Overview
Gitcoin is the longest-running quadratic funding platform in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its Grants Round 15 (GR15) featured the first-ever dedicated DeSci Round, applying quadratic funding to open science: reimagining the incentives, culture, and infrastructure for research using Web3 tools.
Quadratic funding matches community donations using a formula that weights the number of contributors above the size of each contribution, so a project backed by many small donors receives proportionally more matching than one backed by a few large ones. This democratizes science funding in ways a traditional grant committee cannot – and it is why the mechanism depends heavily on sybil resistance: without a way to tell real donors from sockpuppets, the many-small-donors signal can be gamed.
How the funding works: Allo Protocol & Grants Stack
Gitcoin's funding runs on Allo Protocol, an open, modular allocation standard, surfaced to grant operators through Grants Stack – the open-source platform that ran the Gitcoin Grants Program from 2023 through May 2025 and powered dozens of ecosystem partner rounds. Allo decouples who is eligible, how funds are allocated, and how they are distributed, so a round can swap in quadratic funding, direct grants, or retroactive funding without rebuilding the plumbing.
GG24 (donation phase 14–28 October 2025) – billed as the first funding round of "Gitcoin 3.0" – leaned into that modularity, running six allocation mechanisms in parallel: quadratic funding, deep funding, MACI private voting, conviction voting, retroactive funding, and peer-reviewed hypercerts. It is the most mechanistically diverse Gitcoin round to date, and a useful live catalogue of the funding designs the broader DAO treasury world is experimenting with.
DeSci Round Results & Trajectory
The GR15 DeSci Round saw 2,309 donors crowdfund $67.9k across 82+ projects; with matching partners the total pool exceeded $567k. Funded work built new incentives for open practice, out-of-university validation, and shared research infrastructure – an early proof that community-driven science funding was viable.
DeSci was not carved out as a standalone domain in GG24, but the model GR15 established now shows up across the ecosystem: dedicated DeSci rounds on other platforms and the one-donor-one-signal logic that biotech DAO launchpads borrow when they open community allocation. GG24 itself distributed over $1.8 million across six thematic domains – $1.175M of Gitcoin matching, roughly $632,500 from partner matching pools, and $36,657 in direct donations – with 78 open-source projects supported by about 1,300 unique donors in the two quadratic-funding rounds run on Giveth.
Where the programme stands in 2026
Anyone budgeting around a Gitcoin round should read the cadence rather than the archive. Gitcoin ran grants rounds roughly quarterly from GR1 in February 2019 onward. GG24, in October 2025, is still the most recent round: as of August 2026 no GG25 has run.
The reasons are on the record in Gitcoin's own forum. GG25 was opened for discussion by founder Kevin Owocki on 25 November 2025 under two stated constraints – "keep burn low" and "rebuild relevance and upside" – proposing coalition-funded rounds in one or two frontier domains rather than a broad seasonal round. That thread's last reply is dated 31 March 2026. A companion proposal to fund GG25 matching from Octant's yield was withdrawn in December 2025 and re-passed in February 2026 as a pilot, decoupled from any specific round number.
The organization behind the rounds shrank to match. Gitcoin dissolved its Grants Lab business unit mid-2025 and moved into what it calls the Gitcoin 3.0 era; its 2026 DAO budget request of $1,053,469 describes a DAO that "deliberately hit the brakes in 2025 – spun down burn, shed organizational debt, and returned to a founder-stewarded, lean network." In August 2026 the DAO went further and put a second budget tranche to the forum that redirects roughly $1M toward a "local-first platform" for AI-displaced professionals – funding what matters with Ethereum rather than for it. For DeSci projects, the practical read is that Gitcoin's matching pool is no longer a dependable seasonal line item, and the mechanism has outlived the cadence: quadratic funding now runs on Giveth, partner rounds, and forked Allo deployments as much as on Gitcoin's own calendar. The organizational detail lives on the Gitcoin DAO page.
How Caper approaches this
Quadratic funding answers "how do you fund good work when a committee can't scale?" by matching against the breadth of small donors. Caper answers the same question differently: instead of a periodic matching round, each caper raises continuously from its bonding curve, and its treasury deploys that capital through INVEST and PAYOUT proposals that holders decide by participation-weighted voting. The shared instinct is the same – put allocation in the hands of the many who show up rather than a gatekept panel – but Caper trades the sybil-resistance overhead of a matching round for stake that has to be bought and held on the curve. It also removes the cadence risk visible above: a caper's treasury is always open to contribution, so a research group is never waiting on somebody else's round to be scheduled.
External Links
- Gitcoin – Official Website
- Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24) (the round explorer at
grants.gitcoin.costopped resolving in 2026) - GG24: The First Funding Round of Gitcoin 3.0 – Case Study
- Allo Protocol · Grants Stack
- GR15 Results & Recap – Gitcoin Blog
- Early thinking on GG25 – Gitcoin governance forum, November 2025.
- Gitcoin DAO 2026 Budget Request (passed) – the post-Grants-Lab operating model.