Envisioning the Power of Gitcoin style grants for Solana

An in-depth analysis of Gitcoin and why a Gitcoin-style grants program for the Solana ecosystem is a golden opportunity!

$500 Billion+ of value has been created by Open Source, the digital public good.
Open-source developers create economic value but are under-compensated. This mismatch between value and compensation is due to a lack of funding for digital public goods on the internet, because of no single governing entity or platform. Until recently, we lacked the technological means to let markets handle the cost allocation to the public goods at scale. Gitcoin changed that for the Ethereum public goods!

One of the primary reasons, why Ethereum has a vivid open-source culture has been allegedly Gitcoin, which has facilitated more than $72.8 Million in funding for Open-source Software (OSS). The recent rise in the need for public goods on Solana has sparked a series of discussions for a gitcoin-style platform for Solana to foster Open-source contributions on Solana.

In this essay, we will first have a detailed look at Gitcoin to understand the key concepts and their working model. Taking insights from Gitcoin, we then make a case for why a Gitcoin-style grant platform for Solana is a solid opportunity, and what can be the different operating models, their implementations, and potential Go-To-Market strategies.

If you are already familiar with Gitcoin, you can skip the first few sections, but we would highly recommend reading the entire essay for a holistic understanding.

Thanks to Mahadeep, Dhruv, Irfaan, and Madhav for reviewing the essay. A special thanks to SuperteamDAO for sponsoring and supporting us to write this piece.

What is Gitcoin?

Gitcoin is a crowdfunding platform based on Ethereum built and designed to aid open-source contributors in capturing the value of their projects by raising funds. Founded in 2017, it focused on creating a platform to pay open-source software developers. Think of it as “Github + Ethereum”. It got launched as a portfolio project of Consensys (the parent company of MetaMask). Later in 2020, Gitcoin raised an $11.3 million funding round led by Paradigm; and spun out of Consensys as a separate entity.

In simple terms, Developers get paid working on open-source technologies, creating a space for them to learn, earn, connect, build and raise funding. It can be considered as an ‘Internet of Jobs’ platform based on Ethereum, running on a Quadratic funding model (more on that later).

What does the Gitcoin ecosystem constitute?

1. Kernel is a learn-and-build cohort-based program aiming to connect communities of open-source developers.
2. Gitcoin Bounties connect open-source developers to bug bounties and other meaningful projects.
3. Gitcoin Hackathons are designed to aid open-source contributors in earning by working on sponsored tasks while competing with their peers.
4. Gitcoin Grants provide a way for the community to fund open-source projects for public benefit in web3.

Though it is based on Ethereum, Gitcoin has been key to the development of many tangible crypto projects even outside of the Ethereum ecosystem. For a fact, Solana Labs was also active on Gitcoin in its early days, spending over $100K+ in bounties, partnering with projects like Arweave, and Jump, and hosting hackathons!

Have a snapshot of the incredible journey of gitcoin👇

Quadratic Funding: The Gitcoin Innovation

While crowdfunding is nothing new, one thing which made Gitcoin so successful was: Quadratic Funding! It is a capital allocation model, which tells a community to demonstrate their preference for a project by putting money. The model encourages each small contribution and allows maximum participation and benefits the project with the most number of backers. It utilizes blockchain to fund projects which can have increasing returns to the community.

Let’s understand Quadratic funding with an example👇

Suppose a project is building open-source Zk-based identity solutions and we want to figure out whether or not, this program is worth funding. Similarly, assume that there are many other projects as well, and want to raise funds.

Let’s assume the following:

• Anyone can make a contribution to any project.
• There is a mechanism that keeps track of these contributions.
• At the end of some period of time, the mechanism calculates a payment for each project.

According to the quadratic funding formula, the amount received by the project is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received.

For any given project, the payment is calculated as:

Take the square root of each contributor’s contribution, add these values together and take the square of the result.

Note: There were a lot of iterations over the formula to optimize and make it better, so the main formula being used might be slightly different but the fundamentals stay the same, i.e- The project with the most number of backers will benefit the most in terms of matching amount.

We have created these infographics to help you understand with an example👇

GTC Token and DAO: The Governance

Gitcoin launched its own governance token, GTC in May 2021 to decentralize the platform into a DAO (Gitcoin DAO) and create an ecosystem, which would enable them to collectively work to fund the next generation of public goods. $GTC has no economic utility and is used to just govern the Gitcoin ecosystem, with no claim on financial rights.

