📺 SotN #47: Gitcoin DAO & $GTC Token with Kevin Owocki

hey bankless nation here another episode of state of the nation this is the time of the week where we talk about what's happening we've related to big picture stuff the themes of the bankless newsletter and podcast we try to drop some insights and action items for you coming in hot today super excited about this git coin doubt just launched uh the gtc token just launched if you've ever given to get coin you may be a recipient of gtc we are talking kevin owaki who is the

founder of git coin and responsible for helping to launch this dow today super excited about it david are you excited man oh my gosh absolutely and i think there's no one more on the forefront of thinking about why dao's why digital organizations than kevin owaki and that's why i'm really excited to get him on the show today because we cannot we can talk about uh you know simple all the basic reasons that everyone hears over and over and over again about why dows are good and those are all real but when we take them in and think about

them at more abstract more satellite level views uh things get really interesting and kevin is a great person to talk to uh about that and and so i'm really excited to get that conversation going here on the state of the nation so we are going to be talking about the bitcoin dow launch solving the public goods funding problem not just for ethereum not just for crypto but i think even larger than that uh we're also going to be talking about the future of work in the future you may be working for a doubt if you're not already not a

company super exciting topics uh and i think themes of the bankless podcast newsletter writ large david before we get in with kevin uh we should talk about some announcements we dropped an mev podcast this week on on monday it's big brain books distill it down for us why should folks tune in to that and download that episode and give it a listen yeah uh mev is the hard problem of crypto it is the thing that could really just compromise a lot of the reasons why we think crypto

is cool uh mev is the problem that if you are the person proposing a block either as a bitcoin miner or an ethereum validator you have god mode over that block and that really sets you apart as an entity away from the rest of the network and there's a discrepancy between the values of the network and the the interest of that one individual person and this can really send these systems into haywire mode it can really destabilize these systems and so phil diane georgia's constantinopolis and charlie noyes are really at the

forefront of thinking about this subject and we had a fantastic conversation the first conversation that all three of them have been in a room together uh and things go from the very concrete to the very philosophical at the very end because uh like many of these things that we touch in crypto things kind of end with philosophy and and really big thinking uh and so we uh really really appreciated that conversation and really glad we could get that out and like you said ryan on the intro that podcast i think that is the first of many mev shows that we must do on the bankless

program it was uh it probably the first of many listens too i just listened to it for a second time this morning just finished it so i could let these these topics really digest but super important we also have a liquidy ama ask me anything liquidy is an algorithmic stablecoin stablecoin as the definition that bankless would use which means it's not backed by a meat space bank or institution we're having them on for a live stream ask me anything tomorrow at

12 eastern i believe david anything you want to say about that yeah i used the liquidy uh project as an example in my coindesk talk yesterday as one of these big pro like new brand new d5 protocols that have come out very recently that is all about capital efficiency capital efficiency capital efficiency right uh ether as a collateral asset inside of liquidity is a 110 uh collateralization ratio so really really low uh and also zero percent interest and that is the competitive advantage behind liquidy uh and really

if you view defy at a bird's eye view it's just competition for capital efficiency and liquidity is one of the newest protocols to engage in that competition so we got uh robert uh uh i don't know how to pronounce his last name uh like like how uh to get robert l uh robert l number two robert compound uh he's coming on to answer all of our questions about liquidy and how it works it's gonna be hot guys that is why you subscribe to bankless on youtube you subscribe in the podcast that's the way you get this alpha uh speaking of which

arbitrage next tuesday they're coming on state of the nation and i've just heard from them they still plan to to launch on may 28th so i'm super excited about that david arbitram of course is a highly anticipated roll-up tech scalability solution for ethereum so we're going to talk to them next tuesday another reason to subscribe to the bankless podcast but david i'm gonna start this episode with the question i ask you every single state of the nation that we've done so far which is this what is the state of the nation today

sir the state of the nation is slaying and we could not do that with anyone else other than kevin olwaki we are slaying moloch that is really the through line for me what git coin is trying to do it's trying to slay moloch and if you are privy to the molot conversation you know that he's the god of coordination failure and the thing that gitcoin is trying to do the most is allow humans to coordinate and you might also know that it's actually impossible to slay moloch but you can wound him and make him retreat and so that is what we are trying to do

this week on the bankless state of the nation we are slaying moloch once again oh my god can we solve the tragedy of the commons problem can we figure out how to give to public goods that is the topic for today i'm super excited about that guys we're going to be back with kevin in just a minute but before we do we want to tell you about the fantastic sponsors who make bankless possible ave is a borrowing and lending protocol on ethereum and just recently released ave version 2 which has a ton of cool

