50 people who only give to Rothke because
I told them there's a fantastic project, please give to it.
Can I then kind of escalate the fact that kind of they were kind
of, so to say, disqualified from the matching pool?
Yeah, so I mean the first method of of feedback is is contacting
the get coin support. So in the bottom right of your
browser window you can chat with someone on the get coin support
team and just say hey I don't agree with this or hey here's my
feedback. Your UX sucks in this browser
combination, web three login combination, that's the first
layer. The second layer is that you can
go to gov.getcoin.co and you can escalate it to the Dow
governance structures. So you know, this is all
transparent political economy happening out in the open and if
you're not happy with the way things that are are working,
then that's another way to escalate things.
And then you know the 3rd way is just complaining on Twitter.
I know that Get Coin has had some missteps in the last year
and a half, and I'm partially responsible for that as the
founder and we listen to all that feedback and Get Coin is,
like I said, iterative and evolutionary.
And you're complaining helps makes make Bitcoin grants 21
better. So please tell us through any of
those channels when you when you don't like what you're seeing.
Perfect. So maybe let's back up a little
bit. Why is capital allocation a
difficult problem that kind of needs this level of
infrastructure to tackle? I I think that what we're seeing
in 2024 is really quite interesting.
We've got thousands of Dows or tokenized communities that have
10s or hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars of
capital in their treasury and they all want to build
ecosystems around their software stack.
And so, you know, Justin Drake was just on a bankless episode
in which he was talking to David about how like the L2 meta, how
L2's are competing with each other.
And he said that L2's are going to compete for liquidity and on
infrastructure and on sequencers and and on tooling and on public
goods. And you know, like the one
change I would say to to what Justin said is that is that
public goods are are the way that you get all of those other
things in your ecosystem. So if you can solve the problem
of capital allocation, you can invite the builders into your
ecosystem to build tooling, to build infrastructure, to build,
to build liquidity. And so basically what get coins
trying to do is we're trying to build the ultimate capital
allocation engine for these ecosystems and allow people to
deploy these tokenized treasuries to allocate them to
fund what matters in their communities.
So basically the problem of capital allocation is, is how do
we fund what matters in in these communities?
How do we run quadratic funding rounds that that help
incentivize the outer ring of builders in your community?
How do we run retroactive public goods funding rounds in in order
to incentivize communities in in order to add value value to
them. So I I I think that like the
immediate answer in the crypto space is like the most effective
tactic available if you're competing as an L2 or an LST or
an LRT or AD 5 project is to build a community of of hackers
that are in the orbit of your ecosystem.
And so, you know, that's the near term goal for Get Coin
grants is to help these communities fund what matters to
them in the near future. Now, I think in 10 or 20 years
we're going to take the the tools that we have pioneered in
the crypto space, we and others have pioneered in the crypto
space, and we're going to take the mainstream.
And in 10 or 20 years, I would love to live in a world in which
local towns and cities and states are running retroactive
public goods funding rounds and quadratic funding rounds using
tools that were pioneered in the crypto space.
I think we can do better capital allocation using block chains
than was possible in the old world.
We now can do scalable and precise capital allocation
without intermediaries. We can do more democratic
capital allocation than was possible before.
And to me that's the true purpose of crypto is removing
intermediaries and help helping people get funding for doing
good in their communities. So yeah, near term answer we're
going to help arm arm people who are building EVM based
communities. But long term, it's it's about
helping the world fund its public goods and helping the
world allocate capital in a democratic way.
Cool. You talked about quadratic
funding earlier. Where kind of the the impact
your vote has depends on the square root of how much you're
giving. You also mentioned retroactive
public goods funding right now. Can you briefly explain what
that is? Yeah, sure.
So but just to zoom out a little bit, one way that we describe
get coin one point O is like get coin one point O is like a
screwdriver. It only did quadratic funding.
Get coin two point O is like multi tool.
It's going to do quadratic funding.
It actually does quadratic funding.
It does retroactive public goods funding, it does direct grants,
it does all these different flavours of of funding.
So. Talk us through all of the
flavours that you support now. Sir.
Yeah, yeah. Well you asked about retroactive
public goods funding, so I'll, I'll start with that.
