A partnership announced between the Gitcoin project and Polkadot will help the interoperable blockchain platform’s developers find community support and funding.
Gitcoin’s current function can be considered as an experiment in a new way of funding public goods based on the concept of “Capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism.”
That works through Gitcoin Grants- a hybrid public funding mechanism that relies both on community contributions and wealthy donors.
“Capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism,” or CLR is similar to the concept of matching donations, but are not backed one-to-one.
Instead, a quadratic funding system changes the weight of each individual donor.
As part of the mission to contribute to Web 3.0, a fair, secure & resilient internet that inherently protects its users, we are excited to join up with @gitcoin in our shared goal to grow the open-source ecosystem, co-creating more opportunities for devs.https://t.co/NpxnvdPHOO — Polkadot (@polkadotnetwork) June 16, 2020
Scott Moore, the developer relations lead for Gitcoin, explains that the matching changes based on how many people have participated:
“That’s really just meant to provide a community signal. We want there to be a real feeling from any candidate that participates in this […] that their voice matters and that it’s not just one central entity controlling funding.”
Integrating the Polkadot community is an important step in that process, as its blockchain development ecosystem is based on WebAssembly, a framework to bring low-level languages like Rust and C++ to web applications.
Moore noted that:
“a lot of our growth is coming from Web2 and not from Web3, and that’s a really big priority for us.”
Moore believes that the number of Web 3.0 developers especially including Ethereum is low, citing estimates between 10,000 and 200,000.
Moore adds:
“I think given how small our ecosystem is we really need to be considering how we can work together to reach broader adoption, rather than focusing on just our respective projects.”
According to Moore, Polkadot, with its choice of more traditional languages such as Rust, can be “really useful when it comes to bringing on new people from the Web2 Rust community.”
Ethereum itself will also move to a WebAssembly-based system with 2.0, but that is still far off, while Polkadot has already launched a “mainnet candidate.”
Chris Hutchinson, the community and growth manager at the Web3 Foundation, described Polkadot as a “bet against chain maximalism in general.”
Moore noted that a significant portion of the Ethereum community began feeling that “Ethereum is really the only project” after finding itself at the receiving end of similar treatment from the Bitcoin community.
Moore adds:
“I think given how small our ecosystem is we really need to be considering how we can work together to reach broader adoption, rather than focusing on just our respective projects.”
Hutchinson says that Polkadot doesn’t really consider itself as a competitor to Ethereum.
Hutchinson adds:
“All of that goes out the window, whenever you have systems that work together and can share these different [features] together.”
He conceded that “there’s still competition” with other chains on some levels, but the overarching vision behind Polkadot is to “accomplish the goal of Web 3.0 in general.”
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Unsplash