Quadratic Funding Hackathon: Debrief and Demo Day
Leon Erichsen
November 22, 2020
The Quadratic Funding hackathon GitxChange2 has come to an end. GitxChange2 was a 4-week program designed by the RadicalxChange Foundation and Gitcoin to lay the ground for various Quadratic Funding (QF) ecosystems.
QF is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods. Public or common goods can be any project that is valuable to large groups of people and accessible to the general public. You can find out more and play around with a quadratic funding tool at wtfisqf.com.
Gitcoin has shown that the math behind QF holds its promises in practice. Gitcoin Grants utilizes QF for public goods on the Ethereum blockchain. Downtown Stimulus put QF in action for economic relief of local businesses in downtown Boulder, Colorado. This hackathon’s primary goal was to take QF to many more causes for public goods.
Distribute Emergence
We believe that Quadratic Funding can advance public goods of all kinds. The hackathon included a variety of prizes around the concept of QF. We brought together creative companies, nonprofits, governments, and individuals who would like to initiate more democratic and scalable funding for their cause.
The Sponsors and Their Prizes
Eight sponsors participated in the GitxChange2 hackathon and posted thirteen prizes, problem-solving challenges with an attached bounty, amounting to a bounty sum of about $18,000 (USD).
Here is the list of the sponsors and prizes.
- Clr.fund is an Ethereum-based QF protocol for efficiently allocating funds to public goods that benefit the Ethereum network. Their challenges for the hackathon were to integrate Bright ID for identity verification and to create a subgraph, in other words, an open API for other projects to utilize the blockchain code of clr.fund.
- Freelio and its Elecratseed Fund project aim to create equitable funding opportunities for clean energy access providers and posted two related challenges. First, making a meme to encourage crypto philanthropists to fund energy matching funds. Second, explaining how the Electraseed Fund can implement QF.
- Gitcoin’s mission is to grow and sustain open-source software. As Gitcoin Grants has become a vital QF ecosystem at scale, Sybil attack resistance is crucial to ensure that nobody can work around the quadratic, democratic element. So the prize posted by Gitcoin is about adding additional identity verifiers to Gitcoin Grants that benefit accounts that use many verifiers.
- Idena, a blockchain-based proof-of-personhood network, posted a related prize for integrating Idena as a trust bonus in human verification of Gitcoin Grants.
- M+ Climate is quite an early stage project; its goal is to establish retired carbon dioxide credits as currency. They challenged hackers to develop a QF ecosystem to democratically fund projects in the M+ Climate ecosystem. Moreover, they posted a prize to create a video explanation of the M+ Climate project and draft the M+ Climate currency token.
- Rarebirds is a support ecosystem for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Pursuing that mission, they challenged the hackers to build a QF ecosystem dedicated to that cause.
- Regen Network is a platform for a thriving planet and agriculture in particular. Their prize was about building a QF application for the Regen platform.
- RadicalxChange Foundation also posted two challenges. One was more creative, asking participants to develop an expressive and exciting Internet meme to explain and spread the word about public goods. The other prize was about building RadicalxChange Openfund, a QF platform for RadicalxChange projects. (Stay tuned for information about Openfund soon.)
Celebrate the Winners on Demo Day on November 24
One hundred seventy-six hackers joined the event to work on these challenges. On November 24, 2020, at 10 AM EST, the sponsors and hackers will come together in a fun and casual demo day to present the respective prizes’ winning submissions. Join us for a conversation about all things QF.
Follow this link to get the event on your Google calendar or sign up for and join the Airmeet directly here.