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 DeSci quadratic funding went instead is recorded in Gitcoin's own forum rather than its round calendar. The DeSci – Gitcoin 3.0 sensemaking report, opened on 15 August 2025, was still being added to in 2026, and its later posts describe the work moving off Gitcoin. In May 2026 the thread's author wrote that the focus had shifted to Spark, running a second DeSci funding round on Artizen with 40 projects and a matching pool of more than $30,000; a June post described Artizen's season 6 Spark round as supporting more than 50 early-stage projects; and a 2 July 2026 post announced an open data layer archiving that season's 49 projects, with a stated plan to add the data from five earlier Gitcoin Grants DeSci rounds. These are the author's own figures, posted to Gitcoin's forum, and are reproduced here as such. They fit the pattern this page describes: the mechanism outlived Gitcoin's calendar and moved to smaller platforms.
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: no GG25 had run when Gitcoin's governance forum was re-read on 14 September 2026, and the newest thread about it was still the November 2025 one below.
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.
The size of the pool and the size of what it can spend have also come apart, which matters more to a research budget than the round number does. A founder's retrospective posted to the forum on 31 August 2026 – written to make the matching pool's history legible to the DAO's incoming “Transition Stewards” – puts the pool at $10,189,330 as at 23 July 2026, against $6,897,677 in the DAO's operational treasury, and describes an arc from “checking account to endowment” that began when the assets were placed with a manager in December 2024. The Octant pilot makes the consequence explicit: $1M deployed from gitcoin.eth and matched by Octant to $2M, held in non-custodial ERC-4626 vaults from which only realised yield is routed to matching, principal never spent and withdrawable at any time. The proposal's own worked example is $32,000 per quarter at a 4.5% rate. So the eight-figure balance is not the figure to budget against; on that pilot roughly $128,000 a year of yield is, unless the DAO votes to spend principal. The same retrospective records one erosion in the other direction, and states it plainly: between $125,500 and $170,680 of the GG24 matching request went to round operations rather than to grantees, so “100% goes to the community” is “no longer literally true”.
Quadratic funding reaches the federal record
In July 2026 the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy published Science: A New Golden Age, a report to the President by OSTP Director Michael Kratsios setting out a reform agenda for federally funded research. Its grantmaking chapter argues that consensus peer review “struggles to distinguish the exceptional from the merely good”, catalogues alternatives – golden tickets, individual-based funding, pull mechanisms, scouts, regranting – and then names the mechanism this page documents:
More speculative mechanisms, such as quadratic funding, remain in early testing. … Quadratic funding reveals community preferences rather than gatekeeper preferences, and has shown promise in open-source software, though evidence of its application to science remains pending.
Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. The description is accurate and the framing is favourable: a report to the President treating quadratic funding as a live option for federal research money is a materially different position from where the mechanism sat when the GR15 DeSci round ran in 2022. But the caveat is the honest one. Evidence of its application to science remains pending – and the GR15 round documented above is one of the few data points that exists, four years old, single-round, with no control and no follow-up study of what the funded projects produced. The gap between “named in a report to the President” and “evidenced for science” is the gap a DeSci funder should read this page for, and closing it needs a round designed as an experiment rather than another round.
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.