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are returned to your wallet with the balancer governance token balancer's mission is to become the primary source of liquidity in d5 by providing the most flexible and powerful platform for asset management and decentralized exchange dive into the balancer pools at pools.balancer all right guys we are back with kevin owaki who is the benevolent dictator over at gitcoin which is a platform to help fund public goods and open source software of course bankless got its

start there as well he's also a general in the war against moloch the god of human coordination failure and he's helping us slay human coordination failure through get coin kevin welcome once again to bankless how are you doing again today on this glorious launch day for get coin hey ryan hey david thanks so much for having me things are good uh we released gtc which is the token the government's token of a network has economic coordinate git

coin dao which will be a dow that generates public goods funding experiments matures them and eventually sends them out into the world to slay moloch so things are good we brought the site down a little bit with our record fulls of traffic this morning but we got it back up and feeling pretty good about that now you definitely got hugged to death this morning for a while and it is this like is this like record traffic for uh for get coin and the website yeah um we had about 2 000 users on the site this morning when it was going down

and during the our record during a git coin grants around has been like 800 or 900 people on the site so number go up with website traffic that's awesome i think it's only up from here let's start with this kevin for for folks that aren't actually familiar with git coin maybe this is their first time hearing about git coin why git coin why does it exist what's the purpose for sure so get coin is a place that you can get coins if you're a software developer working on open source software open source creates 500 billion dollars per year in economic value when

i start a startup i don't write my own database server i don't write my own web server i don't write my own open source financial system i use ethereum i use nginx i use postgres these are open source technologies that allow people to stand on the shoulders of giants when they're starting new uh new ventures and one of the problems is that there's no business model for open source software it's open source and it's available for free so why pay for it and it's get coins mission to make sure that we can create business models for open source software after all we

have programmable money if we could program our values into our money and if we valued open source software then we can get open source software developers paid they can get coins they can quit their corporate job and they can just work on our digital infrastructure and that's our mission you guys have been crushing that mission so far this is uh some of the results can you can you walk us through some of the results that uh that you've seen so far with getcoin totally yeah so um bitcoin.com results is our results page and it updates every three hours looks like the last update

as of right here is a minute ago we've done about 20 million dollars worth of open source funding depending on when you uh it's a volatile cryptocurrency as you know uh i think it's between 19 and 20 million dollars right now um doing about six million dollars per quarter as of the last quarter but q2 is not over yet and get coin grants which is when we move the most money to open source software developers starts in about two weeks so expecting to do a couple million dollars per quarter and you know the big metric for us is how many

software developers can quit their jobs and just work for the open internet and so at 20 million dollars there's been about a dozen or uh or more software developers that have told told us that they found their next gig or their next opportunity for get coins so super proud of that it's been a theme on the bank list program to really talk about the ways that these uh protocols are disintermediating uh people from money and people from other people and really at the end of the day uh changing the technology and changing the money of a society is really changing almost

everything there is about money and so what i really see get coin doing when we see these metrics of you know 3 000 per hour being streamed out to open source developers we are really the net result is we are changing the culture of work we are changing what work is uh and to me that is really the through line for get coin it's it's a cultural change platform for you know instead of having a nine to five paper pushing job where you go in and you look busy and you do maybe two and a half hours of work while you're there for eight hours

uh instead uh it's there's more something closer to you know more fluid work you choose what you work on uh you choose when you work and you choose how you value your work and and your relationship to that and i really see git coin pioneering that path um kevin do you what i know you have thoughts on this uh where does your mind go when you think about culture work and get coin sure yeah i mean the analog that i always use when i tell people about blockchain they ask what is blockchain i don't answer that question i say why

blockchain and i say the internet of information changed the world because now computers could send information across a computer network and it changed everything in society that relies on information entertainment media politics journalism and so i think we have the internet of value and now we can send value across the computer network and the allegory is that that's going to change everything in society that relies on value transfer whether that's banking insurance investment is in jobs i think is the really the one that people miss because we're all so busy i mean defy is

