Gitcoin's Kevin Owocki on Controversy and the Future of Open Source Funding

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ever since announcing their fourth round of grants, Gitcoin has been a major subject of conversation across the Twittersphere. In addition to all the excited buzz from both technical projects and media creators vying for grants matched based on E. Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin’s quadratic funding model, there has been controversy. Some of that controversy has been from outside the Ethereum community, pointing to Consensys and Ethereum Foundation support as an example of centralization. Some of the controversy has come from within, as debates rage about what is or isn’t an acceptable use of “public” resources. No matter what one’s position, it’s hard to deny that Gitcoin is one of the most interesting experiments in open source funding to date. Listen as @nlw askes the projects founder Kevin Owocki about the history of the project, the controversy, and what makes this round of grants such a big jump forward.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.
0:15.0	The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.
0:20.3	Welcome back to the breakdown.
0:22.6	It is Tuesday, January 21st, and today our main content is going to be an interview with
0:28.6	Kevin Awaki, the founder of Gitcoin.
0:31.4	Gitcoin has been all over crypto Twitter around its grants program, which has created
0:36.7	controversy, both within the
0:38.7	Ethereum community and beyond, but is something that's a really interesting experiment in
0:43.7	open source financing of not only technology, but community communications and marketing
0:49.8	efforts. So today is the last day of matched voting and matched grant making for Gitcoin.
0:58.0	And so I wanted to have this interview to get Kevin's take on basically everything that's been
1:02.2	going on and to just explain the system a little bit better.
1:04.7	But first, let's start with a few headlines that are related to stories we've covered
1:09.5	recently here on the breakdown.
1:12.9	Derivatives, derivatives, derivatives.
1:14.8	Derivatives have been one of the major themes around the financialization and institutionalization
1:21.4	of Bitcoin.
1:22.6	And there's just no way to see 2020 as anything other than starting off with a bang.
1:27.0	According to Skew, which is a data
1:28.9	analytics firm, there are $235 million worth of open positions across 5,329 contracts on the CME's
1:38.7	Bitcoin Futures as compared to $110 million in early December So basically, this number of open interest,
1:47.2	it's the sum total of all contracts that haven't expired, been exercised, or actually delivered.
	...

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