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 (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. Gitcoin itself continues to distribute millions per year across open-source rounds, with dynamic quadratic funding adjusting eligibility and caps for fairer distribution.
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.