Get coin has I, I, I I've been working with the Optimism
community in order to build a tool called Easy Retro PGF dot
XYZ, and that's basically the same voting interface that
Optimism uses for retroactive public goods funding in their
community. Retroactive public goods
funding, as as your listeners may know, is based off of the
idea that it's easier to fund things that have had an impact
in the past than it is to speculate about which things
will have impact in the future because you have all the data
available about what's actually done good in these communities.
So basically, using retroactive public goods funding, you set up
a system of badge holders who are community members who are
highly regarded in the community, have good judgement
and have about three to five hours per quarter in order to
allocate capital to to what has done good in the past.
And so Optimism has been pioneering the retroactive
public goods funding. Space within the Ethereum
ecosystem and we've partnered with them to make their flavor
of capital allocation available to any other Dow in the EVM
space that wants to do retroactive public goods
funding. So we've got our first pilot of
Easy Retro PGF dot XYZ available coming up in the in the next
month that'll be in in April and we're working with I I think I
can say this on here, but file Coin Pocket Cello in order to
run Retro PGF rounds in their community.
So yeah, just just I just want your listeners to like I just
want to like drill in on this point get coin one point O is
just QF, get coin two point O is is many different flavors of of
capital allocation in QF and retro PGF are two, two of the
ones that we're most excited about right now.
Happy to go into the others or to take questions about Retro
PGF. Yeah.
One question about retro PDF before we kind of go into the
others. So you said that you have to
define a set of people who are allowed to kind of make
allocations or kind of vote on kind of what should receive
funding. Why do we have to do that for
for PDF and not for not for quadratic funding?
Yeah. So we're we're kind of like
almost mixing two things. The the prospect of retroactive
versus prospective funding is, is just like sort of like a
spectrum of are you funding things that were only good in
the past or are you funding things that are good in the past
and in the future. So that's like that's like 1
spectrum and then another spectrum is the allow list who
gets to vote and then quadratic funding does this almost.
It's actually pretty radical to think anyone in the community
can vote with their dollars or or their ETH that they bring.
Whereas retroactive public goods funding is a little bit less
democratic and it's a more a little bit more technocratic.
So basically you assign a badge holder someone in your community
that's well regarded and well informed that gets to vote.
And I I kind of think of this as a spectrum of like on the on the
left hand side, if it's just the core team and the founders that
get to decide who allocates capital, well that's completely
technocratic and sort of like insular and and no one gets to
decide. And badge holders are just a way
for for communities to slowly dole out that responsibility to
their most trusted community members.
And and what I think we're going to see with retroactive public
goods funding is communities that have had direct grants
programs and maybe there's a grants administrator who's
become a power broker in their community start to be able to
dole out and progressively decentralize that that
responsibility. But also that power to their
community in until you start to reach out and have what what
optimism has which is hundreds of badge holders who are making
decisions. And then, you know, I think the
ultimate destination looks a little bit more like QF where
maybe you'll have thousands of badge holders that are making
decisions about funding what matters.
It's about progressively decentralizing that power.
So when we talk about the difference between QF in retro
PGFI think people get a little bit tripped up because we're
actually traversing two different spectrums of the
design space. The 1st is retroactive versus
proactive and the 2nd is how technocratic versus democratic
is the vote. And you know capital allocation
is a design space. There's going to be many dots
along this design space. Those just happen to be two that
the community is exploring right now.
Yeah, super interesting. And and what are the other
capital allocation schemes that you have integrated into get
coin two point O? So I want to be very clear about
what exists right now and then what exists in the future
because I I think a lot of like one of the radical things we did
with the get coin two point O white paper is like we didn't
write the get coin two point O white paper and then say hey
we're going to build it over the next five years.
This stuff is live already. So we've we've got direct grants
which is just plain simple vanilla grants you can go out
and a grant administrator can run an on chain grant program.
We've got quadratic funding which is what get coins
historically known for. We've got retroactive public
goods funding that's already live and then we've got
conviction voting pilot that we were working on with one hive.
So basically conviction voting is, is is sort of like an
interesting way of doing capital allocation which you stake
governance tokens and they can remove money from the treasury.
The more governance tokens have been staked and the longer
they've been staked. And then we've got a capital
allocation mechanism called Streaming Quadratic Funding,
which is a, which is a partnership between Geo Web and
Superfluid and Get Coin in which basically instead of funding
public goods quadratically for two weeks per quarter, you could
have an always on stream of revenue that is being
continuously allocated to different grants in your
ecosystem. So those are the five that exist
right now, Direct Grants, Quadratic Funding Conviction,
Voting Retro PGF and Streaming QF.