The Tokenomics: GTC token (ERC20) has a 100 million supply, with the token allocation as:

1. 50% for the past:
   Allocated to builders, community members, investors, and the existing team.

15% Retractive Airdrops: In May 2021, Gitcoin airdropped its community with GTC with the further allocation as % of the airdrop:

• 72% to GMV(Gross Market Value): Action through which value flowed through Gitcoin (Bounties, hackathons, grants). The 50/50 in the chart means GMV allocations were split evenly between spenders and earners from Gitcoin.
• 20% to On-platform actions like Opened/creating a bounty, Submitted work to a bounty, Opened/created a grant, Contributed to a grant (This also included a ‘time decay’ i.e- actions performed early in Gitcoin got more weightage)
• 6% to Funder’s League: Projects who participated in the Funder’s League got a split in GTC allocation.
• 1.6% to KERNEL: Reserved for members of KERNEL (a web3 educational community).

2. 50% for the future:
The remaining 50% of the tokens are deposited into the timelock contract held in the Gitcoin DAO treasury, governed directly through on-chain GTC voting. Over the next two years, GTC allocated to the Gitcoin DAO will be made available for distribution in equal monthly installments, meaning the full allocation will be unlocked by ~May 25th, 2023.

Gitcoin DAO

The Holders of GTC tokens are able to help guide the direction of Gitcoin from a partially centralized Web 2.5 platform to a completely decentralized protocol. To categorize Gitcoin DAO is a “Protocol DAO” (centered around an economic protocol) or an “Impact DAO” (creation of public goods)

This is how the DAO building is working out:

Building a community that cares about public goods → Designing & launching experiments → Supporting & scaling them → Collectively governing them

The DAO is focussing and optimizing its KPIs on three major areas:

1. The Ecosystem Impact: The positive impact Gitcoin is having on open-source through the Impact funnel: — Number of developers onboarded → Developers getting opportunities → Funding Opportunities → Retention
2. Interconnectedness: Increasing the social factor in the community. For eg. spinning off Sub-DAOs
3. Decentralization: Progressive decentralization of Gitcoin.

For effective coordination, Gitcoin DAO has workstreams (or working groups), that have their own budget, leadership structure, tools, and processes on a per-workstream basis — like a subDAO. Anyone can propose a workstream by following a proposal process.

Gitcoin leverages a COMP/UNI style governance and launched a Stewardship Delegation program, where Stewards are active community members who participate in governance. GTC holders have voting rights proportional to the number/amount of tokens they hold and they may delegate their voting rights to community stewards to vote on their behalf.

Workstreams define topics → topics lead to proposals → proposals are voted on by the community (and the stewards).

GTC makes up for the most value of the treasury which makes sense and it is followed by USDC, ETH, and so on. Interestingly, Gitcoin treasury has constantly been accumulating USDC, which might be due to the protection of treasury value in dollar terms and increased confidence in USDC to prepare for a prolonged bear market.

Community of Gitcoin: The Traction recipe

Gitcoin being quite deep on Ethereum gets strong support from its community: the primary reason for its success. It has also created a successful network effect, as projects have the incentive to promote each grant round to their communities due to the advantages of quadratic funding. When donors show up, they can easily back multiple initiatives in the gitcoin platform, thus amplifying the total impact. Their e-commerce-like platform, which allows contributors to add multiple grants to a cart and pay via multiple chains, provides a smooth user experience.

After seeing Gitcoin become the pioneer of grants in the crypto ecosystem, everyone started giving attention to those projects and in return, the projects got both the capital and the eyeballs they wanted (somewhat like Shark Tank but without giving up any equity, i.e free advertising).

Challenges faced by Gitcoin: A potential opportunity

1. Still Centralised: Gitcoin is still largely built on web2 infrastructure and fairly centralized from a technical standpoint. This has led to centralized debt which has to be undone (just like technical debt). In fact, Gitcoin is also well aware of this issue and the topic was initiated in May 2021, starting a workstream called “dCompass”, which aims to make grants and hackathons decentralize more permissionless.
2. Ethereum-focussed: While Gitcoin doesn’t pitch itself as an Ethereum-based grants system, it’s entirely focused on the Ethereum ecosystem and hasn’t much expanded to other alternate L1s, posing a concentration risk.
3. Attack Vectors of QF: With millions of dollars in line, these are the different ways to game Quadratic Funding like:

• Splitting contributions into multiple accounts, and donating to themselves
• Coordinating fake contributions with real people
• Colluders can manipulate the matching funds’ mechanism by dividing a large contribution into many small grants or by creating fake grants and coordinating real accounts to donate to them. This allows them to attract more matching funds as the mechanism disproportionately rewards the number of participants over the amount each participant donated.

