Public goods funding and profitability are not necessarily in conflict. This was the lesson that Gitcoin, the decentralized, Ethereum-based crowdfunding project, is putting into practice as the organization overhauls its operating structure and announces a significant change in focus. The community-led project has opted to sunset its layer 2, the Public Goods Network, and is shifting its attention to helping support technology development through grants.
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“The narrative around Gitcoin has largely been around supporting public goods and funding projects with high impact,” Kyle Weiss, executive director of Gitcoin, told CoinDesk in an interview. “Our mission to fund public goods still feels like the soul of the DAO,” he said, but the method and strategy it will take is being substantially reworked. In a word, Gitcoin is becoming more capitalistic.
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In addition to merging a few teams under a new business unit and granting more decision-making power to Meg Lister, who was promoted to lead the reformed Grants Labs, the project is no longer shying away from money-making opportunities, including by investing in for-profit projects and allocating its own capital into various DeFi yield strategies. “You need capital to be able to fund public goods,” Weiss said.
“I do think that building-in profitability is important if only for sustainability,” Azeem Khan, the former head of impact at Gitcoin, said in a direct message. “That was one of the things I really pushed on and used to joke that I was the most capitalist person at Gitcoin. Finding ways for creating sustainability so that good things can continue to be done is something I think is extremely important.”
Partially motivating the revamp in operations was learning that a fully-remote and geographically-split workforce had become unwieldy to manage. But Gitcoin itself was also becoming unfocused, dipping its toes into a number of areas that, in hindsight, did not add to its core mission. Either they were ancillary or because they never achieved “product market fit,” like its L2, which was…
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