We've got a road map of around a dozen other mechanisms that we
want to build into the Get Cooling Toolbox into the future.
And you know like I said, this is all in service of helping
communities fund what matters. We see a future in which
communities are going to be funding their ecosystem in a
plurality of different mechanisms and we think these
mechanisms are all complementary with each other.
I I think that the the meta the most effective tactic for
someone watching an EVM based community in the next cycle is
going to be not just having a regular grants program but also
doing QF and retro PGF and conviction voting all all
together and and and yeah so the the vision is basically to to
have an ecosystem of capital allocation that funds your
community in complementary ways to just your existing direct
grants program. Can you give examples of where
you think each of these schemes will be particularly effective?
Because if they're if they're all about the same, you wouldn't
need so many, right? Yeah, sure, I'm happy to.
The word scheme makes me feel a little bit dirty because a lot
of these things are deeply rooted in in game theory.
But but yeah, just to to answer your question, quadratic funding
is really good at democratic capital allocation.
It invites people in the outer edges of your community to fund
what matters to them. Retroactive public goods funding
is really good at progressively decentralizing the
responsibility from a centralized grant administrator
to to a group of trusted community members and then
eventually many more of your community members to fund what
matters to them. Conviction voting is really good
at creating bottoms up momentum in your community to help people
fund the the public goods that matter to them.
And you know, if if a normal governance proposal or process
takes, I don't know, hours to write the grant proposal and
then it takes all of the token holders to vote on it.
And in Summit spends 100 hours of of token holder attention
conviction voting is really nice because you you you you're not
doing $1,000,000 grants with with hundreds of hundreds of
hours of attention. You're doing like a a $500 slush
fund for a party that someone in your community wants to host and
they only have to stake thousands of their of their
governance tokens in order to pull it out.
So it's like a very bottoms up way of doing capital allocation.
So I think these are all these things are all good at like it.
It's it's the analogy of of of a multi tool I think really works
like for the same reason that scissors and a Phillips head
screwdriver and pliers solve different problems around the
house. Each of these capital allocation
tools solve different ways of doing capital allocation in your
community that are all complementary to each other.
So I think of it as like a multi tool or like a toolbox of
different tools that complement each other.
Cool you you were just talking about staking the token that's
relevant for that community. You guys also have your own
token that you pre briefly alluded to earlier.
What is that used for? Yep, so GTC is the is the Get
Coin token and GTC stands for Get Coin, or I like to say that
it's all it stands for govern the community.
It's a Governance Token and basically it's a fork of Uni,
which itself is a fork of compound.
Using GTC, any token holders can delegate their governance power
to a member of the community that's more active than them.
There is the Get Coin token dropped in 2021 and there was
around 14,000 holders at that time who were delegating to
about a hundred 150 key decision makers in the community.
And yeah, GTC is is basically a governance token that allows you
to govern the get coin smart contracts on chain and the get
coin smart contracts are basically the treasury.
And then there's also ALOE protocol, which is our capital
allocation protocol that you know, there's a, there's a fee
switch within the protocol that is governed by the GTC holders
and then there's the the treasuries that are governed by
the GTC holders. And there's active discover
discussions on gov.getcoin.co about how to evolve this into
the future. But yeah, the the short answer
to your question is just governing both Allo Protocol and
the Treasury. OK.
Then let's maybe dive into Allo protocol because kind of like
the get coin two point O vision is kind of like a three tiered
stack with the LO protocol at the bottom or top however way
you look at it. So talk us through that.
We're I'll start is that we built kit coin.
One point O totally wrong and I just want to like raise my hand
in front of your your audience and say I built it centralized
and monolithic and I have seen the light and modular and
decentralized is the way to go. So so get Coin 1.0 was a
centralized monolith. It was hosted on a AWS server in
Oregon that I set up and get. Coin 2.0 is hosted on Etherium
and on IPFS. So Hooray, our public goods
funding mechanisms are decentralized.
Now we were eating our decentralized vegetables.
So basically this is a Allo protocol is a modular suite of
smart contracts that allows people to basically it's easily
forkable. So anyone can fork, get coin
grants and build their own capital allocation mechanism
into it. But if you don't care about
coding, you can just basically use this tool called Get coin
Grant Stack which is the web application that allows anyone
to run a Get coin grants in in their community.