amazing don't get me wrong but you want ethereum to go mainstream you got to hit people where they're at and for 95 of the world's population their financial lives is their jobs and not their investments and so i'm super passionate about okay we're moving forward into this world how do we make it as good for talent as possible how do we optimize not just for in in the terms of economics how do we optimize for for the labor and not just for the capital and i think that the way that you do that is you provide new learning

opportunities new opportunities to level up to the the world's labor and software engineers is just a logical place to start because software engineers are going to be able to figure out what a nonce is and how to broadcast a transaction on metamask but hopefully we'll create a better world for the world's workers expanding out from what we learned with software engineers to to communities across the world and i don't take that lightly i think that this is a really important part of people's lives and we're not going back to the world that used to exist but we can create a better world for them and so for me i think one of the real things about

ethereum that's pretty cool is removing from the industrial age when there was a lot of hierarchy in the organizations that we were involved with and now we're moving to a network stage where the everyday average participant can uh can can work for the open internet and can work for the network and one of the cool things about that is like imagine a mesh network of jobs where i can work for david one day and bank list the next day and then i can go work for the open internet after that and so a mesh network of jobs where we're all working with each other peer to peer instead of

working for a boss who works for their boss who works for their boss is i think where we're gonna go and the last thing that i'll say is just that there's a lot of jobs that needs to be reinvented there's there's compliance there's insurance there's retirement that's bundled with jobs and we're just at the starting line for how people are going to earn in the 21st century i'm really excited to be pushing this forward along with other great projects in the ethereum ecosystem like opolis like radical like common stack that are trying to create a better

world for the world's labor not just for capital kevin there's a line in the cypherpunk manifesto that says cypherpunks know that cryptographic protocols make social structures uh is it too generous to say that git coin is a cypherpunk platform that coordinates funding towards other cypherpunk platforms and to me the evolution of the cypherpunks is that you know they may they made early cryptography and then that made bitcoin and then and then that made ethereum and the cool thing about ethereum and also

the cool thing about git coin is that the cipher the cryptographic side of things has kind of been taken care of and now we can do other cypherpunk stuff that's not necessary about cryptography but still of the cypherpunk ethos and and my my mental model for getcoin is that it's a cypherplunk cypherpunk platform that funds other cypherpunk things um ryan started the bankless newsletter and got his first uh you know donations from from get coin i started just writing about stuff writing about the things that i saw in defy and i got my first

funding out out of bitcoin as well and so kind of both ryan and i are graduates of the git coin platform and neither of us know how to code but yet i still think we are kind of promoting cypherpunk values um how do you think about bitcoin in the inside of that context um well i've read the cypherpunk manifesto i said i think it's certainly interesting um i do think that the mainstream is going to be a little bit maybe turn not turned off but like i don't know i don't i don't know if i see the word cypherpunk going mainstream i think

open source software has already gone mainstream and so um i love ethereum i think cypherpunk values are really interesting to think about as we go into this new world but i'm an open source maximalist and i think that open source software is just the bee's knees it produces so much value for the world and i think that i'm i'm an open source maximalist and i want to see open source software developers getting paid there is a natural overlap with cypherpunk values and with ethereum values there but i would say that i'm an open source maximus more than anything all right so kevin uh take us into get

coined out so we've talked about why get coin as an organization exists funding public goods uh now you are choosing to and bitcoin is choosing to decentralize itself so no longer kevin the benevolent dictator just a member of a digital organization a dow as as people call them before let's talk about this and uh i'm going to open up the the welcome to quadratic lands interface for you because that that's a great place to start as you talk about

this but why a bitcoin dow totally yeah so i mean i've uh i so so this is the quadratic lands this is the promised land that we want to bring everyone to memetically we're trying to meme ourselves into the quadratic lands which is just a world where there's more digital democracy and public goods are funding there's unicorns there you can see it on screen so so basically what we want to do is we want to create a better world for the world's workers and the quadratic lands

is this mythical pro uh mythical place that we want to go to it's the earth it's it's the promised land where public goods are well funded and digital democracy reigns and i think that you know that's the economic way of of describing it but imagine a world where we could rewrite the rules of economic gravity uh in order to favor the common person and and and we could build a world in which there is serendipity serendipity just being defined as chance luck for the everyday person whether that's economic luck or social luck a world

