On February 1, 2019, Gitcoin put $25,000 behind an idea from an economics paper2. Anyone who gave to an open source project on Gitcoin Grants over the next two weeks would see the gift matched. The Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys funded the pool, along with unnamed donors.
Its match followed a formula that favored many small gifts over a few large ones3. Kevin Owocki and his team started Gitcoin in 2017, paying bounties to open source maintainers20. By September 2022, Gitcoin's fifteenth round matched $3,100,00017.
A 2018 paper behind the match
Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and Glen Weyl posted the paper on September 17, 20181. The paper proposed a way to fund public goods, things everyone uses and few pay for, such as open source code. “The amount received by the project is (proportional to) the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received,” they wrote.
What does that do in practice? Gitcoin's first results gave a case. Lodestar drew 10 contributions worth $368, and its match came to $1,702, the fourth largest3. The count of people mattered more than the size of the checks. That design is now called quadratic funding18.
Both sides, in their own words
Does quadratic funding reward the crowd, or whoever can fake one?
“we grew into quadratic funding because the math was a better answer than the market was giving us”
“Because of its quadratic design, matching funds requirements scale rapidly, particularly by more numerous and equally contributed projects”
Round 1, and the first collusion
Gitcoin ran the first round from February 1 to February 15, 20193. Vivek Singh of Gitcoin posted the results on February 22. Donors gave $13,242 across 26 projects, and 132 unique contributors took part. With the match, $38,242 went to Ethereum open source in two weeks. Prysmatic Labs, MolochDAO and Uniswap drew the largest matches.
The same post named a problem. Gitcoin had stretched the round to February 17 at the ETHDenver conference3. “However, the results in this period skewed towards one project, which we believe was the result of collusion,” Singh wrote. Gitcoin kept only the results through February 15.
Round 2 hit the same wall. Gitcoin found that one project had drawn matching money through GitHub accounts "which eventually were proven to be fake, puppet accounts," Singh wrote on May 7, 20194. A sybil attack is that move: one person posing as many to win a bigger match.
The records disagree on Round 1
Gitcoin's own counts of its first round drift. The February 22, 2019 post says 132 unique contributors3. Owocki's July 14, 2026 retrospective lists "200 donors, $38k total to open source" for February 201921. Gitcoin's 2021 governance briefs say Round 1 "concluded with $44k funded"12.
What the coverage missed
Press coverage arrived as the rounds grew. On January 30, 2020, The Defiant's Camila Russo listed "protection against collusion" among the method's traits7. Gitcoin's own posts had flagged collusion in each of its first two rounds34.
Later coverage blurred people and gifts. On October 13, 2022, Decrypt reported that Round 15 raised over $1 million "from 390,000 contributors"18. Gitcoin's own report counted 39,750 contributors making 465,000 contributions17.
Fifteen rounds by the numbers
Each round set a match and drew gifts from the crowd. Round 1 matched $25,000 and drew $13,2423. In Round 2, the match was $50,000 and donors gave $56,5354. Donors in Round 3 gave $163,279 against a $100,000 match, from 477 contributors5. For Round 4, Gitcoin matched $200,000, and donors gave $143,6426.
The reports read for this piece omit Round 5's crowd total, so the chart skips it. Round 6 matched $175,000 and drew $227,8478. Its successor, Round 7, matched $450,000 and drew $274,8309. By Round 8, the match was $500,000 and donors gave $571,00010.
Donors peaked against the match in 2021. In Round 9, donors gave about $1,380,000 against a $500,000 match11. Round 10 matched $700,000 and drew more than $1,100,00012. Donors in Round 11 gave $1,590,000 against $965,00013.
Then the balance flipped. Round 12, in December 2021, matched $3,000,000 and drew $3,100,00014. In Round 13, the match was $3,200,000 and donors gave $1,450,00015. Round 14 matched $3,200,000 and drew $1,700,00016. Donors in Round 15 gave $1,300,000 against a $3,100,000 match17.