So basically what we're allowing everyone to do is run AQF rounds
permissionlessly with without any help from us.
So get coin one point O was all about fishing for you Get coin
two point O is teaching you to fish.
We've now got a community of 50 to 100 round operators that are
trained to run Get coin grants rounds in in your community and
that's what we call the program layer.
It's the social layer. People who run understand how to
run QF rounds in in various EVM based communities and they are
building, they are building these programs on top of get
coin grant stack which is the application that anyone can use
to run AQF round and a retro PGF round And then that's all built
on Allo protocol which is it was just sort of the the development
layer under underneath of it. So yeah I I think this
architecture is quite elegant because it allows us to go deep
on each of the capital allocation tools and build the
best tool for for that design space.
But it allows us to go broad and build many different types of
capital allocation tools into the community.
So that's a little bit about the architecture of Gitcoin 2 point
O. Can I add modules to that?
So basically, if I feel like a particular distribution
mechanism is definitely missing, can I build that and have it
integrated into that stack? Yep so if you don't have coding
skills you can go to getcoin.co slash grant stack, click on the
GitHub, open up a new issue and make a suggestion for a capital
allocation strategy. If you are a software developer
what you can do is you can fork aloe and grant stack and you can
augment the capital allocation strategies and then PR it back
into grant stack. So what I think is really one of
the most powerful things about open source is the ability to
accept contributions from from all over the place and and my
goal for get coin two point O is I want to do for capital
allocation what Open Zeppelin has done for your C20 tokens and
when. What I mean by that is this.
When I was a software developer who was just entering the space
and wanted to mess around with something at a hackathon for a
weekend, I would just pull ERC 20 solidity contracts out of
Open Zeppelin's repository. And I knew they were well
documented and they were audited and I could just take that money
Lego ERC 20 token and pull it into my app and then that way I
could build what my app actually actually needed to do instead of
reinventing the wheel of ERC 20 for every app that I'm that I'm
building. We want to do that for capital
allocation. I imagine a future in which
anyone in a hackathon at a Neath global hackathon in the future
can pull the power of get coin grants into their out into their
application for that weekend and they can instantly have a
quadratic funding strategy or retroactive public goods funding
strategy that they know is documented and audited and and
and I think that what this is we want to build the money Legos
for capital allocation in on the on the EVM base stack and and
what that's going to do is is propel the community forward in
distributing the capital that that exists in all of these
different tokenized treasuries across across the space.
And so yeah, setting the shelling point for for for
capital allocation contracts and and making those those contracts
available to any hacker in the space who wants to build QF or
retro PGF or conviction voting or whatever it is into their
application in the future. So that's the final North Star.
We're not quite there yet, still working on making the docs good,
still making the contracts really understandable.
But but yeah, we believe in a future in which anyone can take
the power of get going grants and put it into their
application and that's enabled by this new modular architecture
that we presented in get going two point O.
You said that the fee switch for the Allo protocol is triggered
by the Bitcoin token. Tell us about the fees that you
may introduce. Yeah, I I'd say that right now
we're really just focused on providing as as much value as
possible. Allo protocol is being used in
dozens of places right now. We think that there could be
hundreds, thousands of dials that are using Allo protocol and
could benefit from these capital allocation tools.
Right now and right now we are accepting payment and feedback
because we just want to make sure that these tools are
adopted in helping as many people as possible.
There are no active plans to turn on the fee switch.
I think it's really up to governance whether that's going
to happen or not. And I I think keep an eye on
gov.getcoin.co, but you know my constraints for actually
activating the fee switch would be that it has to be done in a
way that is positive some with the communities that it serves.
And I think that we're still exactly figuring out the path to
financial sustainability for get coin and how to how to balance
the trade-offs with with what that would mean for turning that
on. So I guess that's a long way of
saying it's up to governance. I don't know.
Keep an eye on govgovgov.getcoin.co.
What's the sentiment about get coin token holders because I
mean in principle it's like if you look at the market cap, it's
kind of like probably on the order of 100 million or
something. So and to kind of have that kind
of float, people probably believe that it'll it'll be able
to capture some of the value that it provides to other
communities, right? I mean I, I, I I think that the
the sentiment that I see expressed on gov.getcoin.co
which is where at least in theory, people are supposed to
be expressing their sentiment about get Coin is you guys need
to get product adoption. So, so basically get coin, Get
coin Dow launched in 2021 and we're now in 2024.