where we're all supporting each other because we now have programmable money and we can rewrite the laws of economic gravity to build programmable money and as we were thinking about how do we mean this into existence how do we build this world we just didn't feel like a company was the right opportunity to do this if we're going to eat the ethereum dog food then we felt a dow was a better vessel for the quadratic lands than a company could ever be and i'll just share a little bit of a personal experience for me i think that you know companies are vessels for entrepreneurism and dowser vessels for

activism um i have been an entrepreneur for the last 12 years and i've run companies before that have raised vc capital and then the bankers are leaning on me to extract from the users and get as much value out of them as possible so that they can return funds for their lp their lps and i just don't want to be doing that with my life my community at gitcoin are some of my best friends and i have a deep reverence for them and i felt like there was no way that we could align in incentives without making it so that git coin was serving the community and governed by

the by the same community so if i'm a manager of a of a startup i might have my users on my right and my investors on my right on my left and my investors are saying hey get as much money out of these users as possible and i didn't want to be in that position i wanted the users of bitcoin to be the governors of bitcoin and so anyone who's building bitcoin now is just focused on what's good for the end user and so that's the main reason why we wanted to um push into a dow the other little anecdote that i'll just share is that people talk a lot about the decentralization of

power and i've just been through a brutal two-year bear market in the ethereum space and i'm excited about the decentralization of stress i don't think that's for the bitcoin mission anymore i want the world to be able to carry this forward and i want it to be anti-fragile uh and like you know i'm not going anywhere i'm so dedicated to this mission but i you know i i want to i i don't want to be the single point of failure anti-fragility is a really important part of these missions and these networks and if i'm the ceo um i

like to say philosopher king not benevolent dictator by the way you know uh but but i do think that um over time i would like to have these same privileges as everyone else in the network and that's a part of decentralization that's a part of the ethos and so we're really trying to uh not just to walk uh talk to talk but to walk to walk the walk and become a doubt kevin you said you want the same privileges as everyone else in the network and that's a little bit of a coder speak or computer science speak coming out there because i think the what you may be alluding to is that

literally privileges as according to the the protocol right like if you on a computer on a pc you have different levels of privileges if you have admin access or not right and one of the the keys of uh this industry is that everyone has equal access towards ethereum there are there is no you know there is no admin access to ethereum there everyone has equal privileges and i think what you're saying is that you know with this hierarchy of companies where you know bosses boss our bosses are stacked upon bosses are stacked upon boxes bosses right you know not in my

pay grade right no there is just one pay grade right it's just everyone's on the same flat topological map uh and i really like this chart that you put in in your announcement uh post where you talk about how when in web 2 it hits the limits of scale sooner than in web 3 world or a dow world and also that limit limits of scale turns into an extraction model rather than what i see you calling here an enabling model uh and this is again what what i was going to back to say to say earlier this is really just

fundamentally changing the culture of the way the world works right like there's just the alignment of incentives allows for things to just be net beneficial to everyone because we have that compressed hierarchy into a topological distributed map um kevin i see you as a leader in that charge and uh i really enjoy all these conversations of this nature that we have but i also know that the listeners are itching to hear about uh the gtc token and the nature of how it

got distributed because now people who are our previous users of the web 2 version of bitcoin are now the governors of the web 3 version of git coin so can we can we talk about how uh gtc was elected to be distributed to all the current uh stakeholders of gtc token totally uh well gtc stands for grow the community or git coin if you want to be conventional and basically the idea here was that i kind of think of where we're

at now as the midpoint in the bitcoin journey we've built the coordination mechanisms we've built a platform and um about half of the tokens are going to uh going to myself and get coins investors and then uh also through a retroactive airdrop to people who have funded public goods on the platform in the past and you know that's no mistake we think that if you funded bitcoin grants then your values are aligned with bitcoin and you've not only said that your values are aligned with

bitcoin you've showed us that your values are aligned with bitcoin by taking your money and putting it where your mouth is and and so uh this is the halfway point in the bitcoin journey half of the tokens have been uh released to stakeholders who have pushed bitcoin to where it is in the past and half will be pushed in the as a community treasury to people who are helping to grow the network in the future and so there's a treasury of 50 million gtc that are sitting in a compound fork that the community can make proposals and anyone