Gitcoin donors outgave the match $1,380,000 to $500,000 in 2021, then trailed it in 2022
Dollars from Gitcoin's matching pool and from donors in each Grants round; Round 5 is left out
- Matching pool
- Individual donors
- Height: Dollars, US
Sources: Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [3]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [4]; vitalik.eth.limo [5]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [6]; vitalik.eth.limo [8]; vitalik.eth.limo [9]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [10]; vitalik.eth.limo [11]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [12]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [13]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [14]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [15]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [16]; Gitcoin (via Internet Archive) [17].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Matching pool | Individual donors |
|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | $25,000 | $13,242 |
| Round 2 | $50,000 | $56,535 |
| Round 3 | $100,000 | $163,279 |
| Round 4 | $200,000 | $143,642 |
| Round 6 | $175,000 | $227,847 |
| Round 7 | $450,000 | $274,830 |
| Round 8 | $500,000 | $571,000 |
| Round 9 | $500,000 | $1,380,000 |
| Round 10 | $700,000 | $1,100,000 |
| Round 11 | $965,000 | $1,590,000 |
| Round 12 | $3,000,000 | $3,100,000 |
| Round 13 | $3,200,000 | $1,450,000 |
| Round 14 | $3,200,000 | $1,700,000 |
| Round 15 | $3,100,000 | $1,300,000 |
Participation moved on its own path. Round 10 had 14,500 unique contributors making 297,000 contributions12. In Round 11, 16,000 people took part13. Gitcoin's brief for that round gives two contribution counts, 425,000 and 486,000. The chart uses 425,000, the figure Gitcoin's Round 12 report implies14. Round 12 drew 27,000 contributors and 473,000 contributions.
Round 13 fell to 17,000 contributors and 300,000 contributions15. A record came in Round 14: 44,000 contributors and nearly 600,000 contributions16. Round 15 had 39,750 contributors and 465,000 contributions, about 12 per person, by The CryptoLately.com Desk's arithmetic17.
Gitcoin's Round 15 drew 465,000 donations from 39,750 donors in 2022, about 12 each
Unique contributors and contributions, Gitcoin Grants Rounds 10 to 15, July 2021 to Sept. 2022
- Contributions made
- Unique contributors
- Height: Count
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Contributions made | Unique contributors |
|---|---|---|
| Round 10 | 297,000 | 14,500 |
| Round 11 | 425,000 | 16,000 |
| Round 12 | 473,000 | 27,000 |
| Round 13 | 300,000 | 17,000 |
| Round 14 | 600,000 | 44,000 |
| Round 15 | 465,000 | 39,750 |
The fight over fake accounts
Fraud grew with the pool. In Round 9, "over 15% of contributions were detected as being probably fraudulent," Buterin wrote on April 2, 202111. Gitcoin paid the difference, about $33,000, from its treasury.
Gitcoin then gave the problem its own team. “Sybil Attacks, a form of fraud, and collusion constitute the existential threats quadratic funding faces,” wrote disruptionjoe in Gitcoin's Round 10 brief12. Gitcoin's detection model flagged 1,377 sybil accounts in Round 10 and 853 in Round 1113. The cost of the fake accounts, which Gitcoin called the fraud tax, fell from $33,014 in Round 9 to $14,350 in Round 10. In Round 11 it was $5,787.
The case for quadratic funding
Owocki still argues the math beat the market. “we grew into quadratic funding because the math was a better answer than the market was giving us,” Kevin Owocki wrote on May 12, 202620. In his July retrospective, he measured reach outside Gitcoin. “quadratic funding went from a 2018 paper to a mechanism the whole ecosystem runs,” he wrote21.
He also conceded ground. “the ideas won even where our product didn’t. i’m proud of that, and i hold both at once,” Owocki wrote21. In 2023, he told Blockworks that Gitcoin's first grants product "is just quadratic funding"22.
The case against
Ricardo Pasquini, a researcher at Universidad Austral's business school in Argentina, tested the method on Gitcoin's own data. “Because of its quadratic design, matching funds requirements scale rapidly, particularly by more numerous and equally contributed projects,” Pasquini wrote19. “As a result, matching funds are exhausted early in the funding rounds, and much space remains for social efficiency improvement,” he added.
He also looked for donors who back each other. “Among other findings, we also identify a significant amount of reciprocal backing, which could be consistent with the kind of strategic behavior we discuss,” Pasquini wrote19. In Rounds 7 and 8, he found at least 20 percent of contributions came back this way.
