Dispatches from the Quadratic Lands
After diving deep into incentives in my last couple of articles, I'm pivoting back to grants because that's what we do in crypto, right? Pivot.
What follows are my dispatches from the Quadratic Lands—observations from someone who initially approached this space as a curious researcher and then found himself knee-deep in running these systems at scale.
As I was writing this piece, it was announced that we’re sunsetting Grants Lab. The "winding down the business unit that built our tooling" headline instantly gave whole new meaning to this piece and everything I'd been working on for the last few years.
This change provides a unique vantage point for what I'm about to share and that backdrop colors the observations that follow.
WTF is Quadratic Funding?
First, some basics. Let's start with a simple question: What does "quadratic" even mean?
In math, quadratic refers to something involving the second power - that's when you square a number (multiply it by itself). It's the same reason we call those four-sided shapes quadrilaterals (for those of you who made it that far in your educational journey).
When applied to funding, this quadratic principle creates something interesting: instead of money flowing based purely on how much each person gives, it's designed to care more about how many people support something.
Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and Glen Weyl developed the concept in their 2018 paper, "Liberal Radicalism." They were initially tackling a bigger problem: How do we fund public goods that benefit everyone but that nobody has enough incentive to pay for themselves? Their solution was a system that could capture how communities collectively value something.
The math is straightforward but powerful: if one person donates $100, that might generate $100 in matching. But if 100 people each donate $1 (the same $100 total), that generates significantly more in matching - potentially $1,000 or more - because it demonstrates broader community support. The matching is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions - hence "quadratic."
Gitcoin: Origins
About a year before the aforementioned giga brains were writing their paper, Kevin Owocki founded Gitcoin. Under the umbrella of Consensys, it initially focused on hackathons (which eventually evolved into buidlbox) and simple bounties. The initial version was a place to connect developers with organizations that needed work done, but it was nothing revolutionary.
Everything changed in 2019 when Owocki discovered quadratic funding. He recognized that this novel concept could solve a real problem: how to distribute funding to the projects people cared about, not just the ones with the best connections.
It was the perfect fit for what Gitcoin was trying to do – help open source devs get paid while giving the community a say in funding what matters.
The first few Gitcoin Grants rounds were small experiments, with matching pools of just a few thousand dollars. Round 1 in February 2019 distributed a mere $38,000 across 86 projects – pocket change by today's standards. But something interesting happened: high-impact projects that traditional funding might have overlooked were getting noticed. Tools like ETH.build, Ethers.js, and WalletConnect received early funding that helped them along the way.
The success of these early rounds proved the concept worked in practice, not just in academic papers. By Round 4 in early 2020, the matching pool had grown to $200,000, and bigger players in the Ethereum ecosystem—including Vitalik himself—started contributing. The matching pool for these early rounds came from a combination of sources including Ethereum Foundation, Consensys, and a few generous individuals/entities. Some of the projects funded in these rounds became the backbone of DeFi Summer just months later: Uniswap, 1inch, and other protocols received early support through this community-driven mechanism.
As the impact grew, so did the vision. In 2021, Gitcoin evolved from just a product to a DAO. The $GTC token was distributed, governance processes were established, and the "Quadratic Lands" concept was born.
This idea/ethos of Gitcoin was interesting, but at the time, I was more concerned with researching programs running direct grants at scale (as you can see in my earlier work). The concept of these new funding mechanisms that crypto could unlock hasn't quite clicked for me yet. Fast-forward to 2023, and that would soon change…
Entry to the Quadratic Lands
My journey into the Quadratic Lands began in earnest around Gitcoin Grants Rounds 17 and 18. While I had been researching and writing on crypto grant programs for years, this was the first time I was actively involved rather than just observing.
By this point, the program had scaled from its humble beginnings – Round 15 alone (late 2022) saw nearly 40,000 contributors making 465,000 individual contributions to around 1,500 grants, with $4.4 million distributed. The operation was no longer a scrappy experiment but a full-blown machine moving serious capital across the ecosystem.
My title was "Wizard" (I have a staff and everything). The organizational structure was much more than just the Gitcoin Grants Program - it had grown into multiple workstreams, including PGN (the now spun down OP Stack L2), Passport (recently acquired by human.tech), MMM (Marketing, Merch and Memes), PGF (Public Goods Funding), Allo (the Allo Protocol Workstream), and Grants Stack (the no-code interface for running QF and soon-to-be direct grants platform).
