welcome
[Music]
Kevin Hello friends what's
up I'm Kevin aukee I'm one of the
co-founders of gitcoin has anyone in the
audience used
gitcoin all right can't see it on the
live stream but a bunch of hands went up
uh I'm going to talk about bringing the
getcoin model of quadratic funding to
Main Street so how do we exit our little
crypto bubble and start to do more
public goods funding downtown so if
you've been in the etherium ecosystem
over the last couple years you know that
quadratic funding is a democratic way to
run a public goods funding campaign if
you are an ecosystem that wants to fund
your ecosystem public goods you put out
a pool of funds and then you allow
grants or projects in your ecosystem to
access those funds by raising money from
their constituents and receiv money from
the central matching pool but there's
one weird trick with quadratic funding
that makes it into a democratic power
tool and that's that the matching is
based off of the amount of contributors
to each project as opposed to the amount
that they've given so if you raise $100
from a 100 contributors and I raise $100
from one contributor in a quadratic
funding campaign the one with the
broader base of support is going to get
99% of the matching pool and this makes
quadratic funding into a power tool for
funding what matters for everyday people
in these communities because the poor in
the many get to make Capital allocation
decisions instead of the rich in the few
quadratic funding has delivered 65
Million worth of funding in the ethereum
ecosystem over the last six years on
gitcoin but I wanted to prove that we
could bring it out of the crypto bubble
and to Main Street and so in 2020 when
Co was ravaging the world and in my
hometown of Boulder Colorado
99% uh decrease in foot traffic for the
down town uh was happening businesses
were struggling to stay afloat and so I
got together with my colleagues Zack
Herring and Katie Johnson and we put
together a $225,000 matching pool of
quadratic funding in downtown Boulder
Colorado and we're able to run a
quadratic funding campaign for a yoga
studio
a bookstore uh coffee shop and a couple
of other projects
downtown so this is what it looked like
downtown stimulus.com and basically the
way that we positioned this was that you
could support local businesses by making
a contribution to these businesses using
a credit card payout so basically we
took quadratic funding we took gitcoin
grants we stripped out all the crypto
and we just allowed people people to
contribute with quadratic funding or
sorry with uh with with US Dollars and
have their contributions matched by
quadratic funding so we had a $25,000
matching pool thank you to vitalic boin
and to local philanthropist bradf Feld
and we're able to raise
$116,000 from 320 320 contributors of an
average donation of about $40 and all in
all were able to raise about 41 thousand
doll for downtown Boulder public
goods I think this is really exciting
that A Primitive that has been pioneered
and distributed in the crypto ecosystem
was able to go mainstream with a
campaign like downtown stimulus and I'm
really excited about this meme of cosmol
localism which is basically an approach
to production and governance that
provides uh a combination of global
coordination with knowledge sharing in
local manufacturing and resource use
emphasizing open- Source software and a
relationship between the global and the
local where the Global Services the
local okay so in what ways can we in the
ethereum ecosystem in the open source
ecosystem create a Global Commons create
knowledge and production that is in
service to the local and this is opposed
to the web 2 surveillance economy in
which you have Facebook Communities
going into your local communities and
surveiling everyone and tearing apart
the social fabric because it's more
profitable for Facebook shareholders
that way how can the ethereum commons be
in service of the local Commons is the
design space of cosmol localism and
ethereum localism and I'm happy to say
that downtown stimulus to me is a proof
point that this is possible we can take
the programmable money where we program
our values into our money in the
ethereum space
from the ethereum space and start
applying it to downtowns uh across the
world and I'm really excited to see what
kind of experiments in public goods
funding Community currency supporting
the Arts and supporting public goods
that we can do uh when we do that so I'm
Kevin aaki founder of gitcoin that's
been downtown stimulus thanks so much
for your
time thank you
Kevin hello hello amazing we have like
uh roughly 5 minutes for
questions um by by the way I'm also a
big fan of cosmal localism yeah
thanks anyone in the
audience uh the gentleman is the purple
head should
I oh wow you're good good catch thanks
um yeah I love your work and all that um
I was going to ask with um things like
Community currencies and um things like
that where you might put conditions on
your money I I sometimes think that
that's obviously a restricted form of
trade that um whereas like regular Fe
currencies are sort of unrestricted so
with that lens how would you say that
the community currencies can sort of out
compete Freer money if that's a right
premise fig yeah so the question is how
can Community currencies out compete
National currencies yeah like how how
would it have more utility if it's
somewhat constrained in some ways yeah
um I think the community currency are
cool as an outsider but I'm not a
designer of any so I'm not qualified to
answer that question uh I think Scott
Morris has done a lot of work on
community currencies and I would ask him
yeah I guess I was riffing off the um
like adding our values to our money and
if you put sort of constraints on it in
that sense to fuel our values I can see
definitely the bigger picture that
that's that's awesome and I want to see
more of that but then I also sort of
play Devil's Advocate as more so another
friend does this to me where he sort of
says well I could just do that with the
US dollar or do that with this spere
currency so I'm trying to sort of find
the arguments like other arguments that
say this um money with value
restrictions is kind of
more better in a more immediate form
than I can currently argue so I'm trying
to find on that side yeah um uh I think
that uh you know one of the things that
I see a parallel between what we're
doing in the crypto ecosystem and what
community currencies have done for
hundreds of years is that what we're
doing in the crypto ecosystem is mically
local and Community currencies are
geographically local okay so like uh to
me mimetically local means that like
gitcoin a public goods funding uh coin
filecoin is a file storage coin ethereum
is a computational coin in in in a local
mimic area and so you know in what ways
in what what we learn in community
currencies can be applied to Global
currencies like Dow currencies and vice
versa I think that there might be sort
of a cosmol local convergence
there yeah but my talk was about
quadratic funding more than Community
currencies uh I I think that they're
both cool though thank you do we have
time for one more question yes we do
gentleman over
there thank you hi Kevin hey um what do
you think or what in your mind will be
the hardest part of building some uh
version of a downtown U uh stimulus in
in in another local community finding
the the initial donors or the tech
probably Tech is just foring something
or uh making people understand how to
use the system or anything like in your
experience what what you think is is the
focus should the focus be on on if if
you want to build something in in my own
local community Pro yeah great question
so uh we built a code base that you can
use to do Fiat quadratic funding round
it's called Simple grants. XYZ go to
simple grants. XYZ Fork it deploy it in
your own local community um I should put
that in the talk actually now I think
about it um but yeah the hardest part
honestly was raising the initial
25k uh quadratic funding campaigns in
web 3 there's a lot of treasuries that
are just hundreds of millions of dollars
and we draw on those to run quadratic
funding rounds in qf but the uh the the
raising of funds to do quadratic funding
locally is sort of hampered by uh are
you do you have access to wealthy
individuals who are willing to do it and
can you crack the nut of the local
government actually funding it we
actually went around the local
government we didn't even talk to the
local government government because
their funding Cycles are just quarters
and quarters long so to answer your
question I think that raising the
initial amount of funding is the hardest
thing that you'll do if you're if you're
going to run these campaigns and
hopefully we can make the tech a little
bit easier with simple Grant St XYZ
thank you for the question thank you and
that's it for the at the time okay