Gitcoin Passport

Gitcoin introduced a measure to stop the Sybil attacks (identity issues) and the bots trying to game the QF model by designing an identity verification and reputation mechanism. Gitcoin Passport is a decentralized digital identity solution that provides a secure and privacy-preserving way for individuals to own, manage, and verify their digital identity, reducing the number of bad actors, scammers, and bots in the community. It enables users to collect “stamps” from authenticators such as Bright ID and Proof of Humanity, which act as credentials for their Passport and can be integrated into web2 and web3 apps with customizable front-ends.

Key features of Gitcoin Passport are:

• Privacy-preserving identity verification through open web standards like Decentralized Identifiers (DID) and Verifiable Credentials (VC).
• Cross-chain verification, allows data to be verified across multiple blockchains for a composable, interoperable identity.
• Sybil resistance that ensures the governance and decision-making systems are secure and protected from fraud.

Not just gitcoin grants, but passport solves the universal identity issues and can be used for Governance & Voting systems, P2E games, remote employment, and so on.

Impact analysis of Gitcoin Grants:

So far Gitcoin has given out more than $69M through grants alone. Let’s take a look at the total amount of grants given by Gitcoin in each round, starting from round 1 to round 15, which is the most recent round (September ‘22.) The contributions are separated into two categories:

1. Community Contribution: Amount contributed by the community
2. From matching pools: Coming from Gitcoin’s matching pools which are made up of sponsors

The central party creates a matching campaign and matches contributions from the crowd based on Qudrartic Funding.

Every grant round also features some ecosystem rounds and cause rounds (e.g.- Climate, Advocacy, Longevity) but for this analysis, we are considering each grant round as a whole.

Starting with grant round 1, Gitcoin distributed a total of $13,242 in community contributions and $25,000 from matching pools — we know this sounds low given the bull market frenzy we are coming from, but hold on! In grant round 2, the total grant amount increased to $56,535 in community contributions and $50,000 from matching pools. Similarly, the total grant amount continued to increase in subsequent rounds, with grant round 3 reaching $163,279 in community contributions and $100,000 from matching pools.

As we move along the grant round, it is evident that the Community Contribution amounts are not stable and keep fluctuating from round to round, reaching the highest at round 12 (Dec 2021) with $3.1M in community contributions and $3M from matching pools. This makes GR12 the highest amount raised so far in Gitcoin grant rounds representing a 135% round-over-round growth — all thanks to the peak bull market season!

While community contributions tended to fluctuate, the matching pool amount has been rising steadily over the years and reached its peak at $3.2M and continues to be in that range from grant round 13 (March 2022). The reason for this disparity in the trend is simply that retail is more prone to sentiments than businesses. We can see a decline in the amount in the latest round 15 where Gitcoin distributed $1.3M in community contributions owing to the bull market folding. Despite all this, the matching amount has stayed the same from grant round 13 which is at $3.2M.

Okay, enough of glorifying gitcoin and talking about Ethereum, it’s time to take inspiration and envision the grants program for the Solana ecosystem, folks! Be ready for the juicy stuff.

Solana has been one of the most active and growing developer ecosystems with tremendous growth in terms of the number of projects getting built. There has been an innate demand for funding projects that align with the community’s goals and values. Having seen the gitcoin success, the community now demands a gitcoin for Solana!

Why Solana desperately needs Gitcoin-grants now?

Solana Foundation has been instrumental in disbursing grants for early-stage projects in Solana, via various channels like the official grants page, SuperteamDAO, LamportDAO, and hosting one of the most successful ecosystem hackathons like Riptide, Summer camp, and Ignition. In fact, more than 60%+ of all VC-backed projects are sourced from Solana hackathons with ~$550 Million in total external funding raised.

However, the biggest challenge in the current process of grants and hackathons is, it’s way too CENTRALISED! There are pros and cons to it. The biggest pro is, faster turnaround time and hence, faster decision-making. For instance, Superteam Instagrants are disbursed within just ~48 hours, if approved. Implying, the Solana foundation or any central organization responsible for grants is better suited for shortlisting and judging deserving projects.

However, the lack of a decentralized grants program also leads to more closed-source programs, as the projects are not incentivized enough to open-source their programs with very low community participation in them. Let’s be honest, Ethereum has a very strong open-source community, and Gitcoin has been a primary reason!

