Gitcoin’s Grantees Turnover $50M Grant, Add $28B To The Market In Three Years

More than $50 million in grants has been distributed to projects that in turn generated tens of billions of dollars in financial impact, Gitcoin said in its first report released on Wednesday highlighting the feats of its grants platform.

The grants programme which began in 2019 has supported 3,715 projects through donations from 270,000 unique contributors and $3.8 million raised by the community, Gitcoin stated, adding that it grew by 3000% in three years to empower its community to allocate over $20 million from less that $1 million it raised in its first year.

Grantees include Optimism which seeks to scale Ethereum; EIP 1559 which improves core protocol; Tornado Cash which supports private transactions; Coin Centre which engages in advocacy; Austin Grifith educates and helps on-board developers; Shamba Network rewards farmers who lessen carbon emission. Gitcoin said grantees have contributed over $28 billion to the market

Although we have only been around for a short time, our impact is immeasurable. Many of the most prominent Web3 organisations were once grantees and a large number have even returned as funders, said Azeem Khan, head of Impact at Gitcoin.

Gitcoin attributed its achievements to the quadratic funding mechanism introduced by Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl and Zoe Hitzig. Quadratic Funding is a system where the Web3 community contributes to fund projects that interest them. This system is aimed at curtailing the monopoly of centralised funders, including venture capitals and by giving projects direct access to potential funding from individual donors. Funds raised from the community are matched by those from matching funders.

This game-changing system financially amplifies projects that receive support from more people, not just more dollars, Gitcoin said.

Having operated the grants programme on a centralised platform, Gitcoin announced in November last year that it was ending it and would begin testing a decentralised grants platform. This year, it began testing the grants stack in Alpha and Beta stages.

As Gitcoin advances toward its goal of becoming a protocol-first DAO, we are excited to build on our accomplishments and expand our impact even further, the project said.