What to watch
The first number is the ratio of crowd money to match money. In Round 9, donors outgave the match by $1,380,000 to $500,00011. By Round 15, the match led by $3,100,000 to $1,300,00017. The second is the fraud tax each round's report prints13. A falling tax and a rising crowd share would back Owocki. Pasquini's warning would gain from a rising tax.
Sources
- Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig and E. Glen Weyl, "A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods," arXiv, Sept. 17, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06421
- Vivek Singh, "Gitcoin Grants: CLR Matching," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Feb. 1, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190330175942/https://medium.com/gitcoin/gitcoin-grants-clr-matching-ecbc87b10038
- Vivek Singh, "Radical Results: Gitcoin's $25K Match," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Feb. 22, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190401173834/https://medium.com/gitcoin/radical-results-gitcoins-25k-match-2c648bff7b19
- Vivek Singh, "Gitcoin OSS Fund Round 2's Radical Results," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), May 7, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20200926080919/https://medium.com/gitcoin/gitcoin-oss-fund-round-2s-radical-results-9d42bb93f9a6
- Vitalik Buterin, "Review of Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Round 3," vitalik.eth.limo, Oct. 24, 2019, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html
- Vivek Singh, "Gitcoin Grants Round 4," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Jan. 31, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20200308053032/https://gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-grants-round-4/
- Camila Russo, "Ethereans are Disrupting Donations in a Literally Radical Way," The Defiant, Jan. 30, 2020, https://thedefiant.substack.com/p/ethereans-are-disrupting-donations
- Vitalik Buterin, "Gitcoin Grants Round 6 Retrospective," vitalik.eth.limo, July 22, 2020, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/07/22/round6.html
- Vitalik Buterin, "Gitcoin Grants Round 7 Retrospective," vitalik.eth.limo, Oct. 18, 2020, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/10/18/round7.html
- Vivek Singh, "Gitcoin Grants Round 8 Governance Brief," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Dec. 23, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20201223204651/https://gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-grants-round-8-governance-brief/
- Vitalik Buterin, "Gitcoin Grants Round 9: The Next Phase of Growth," vitalik.eth.limo, Apr. 2, 2021, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/04/02/round9.html
- disruptionjoe, "Gitcoin Grants Round 10 Governance Brief," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), July 9, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210709205125/https://gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-grants-round-10-governance-brief/
- disruptionjoe, "Gitcoin Grants Round 11 Governance Brief," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Sept. 30, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20211007022833/https://gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-grants-round-11-governance-brief/
- Annika Lewis, "Grants Round 12 Results," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Jan. 5, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221219161616/https://go.gitcoin.co/blog/gr12-results/
- Sean MacMannis, "Grants Round 13: Round Results & Recap," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Mar. 31, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221116140526/https://go.gitcoin.co/blog/gr13-results/
- Sean MacMannis, "Grants Round 14: Round Results & Recap," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Aug. 29, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20230131140822/https://go.gitcoin.co/blog/gr14-results/
- Team Gitcoin, "Gitcoin Grants Round 15: Round Results & Recap," Gitcoin (via Internet Archive), Oct. 1, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20221003013845/https://go.gitcoin.co/blog/gr15-results
- Jason Nelson, "How Gitcoin Taps Community Voting to Give Out Millions in Crypto," Decrypt, Oct. 13, 2022, https://decrypt.co/111944/why-gitcoin-keeps-giving-millions-in-crypto-to-worthy-projects
- Ricardo A. Pasquini, "Quadratic Funding and Matching Funds Requirements," arXiv, July 29, 2022, https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01193
- Kevin Owocki, "What Gitcoin means to me [2026 edition]," Gitcoin Governance Forum, May 12, 2026, https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/what-gitcoin-means-to-me-2026-edition/25255
- Kevin Owocki, "[temp check] gtc retrospective," Gitcoin Governance Forum, July 14, 2026, https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/temp-check-gtc-retrospective/25343
- Bessie Liu, "Gitcoin's co-founder wants to return from the sidelines," Blockworks (via Internet Archive), Sept. 6, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230907080101/https://blockworks.co/news/gitcoin-kevin-owoki-returns