Solana Foundation also acknowledges the problem and Jacob from Solana Foundation have proposed an interesting solution to this, where each round there is a list of projects like gitcoin and the amount funded by the community is matched by foundations.

Different possible Models:

Let’s now look at, how a gitcoin-style grants program can be implemented for Solana by going through each possible operating model:

1. Vanilla Clone of Gitcoin:

This will be simply taking Gitcoin and building a similar platform but on Solana with few customized features. Just like Magic Eden was initially Opensea, but for Solana. This brings an advantage of tried and tested gitcoin features and we will see a few of them coming up in 2023. For instance, Cubic Fund from SuperteamDAO has already started working in this direction. Stockpile, a crowdfunding platform on Solana is also working on adding Gitcoin-like grant functionality.

An obvious problem to tackle here would be Sybil attacks on Solana as well. Right now, Civic is a popular identity solution, which allows for identity verification and bot detection, which can be used for screening contributions. However, we feel that an identity layer is missing on Solana, and a grants platform will be a perfect launchpad for the Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) protocol to be built.

2. Open Grants Protocol:

Taking inspiration from Wireless Anon, we propose an open-source grants protocol. To understand, let’s take the example of Openbook (the fork of Project Serum). Openbook is an order book protocol, which matches orders of BUY and SELL, and the User Interfaces/Frontends, which are projects like Raydium, can use Openbook in the backend and customize their own User Experiences, Fees, etc. After the FTX crash, the OpenBook is now governed by a multi-sig of 13 Solana DeFi ecosystem participants.

The Open Grants protocol will be similar to Openbook, but for matching grants instead of matching trades. Interestingly, this “Open Grants Protocol” will itself be a public good, and will have zero fees. This can be entirely on-chain i.e Solana and will be accompanied by an SDK and a reference open-source frontend implementation for easy integrations.

Let’s understand a few components of this Open Grants architecture:

Frontends/UIs:

There can be as many as Frontends possible and they can compete against each other to attract more sponsors, funders, project creators, and so on. They will be independent to decide their own fees, filtering mechanisms, and so on. However, since all of the funds and data are aggregated into a single protocol, the liquidity will be concentrated and will avoid any fragmentation of grants — making it truly composable as well.

A good front-end example can be Superteam Earn, where there is already an evolving ecosystem of talent and sponsors, and it can launch its own grants program by simply plugging into this protocol.

Protocol:

Once collected by the frontends, all the metadata and funds of the various stakeholders like Projects, communities, and Sponsors finally get aggregated into the protocol. All the logic and calculations of Quadratic Funding, Funds disbursal, and Milestones can be embedded in the protocol itself. The changes can be governed by the community, which can even be a DAO and for an obvious reason, all this will be open-source.

Governance:

Similar to Gitcoin, a governance token would make sense to decentralize the community into a DAO. However, a token isn’t necessary and it can be very well governed by a set of trusted multi-sigs, who can make decisions and signs on behalf of the community. For instance, few members can be appointed from Solana Foundation or any major community voices can be elected to be part of the multi-sig group.

3. Making BONK, the Gitcoin for Solana!

BONK, Solana’s own doge meme coin, has been the talk of the town for the past 2 weeks, for its astronomical run (rising 100x in a span of just 5 days). The Bonk contributors were tired of toxic “Alameda tokenomics” and wanted to make a fun meme coin where everyone gets a fair shot, thus Bonk was born in December 2022. Apart from 50% airdropped to the community, 15% will be allocated to the BONKDAO (which amounts to a whopping ~$30 Million at the time of writing).

With the allocated funds for BONK DAO, it can establish its own Gitcoin-like platform, where each public infrastructure on Solana can be funded by the BONK community through its BONK tokens, while the BONK DAO can match them as a sponsor. This can seed public goods on Solana, much like ConsenSys seeded initial Ethereum Infrastructure products like Metamask and Infura. The primary reason why BONK DAO can become gitcoin is: It is already being used to fund open-source builders in the community-led Solana hackathon (Sandstorm) and is led by core members of BONK, who are themselves bullish on public goods. BONK also funded OpenbookDEX, with a grant of 1B BONK (~$1200 at the time of writing) to incentivize the development of features built on top of Openbook.

The best part would be, the BONK functions as a default, utility as well as governance token. It will give a purpose and accrue value to the BONK, than just being a meme coin. After all, what’s better for the Solana community than open-source public goods?