It took two years to rewrite the centralized monolithic stack to
be decentralized in modular and I and I think that you know in a
space where attention is fickle and we're going to chase meme
coins on the order of hours not days.
I think a lot of people have forgotten about get coin and you
know that's fine we we didn't execute and and you know there
was a pretty hard reset between one point O and two point O.
So you know, I I think the, the focus right now is is on
building tools that are actually useful to people and getting
those adoption. And you know what I I think like
being a leader again in in capital allocation.
I think like in a lot of ways Gitcoin one point O pioneered
quadratic funding at with the help of you know, obviously we
didn't write the paper, Glenn Vitalik and Zoe wrote the paper,
but we're pioneering the actual practice of using it and you
know the game has changed there. It's not just quadratic funding
anymore, it's retroactive public goods funding.
There's a bunch of different capital allocation tools and and
and and the reset from centralized and monolithic to
decentralized and modular has necessitated a different
approach in a in a new era of leadership.
So you know, I think the honest answer to your question is that
Gecko needs to lead again and it needs to and it needs to pioneer
the space during a new era in which the game has changed.
And and the sentiment that I hear that I really want to
respond to is making Gecko a a market leader again and and
that's that's what you'll see me pushing for at gov.getco.co.
That's absolutely fair. So you recently deployed to a
whole bunch of chains. How did you determine where to
deploy to? I mean, obviously it's clear
that if your main net was not the place to fear anymore in in,
in light of the fees, but yeah, how did you decide where to
replace your bets? Yeah, well anyone can take Allo
protocol and deploy it wherever they want.
So that's the nice thing about being forkable and permission
list is that you don't have to rely on Kevin Awaki anymore.
You know get coins going to deploy to any L2 that's
legitimate and wants to fund what matters to its its
community. So right now we're seeing the
most traction on optimism and Arbitrum Allo has also deployed
to to Sello into ZK sync into base and wherever the
communities that wherever there's money that is going to
be funding public goods and funding what matters to these
communities. I I think that we'll make sure
that there is an Allo deployment to those chains.
So I think we're all we're all waiting to see where where L
twos are going to shake out. But it's it's pretty cheap to
deploy the Allo contracts to a new chain in terms of time and
gas costs. So we're going to go to as many
L twos as there are communities that have treasuries that want
to deploy them. Yeah, makes total sense.
You heavily rely on kind of like the future being Dow heavy for
Bitcoin, right? Because kind of like allocating
treasuries kind of like in a decentralized manner.
This is very much a Dow mandate. How do you see the recent
evolution of Daos? Are you happy with where we are
right now with Daos or do you think we we we we need to push
for getting to another place? I think Dowser fascinating
design space. I I think Dowser are basically
crypto and multiplayer mode. What do we do when communities
have to govern something together have to push forward a
movement together. And I I was like when said the
word organization in in decentralized autonomous
organization. I think these are networks in a
way and that's just a totally different way of thinking and
it's going to take time for them to evolve.
The corporate form evolved for 304 hundred years something like
that from the East India Corporation to what we now know
is the Delaware C Corp or you know I'm not sure where the
equivalent is in Europe. But I I think it's going to
take, it's going to take decades of evolution for us to figure
out the final form of dows and I think that that we can't rush
it. I really like, I really like
Molok dowels. I really like compound dowels.
I I I think that there's all the gnosis safe is just an
incredibly simple but powerful tool for for helping communities
work together. I'm excited about new primitives
like hats protocol and you know I I I think we can't force the
evolution. I think we have to go through
the painful parts but also the beautiful parts of of Dallas
happening and you know get what get coins trained to solve is
like a very small portion of the Dow stack which is capital
allocation. And and you're right it it does
sort of depend on on people having tokens that they want to
deploy to from their tokenized treasuries to to the outer
orbits of their communities. But you know get coins kind of a
bet on the EVM eating the world and tokenization eating the
world. And on top of that I know that
people are going to want to fund what matters in their
communities and and we just want to build the best stack for for
doing that. But maybe I could tease a little
actually a little bit. I'm actually writing a book
right now called How to Dow, which will be published with
Penguin with Penguin Random House as a publisher in
September, October of this year. So really excited to explain the
design space of Dowels to hopefully a more mainstream
audience coming in the fall, and I think it's a really
fascinating and exciting design space.
