| Nice to see this here, I spent the last weekend reading about quadratic voting/funding. The core idea is that in order to decide how much "endorsement" each project amongst many receives, you take the square root of how much each person gave to that project, sum that, then square it to decide how much of a matching contribution to be given. It has a couple interesting properties that make it appealing for the funding of "public goods" (such as software) via grant matching mechanisms. The main ones: - Projects with distinct supporter bases will receive more funding if they join forces as a single project with more supporters - Projects with few supporters that give a lot of money/endorsement will receive very little boost from this - You can also implement the possibility of "negative votes/funding" that allow people to "short" the projects that they consider a net negative Over the past year a grant matching mechanism using quadratic funding has been trialed in a platform called Gitcoin, which supports crowdfunding Ethereum development projects:
https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gi... A post by Vitalik Buterin describing quadratic funding is here:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html Vitalik also wrote about the last 3 rounds of this funding on Gitcoin, they’ve been making tweaks and the results are extremely promising: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html
https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html
https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html The idea of quadratic funding came from quadratic voting, which was discussed in the 2018 book Radical Markets:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html In september 2018 Vitalik together with one of the book authors and another person put out a preprint describing their ideas for quadratic funding, which is very interestingly written:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf The broader field under which this fits is called "mechanism design", which means inverse game theory: instead of specifying the rules and seeing what the outcome is, you decide which outcome you want and try to design a game that leads to it...a very enticing idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design |