4. Integration of Solana into Gitcoin

While we envision a Gitcoin-style program for the Solana Ecosystem, an obvious statement would be “Why not simply convince the Gitcoin community to also integrate Solana?”.

Yes, that’s very possible, here’s how:

1. Integrate Solana payments: While Solana-based Projects can simply be listed under the current Gitcoin platform, the biggest issue would be: Solana payments. The Solana ecosystem wouldn’t want to buy or bridge Ethereum and then fund their favorite Solana projects. The donors should be able to pay in Solana-based Tokens (SPL) via wallets like Phantom, Backpack, glow, etc to the very least.
2. Go Cross-Chain: Cross-chain messaging protocols like Wormhole are exactly built to solve the very problem of dApps to go cross-chain quickly. Gitcoin can use Wormhole in two ways:

• xAssets: Allowing users to pay in any tokens on any chain while allowing projects to withdraw funds in any tokens on any chain. All swapping is possible in the backend via cross-chain bridges. Interoperability, FTW!
• xVoting: Cross-chain protocols also allow for sending messages across chains and cross-chain voting is a primary use case for them. This can allow Solana users to vote using Solana, while this is communicated to EVM chains using cross-chain messaging.

Every gitcoin round can incorporate a separate track for Solana and have Solana-specific matching organizations like Solana Foundation.

Pros:

1. A simple solution with saved costs/efforts and faster Go-To-Market
2. Leverage the existing gitcoin community and wider reach for Solana Projects
3. Get eyeballs and bring non-Solana developers to apply and build for native Solana project grants.

Cons:

1. The Solana community will lack enthusiasm as after Degods and Phantom move, cross-chain is not very welcomed by the community.
2. Losing the opportunity to build a Solana-native grant platform and bring an open-source revolution

How Gitcoin-style grants can impact the Solana Ecosystem?

Let’s look at some potential areas of applications, such a grants program can have an impact on:

1. Donations: Crypto has a great utility for donations due to its global nature and accessibility. For example, Unchain and UkraineDAO raised over $10M in crypto donations for the Ukraine war. Gitcoin Round 13 raised over $700K for humanitarian aid which was matched by organizations. Many independent projects also used Gitcoin to fundraise for Ukraine. Crypto donations can be expanded to other social causes like Climate Change, education, and healthcare.
   .
   Donations can not just mobilize on-chain funds toward social causes, but also bring capital from the fiat world into crypto, once it gets sufficient traction. For instance, a COVID relief donation campaign can be launched on-chain, where all the donations are visible to all transparently and it’s matched by a charity foundation, which was completely off-chain previously. Transparency would be the core value proposition for the Web2 charity, where all actions are visible to the public.
2. DeFi: The Solana Foundation along with organizations like Jump and Alameda have been instrumental in building DeFi public goods like Project Serum, Firedancer, and more. However, as the ecosystem matures, Foundation will get thinner and the community will need to step up and build these public goods on their own.
3. A perfect example here would be Openbook, a fork out of project Serum, which served as a critical liquidity infrastructure for Solana DeFi by matching orders for 30+ DeFi protocols, and hence, the fork was inevitable. The forked project doesn’t have any revenue component or a native token and hence, depends on grants from the community to keep it working. A Gitcoin-like platform would be perfect for such a case, where the DeFi community can contribute and the amount is matched by bigger DeFi protocols like Jupiter, Raydium along with Solana Foundation.
4. NFTs: The Solana NFT community has been long debating on Metaplex as the only creator of token standards for the NFTs on Solana, making them a monopoly. The Metaplex essentially controls the whole NFT infrastructure on Solana, making them a critical public good. A gitcoin-style grant to create an open-source forked version of Metaplex would be very much well received by the NFT community and this would ensure a community-wide adoption by inherent marketing, which is essential for any NFT standard.
5. Infrastructure and Developer Tooling: Anchor is a framework for quickly building secure Solana programs, without the hassles of writing boilerplate codes and security checks. It’s immensely popular among Solana developers with 2.6K stars, but it doesn’t have any sustainable sources of revenue. Building such critical pieces of infrastructure and open-source frameworks is critical for Solana, but kickstarting them via grants is necessary. Another such example would be Firedancer, the second validator client for Solana being developed by Jump Crypto. Wouldn’t it be cool, if it was funded by the community, matched by Jump Crypto and Solana Foundation?
6. Bounties and Hackathons: Gitcoin-style grant funding on Solana can also be replicated with Quadratic voting on bounties & hackathons. Currently, winners are judged by a central jury & chosen based on consensus. To decentralize this, implement quadratic voting for public submissions, where participants can allocate a budget of credits to projects.
   Where all hackathon participants or community holders with X amount of certain tokens can just ‘vote’ for the most deserving projects. Each participant can, let’s say have a budget of 100 credits, which can they can choose to allocate between the projects of their choice. This protects minority advocates and balances power vs. one-person-one-vote or one-token-one-vote. These votes can alternatively opt for a Product Hunt-style upvote instead of quadratic voting calculations.