I became part of the PGF Team, the group responsible for running the Gitcoin Grants Program and finding partners to align with in various ways (Gitcoin’s version of BD). What struck me most was how far the program had drifted from its original mission. Instead of concentrating resources solely on OSS/Digital Public Goods, there were many "cause rounds" – climate solutions, diversity in crypto, longevity research, decentralized science, and more. Each cause had its matching pool, criteria, and community of supporters.
On one hand, it showed ambition in growing Gitcoin's mission; on the other, it seemed a departure from its origins.
Round 18 was my proper initiation into the Quadratic Lands. The behind-the-scenes work of running a quadratic funding round was far more intense than most participants realized. The manual effort required was staggering. Our team was managing hundreds of grant applications, each requiring review. Compounding the manual work, the newly released Grants Stack brought everything onchain at the expense of efficiencies built up across our history in the legacy cGrants Platform. Add to this the Sybil defense challenges and coordination of KYC and payouts.
What surprised me most was how artisanal the whole process remained despite its growing size. We were using spreadsheets and Discord to coordinate what had become a multi-million-dollar funding program. This period also revealed to me the fundamental tension in quadratic funding: its elegance in theory versus the messy reality of implementation.
Passport in some ways added to this tension. It was a clever concept for Sybil resistance - building an identity verification system where users collected "stamps" to prove they were real humans. But in practice, it added friction to the user experience. Contributors had to jump through verification hoops to donate a few dollars, and we perceived drop-offs across the donation process because of it.
By late 2023, as we moved from GG18 to GG19, it was becoming clear that we were spending more time fighting Sybil attacks and dorking around in spreadsheets than focusing on the core mission and our original intents. Our processes were complex, and the infrastructure was buckling under the weight of its ambition.
While we maintained the status quo operationally (still relying on the friction-heavy Passport system and extensive post-processing), we were brainstorming alternatives behind the scenes. We kept asking fundamental questions: How do we bring the program back to its original intent? How do we make this sustainable? How do we reduce the overhead that consumes so much of our energy?
GG20
By late 2023, as 2024 approached, I knew we needed a course correction. While the proliferation of cause rounds had brought new vibes to the Quadratic Lands, it had also diluted our impact and stretched our resources thin.
For Round 20 (GG20), which launched in early 2024, we decided to double down on open-source software (OSS). The shift wasn't without controversy. Some community members questioned whether social causes would lose visibility, and we had many internal debates about the right balance. The approach we landed on was to let non-OSS rounds continue, but under community management rather than Gitcoin's primary focus.
By refocusing our efforts, we attempted to direct our resources to projects that provided fundamental infrastructure and tools while pushing for greater accountability and impact measurements.
To do this, we redesigned GG’s structure and split the program into four distinct categories, each a dedicated QF round targeting a slice of the ecosystem:
Web3 Infrastructure (Core Ethereum Infrastructure) – Supporting foundational bedrock projects from client software and L2 scaling solutions to decentralized identity and security tooling that keep the ecosystem running.
Developer Tooling & Libraries – Funding frameworks, SDKs, testing tools, and libraries that make developers' lives easier, ensuring the next ethers.js or Scaffold-ETH could emerge.
dApps & Apps – Backing consumer-facing applications that deliver real user utility, continuing the tradition that had previously supported early versions of Uniswap, 1inch, and Snapshot.
Hackathon Alumni – Promising projects that had already proven their concept at recent hackathons, helping bridge the gap between prototype and product.
Each round had its matching pool (ranging from $100k to $300k) and specific caps to distribute funds widely.
Beyond the OSS program, community-led rounds continued to evolve alongside GG20's structure. We introduced five Community Rounds (totaling ~$476k) run by external groups with matching funds. I was proud of what we accomplished. In addition to restructuring the rounds, they ran relatively smoothly, and we could keep up with all reviews and operational responsibilities better than before.
Distant Lands
While GG20 brought Gitcoin back to its OSS roots, I found myself drawn to what was happening at the edges of the Quadratic Lands, where other ecosystems were considering QF as a way to drive impact. My role shifted around this time. As GG20 wrapped up in May 2024, Gitcoin established Grants Lab as part of its "End Game" initiative.
Around the same time as these changes an important development in the evolution of QF was taking place. COCM, or Connection-Oriented Cluster Matching wholly improved the approach for sybil detection and round finalization by analyzing social graphs to identify coordination patterns and adjusts matches accordingly. Projects with diverse supporter networks are rewarded, while echo chambers are dampened. It's elegant and practical in ways the original QF formula couldn't achieve. This made it possible for a single round operator (me!) to run a large QF Round and not have dependencies on the data teams at Gitcoin to help with end of round reviews and finalizing the results.