I had no idea about the book, but I'm going to push on this
now. So what do you think is the
single thing that should be changed for Dow that would have
the most impact right now? It's it's a hard question to
answer because asking about Dallas is is like asking about
it's it's an extremely wide aperture.
Asking about Dallas is like asking about organizations.
Are we talking about a family? Are we talking about a
nonprofit? Are we talking about a for
profit corporation? Are you talking about an NGO
like it? It's just like too wide of an
aperture to even give a useful answer.
So I'm sorry not to answer your question, but I I think there's
a bunch of little things that need to be made better.
OK, I'd specify. So in my view, the one thing
that would do a lot if it were to be solved is kind of like the
attention bandwidth problem, right?
Kind of right. Now when you actually look at
the snapshots of Daos, often it is votes on things that
shouldn't be voted on. There's like people basically
quorums are not met left and right because people are kind of
disengaged. Do you have an idea how to to to
deal with them the bandwidth problem for different decisions
kind of on different scales for those?
Yeah, I mean my response to that would be, hey, what if there was
a capital allocation tool that respected the voters attention
instead of instead of assuming that they're spending 10s of
hours every day on on the governance forums.
So I I think that like quadratic funding in a way sort of is that
with quadratic funding you're you're taking a look at all of
the grants in a community that are doing stuff within that
community and loading up your cart once per quarter, it takes
10 or 15 minutes. It feels more like an e-commerce
experience you check out and then you're done once 1/4.
And so there's not a bunch of like governance proposals to
really spend a lot of time debating back and forth on.
And anyhow, by the way, I'm sorry there was so much friction
in your GG 19 experience. I hope that GG20 is is more is
better for you. But you know, my response to
that is we need a capital allocation Swiss army knife and
we need to have more tools that respect the the user's
attention, the voters attention when when they're allocating
capital in these dials. Yeah.
And Kevin I kind of I, I, I I want to make clear that kind of
I've I've given through git coin through most of the rounds.
I'm a huge fan. I think it's super it's it's I I
just wanted to kind of I was frustrated because I think it's
a really important tool and I want to see it just work.
Yeah. Well I I I am back at get Coin.
I was just affiliated for about a year and a half and I think
that get coin was in the messy middle between one point O and
two point O. But if you have complaints about
GG20, please tweet at me. I'm at Awaki on Twitter and I I
read all the feedback and we take it seriously sometimes,
even if you don't see it and and and know that we were working
hard to make the user experience better, we have made missteps.
It is a hard design space, but each Get coin is deeply
protopian with and by that I mean it gets better every
quarter. Sometimes it's two steps forward
and one step or one step, 2 steps back and one step forward,
you know, especially between get coin one point O and two point
O. But we are still here, we are
still grinding, and we're going to make each Get Coin grants
round better than the last one. Fantastic.
So tell our audience how to get involved with Get coin
governance if they want to do so, How to contribute, how to I
I know there's an approval process for projects to kind of
be whitelisted and so on. Do you rely heavily on
volunteers for that? So if people, kind of if this
resonates with people, where do they head?
Yep, so you can go to getcoin.co, which is where you
can find all the other good stuff.
If you check out impact.getcoin.co, that is the
ticker for the amount of impact that Get Coin has had from the
beginning of of Get Coin's entrance in the space I've
always been very focused on. Let's actually show the numbers
the tangible impact that Get Coin is is having and I wanted
to stand out from all the projects that were promising the
world but not actually delivering much.
And impact.getcoin.co is where you can go to see our latest
impact numbers. As of as of 2024 March 2024,
we've done $60 million worth of funding to public goods in the
Ethereum ecosystem. You can go to getcoin.co slash
discord if you want to join our Discord and get involved.
gov.getcoin.co is the governance forum for for get coin and you
can also find us on Twitter at twitter.com/get coin.
Yeah, those are the links that I would that I would expect that
people could go and check out. And April 2024 is when Get Coin
Grants 20 is happening. So set a reminder, remember to
check out in your Get Coin cart and send me a tweet after you do
it and let me know. If it sucks then tell me it
sucked. If you thought it was great,
then tell me it was great. I'm twitter.com/awaki Frederick,
a thank you so much for having me on the Epicenter podcast.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank. Thank you for coming on.
Kevin I I'm looking forward to round 20.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
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