who's providing value to open source software and to get coin that is approved by our on-chain governance uh the dials on chain governance can get rewarded in gtc in future governance rights for their providing value to the network so uh if you go to quadraticlands.com then you'll be taken to the token distribution experience and that's just basically this this this beautiful experience that that we've built for everyone in order to get their tokens um you have an airdrop most likely oh right video went off one

sec uh-oh you have an airdrop most likely if you've contributed to bitcoin grants for hackathons in the past and basically what we're asking you to do is to do a proof of knowledge so watch a two-minute video about how uh about bitcoin's mission you can't govern bitcoin without understanding our mission so you do a proof of knowledge and then you do a proof of use which is basically figuring out who in the community you want to delegate your tokens to and then and only then do you go to proof of receive which which is when you actually get your tokens and it looks like from the browser you're

showing me here it looks like you've received your tokens so i have i went through this process so bankruptcy i went through this process it was uh it was super seamless and also super fun like it it very much felt like i was a part of of something uh much bigger than myself by the way my compliments on the video kevin um whoever put that together just did a fantastic job and um yeah and you know uh getting the tokens proof of knowledge the proof of use i actually delegated my tokens to

a member of the community that uh that i trust for voting i might get more involved in governance as it goes but the process was less fun and like i am super excited to see what this community does because i think the the the process of distribution here you've very successfully screened for people who are very invested in public goods uh on ethereum and um you know i just seeing what other doubts have

accomplished when they have that highly engaged invested community i'm just super excited to see where git coin takes us well ryan if you don't mind i'd just love to double click on proof of use which is this second edition right here um i don't know if you can click on it but if not if you go to mission use um in the url bar uh basically what we're doing is we're asking people to delegate their governance rights to members of the ethereum community if you click i am ready right there you'll see what i mean uh so delegation mode is enabled it looks like and then if you click continue then you're gonna see

40 members of the bitcoin community who would like you to delegate your governance rights to them in the uh in the process and so this is actually a really super essential point most on-chain governance systems launch a governance token and they have really low voter turnout and i just think that the consent of the governed is the only legitimate uh frame it's the only legitimate foundation for governance and if you have low voter turnout then how the heck are you gonna govern uh have the consent of the governed and so basically what we're doing is we're

setting the starting conditions of bitcoin dow such that everyone has delegated um and therefore we're gonna have much higher participation this is the theory at least by the way um if everyone's delegated at the start then we're gonna have much higher participation because 95 of people aren't going to follow all the debates on the governance forum but if they can delegate through liquid democracy to someone who is then you still retain the consent of the governed and the high voter turnout and i think that you know we're all standing on the shoulders of of giants with open source software just very

very minimally pushing forward the state of the art around decentralization i hope that this is getcoin's contribution to the space is 100 delegation at the start just means that you're going to have way better voter engagement and turnout in the future of the dow because the starting conditions were set that way so that's that's the hope and the theory with proof of use and by the way guys this is of course fully permissionless so anyone can become a delegate uh so you can paste your own address in here you could rise up the ranks and get people to to vote for you that's super exciting one other thing that we got to

talk about because we we started this uh when you're talking about the git coin dials sailing off to setting off to quadratic lands right and i noticed on the quadratic lands uh home page there there was is this notion uh of implementing quadratic voting as well can you talk briefly about that because that would be a a really innovative concept that maybe get coin dow is uniquely positioned to pull off so talk about what that is for folks who don't

understand why it's important and and how the might be able to pull that off sure so this gets in a little bit into theory but um basically there's this thing called the matthew effect which is the uh compounding gains of accumulated capital and it applies to matters of of of money but it also applies to applies to matters of like fame or status like the rich get richer is basically the matthew effect and there's this economist called glenn weil who invented a method of mechanism a mechanism for voting that basically optimizes for what

the poor and the many want to see happen not just the rich and the few this is a big part of the ethos of decentralization is what are the what what was the most democratic way that we could fund public goods bitcoin grants is famous for quadratic funding um and one of the things that we are interested in doing in bitcoin dow at the governance layer is making it so that the people who have the most tokens don't have the loudest voice so the poor and the many over the rich and the few is the ethos of quadratic funding and what if we could bring quadratic voting