The partnership that showcased what was possible and stress tested the newly minted approach to Sybil defense with COCM was with Sei Network. In April 2024, we launched the $10 million Sei Creator Fund, running four specialized rounds throughout the year. The first "Kickoff Round" allocated $250,000 to 63 projects, while Round 2 on "Creative Media and IP Development" increased the matching pool to $332,500 and funded 181 projects. By the year's end, the Creator Fund had distributed $1.3 million to 515 builders, with the community contributing an additional 20% of Sei's investment. We implemented Connection-Oriented Cluster-Matching (COCM) at scale to protect these rounds from Sybil attacks, ensuring funds went to projects with genuine community backing.
From here, multiple ecosystem partnerships sprouted up as well. To give a few examples:
We ran QF rounds with Metis, who also experimented with retrofunding.
Thrive partnered with us for Arbitrum Summer
LUKSO ran a QF Round while also partnering with us on their direct grants program
Octant ran a joint round with us that supported builders in our shared networks.
Zuzalu ran a few very large QF Rounds. One set of rounds leveraged MACI (which we’ll talk about a bit later!)
At this point in my contributor arc, I was having daily conversations with people all across the globe and exploring what partnership could look like. This included quadratic funding but also direct grants, retro funding, and custom mechanisms. I am forever grateful for this time and experience; it changed my trajectory and was a dream come true.
As these partnerships flourished, it became increasingly clear that quadratic funding was no longer just Gitcoin's experiment - it was evolving into something bigger that could transcend its original implementation.
Diaspora
After a few years of traversing these lands, I'm fascinated by how the mechanism has spread. The quadratic formula that in many ways started as Gitcoin's experiment has evolved into something far more interesting—a coordination primitive that's being remixed, reimagined, and rebuilt.
Take Quadratic Accelerator (q/acc). They've mashed together quadratic funding with token bonding curves to create a new beast entirely. Projects launch tokens through Augmented Bonding Curves while getting QF-style community matching. Instead of direct grants, the matching funds create token liquidity. It's like watching evolution in real time—QF adapting to solve the token launch problem while maintaining its democratic DNA.
Another would be Flow State's streaming quadratic funding experiment with Allo Protocol and Superfluid. Instead of discrete funding rounds, they've created a variant of QF, where donations stream in real time and matching adjusts dynamically. This addresses one of QF's biggest UX problems—the artificial urgency of round deadlines—while creating more sustainable funding flows for projects.
Another variant would be MACI. Using zero-knowledge proofs, MACI makes votes private and prevents vote-buying—donors literally can't prove how they voted to would-be bribers. As mentioned above, we ran a series of sizable MACI QF Rounds for Zuzalu, and DoraHacks launched aMACI.
On NEAR, the Plural Grants crew fused quadratic funding with quadratic voting, letting the community both donate and steer upgrades. NEAR Foundation’s post about the Potlock OSS QF initiative shows how they implemented this.
The Optimism Collective kicked around adding a quadratic-weighting layer to RetroPGF 4—see the design thread on reputation-weighted voting and pairwise ranking. The proposed spec for RetroPGF 4 details their approach.
Want more? How about examples of quadratic mechanisms infiltrating the meatspace over the last few years.
In NYC Council District 9 (Harlem), 1,104 residents used online quadratic voting to allocate a local PB pot—the first U.S. public official to run open QV. RadicalxChange has a case study on this implementation.
Nashville's Metro Council trial-balloted its FY-24 priorities with quadratic scores. When city clerks are debating "voice-credit UX," you know the mechanic has left the crypto petri-dish.
Taiwan's Presidential Hackathon has, since 2019, used on-line quadratic voting (99 "voice-credits" per certified citizen) to rank finalists that pitch the President's office.
In Brazil, an ITS-Rio + RadicalxChange project saw the city councils of Gramado and João Pessoa test QV to set their legislative agenda. ITS-Rio detailed these pilots in a 2021 article When port-city lawmakers in the Serra Gaúcha are arguing about quadratic costs, something fundamental has shifted.
The Quadratic Lands have expanded and become something that now starts to bridge a divide between crypto and those places outside the reaches of the metaverse. It’s grown to more than just funding projects; it’s prototyping the future of democracy itself.
Conclusion
The quadratic funding story isn't ending; it's being rewritten by whoever shows up to build what's next.
Rest assured my journeys in these lands will continue for years to come.
Sov