The potential impact of a gitcoin-style platform would be massive for open-source development, as now developers wouldn’t have to worry about being forked and develop a moat by closed-sourcing their programs in order to protect their future revenue. A critical narrative has been that Solana is trying to speedrun growth via focusing on VC funding vs Foundation style public goods funding like Ethereum — Gitcoin-style grants would cleanse this narrative and depict Solana as a chain promoting open-source development too.

Source: Electric Capital Developers report 2022

Solana-focussed Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy:

A Go-To-Market strategy or how such a platform should enter the market and ensure adoption will be typical to a two-sided marketplace like Uber (Drivers matched by riders) or Amazon (buyers matched with Sellers). Network effects play a critical role in marketplaces, as the number of users willing to use uber will be directly proportional to the number of drivers available. Once there are enough drivers, more riders will use the platform, which will attract more drivers, and a growth flywheel kicks in. Because each marginal new rider creates more value for each driver, and visa versa, the network is subject to power law growth in its utility. This law of network value is called Metcalfe’s law, where

Value of the network grows exponentially = (number of users)²

Source

For a grants program, donors are matched to fundraisers, however, there is one more important aspect, the community or the ecosystem, which will be very specific to Solana. This makes a gitcoin-style platform to be triple-sided marketplace:

1. Community/Ecosystem Builders: This can be the wider Solana ecosystem or sub-ecosystems like the gaming community or trading community. The platform would require serious Business Development/Sales efforts to onboard strategic sponsors and ecosystems.
2. Grant Owners: These will be projects, that are looking to raise $$$. To get more grant owners, partnerships with incubators or DAOs like SuperteamDAO, LamportDAO, GrapeAthensDAO, or MetacampDAO will be essential who can market the platform.
3. Contributors: This will be the general public in the community, who are looking to find great projects and support them. A typical marketing campaign on social media channels like Twitter, Reddit, and community discords along with announcements from all communities and ecosystem projects will be essential to generate the hype. The more the hype, the more the word-of-mouth factor will come into play. BONK’s marketing can be a good example here.

This will lead to a virtuous flywheel, where each side of the market contributes to the network effect of the entire market.

Once launched, some critical KPIs to track for any such platform might be:

1. The number of open source projects on the platform and the amount raised: To help measure the size and growth of the open source community and understand its impact.
2. The number of contributors: To help understand the level of engagement and participation in the community and the level of support that projects are receiving from individuals and organizations.
3. Success Rate: The number of successful funding campaigns divided by the total funding campaigns.
4. Gross Marketplace value (GMV): To measure the amount of value flowed through the platform, just like any marketplace.
5. Platform usage and Retention Rate: E.g. the number of visits, page views, and time spent on the platform to understand the usability and take Product/UX decisions.
6. Revenue: Tracking the revenue and financial performance of your platform and whether it is generating enough income to sustain its operations and growth.

Closing Thoughts: Making the Solana ecosystem more open-source

We genuinely believe sooner or later, gitcoin for Solana is inevitable and we have tried out best to make a case for that. There can be numerous other models and variants of gitcoin, which can be experimented with by various projects and the best model getting traction from the community can be boosted by the Solana Foundation. Initial support from Solana Foundation will be very crucial, but this should progressively decentralize, just like Gitcoin. Thinner foundations and a Fatter community should be the ethos to take the Solana ecosystem forward.

Cheers for staying along with us!

If you are anyone building or have opinions on this theme, feel reach to reach out at Yash Agarwal or Sitesh Sahoo, we would love to help in the best possible ways. If you find this even slightly insightful, do share it — It justifies our weeks of effort and gets us more eyeballs :)

References:

1. Gitcoin’s Blog
2. Governance forum of Gitcoin
3. Green pill podcast by Bankless
4. Gitcoin Passport
5. We have also compiled a comprehensive list of all the resources and study materials related to this report. Feel free to refer to that for the complete list.

(This post was originally published on Litmosis.com)