theres been a sudden wave of interest in where @gitcoin is headed. but have we *earned* it? i worry about the hype getting out ahead of fundamentals, so where things actually stand. we are building techne: an everything app for localism. the first pieces are small, and over time we expect it to grow into local commerce, local funding, local events, and whatever else a town needs to coordinate itself. this represents our most serious attempt to date to go mainstream. if we are successful, we bring our mission (Fund What Matters) and impact ($69m funding via 5mm txns) to everyday people. if we are successful, your nocoiner friends will be using our app. the bet: if enough of a community's daily life runs on shared rails, you get network effects that bootstrap a local commons, and the money moving through it stays in town longer. (today a lot of it leaks out to platforms skimming 15-30% off every transaction.) where things stand: 1. one of the applets is live in private alpha. it's in a small group's hands and it's rough in the ways alphas are rough. 2. we've got an sdk in private alpha too, so other builders could eventually ship their own local applets on the same rails. (builders: help build it!). 3. the other applets are very early. if you're waiting on one of them, expect to wait a while (builders: unless you want to help us build it!). 4. nothing has changed with GTC. it's still a governance token with no claim on economics, and nothing in this plan changes that. Allo Protocol and Grants Stack (our last gen products) are still wound down (but protocols live on on mainnet!). there are no plans for a new token. (governerds: proposals welcome). 5. beacon (the first app) helps you meetup with friends locally ran its first in-person test: 10 of roughly 15 invitees showed up in bad weather, we have 8 engaged beta testers, and 5 people reported a new connection. promising pilot, way too small to conclude anything from. (alpha testers wanted!). 6. buoy (the second app) helps you fund locally is targeting november. this will be a test of a simmilar magnitude of the beacon first test. (alpha testers wanted!). 7. we will continue to scale product - this means rolling out apps and pilots. if/when the trend is bigly up and to the right, and the final everything app slaps, we ship it and we do a big splashy launch around it. (beta testers wanted!). 8. we're setting up a 501(c)(3) and aiming to raise $$ from mainstream grants and mains donors eventually. this may also mean that future fundraising on our platforms will be tax-exempt in the US! 9. we're moving fast on product because the window on localism is open right now, the tools to rebuild enshittified technofeudalist corposlop SAAS products into something better are available now, and people are feeling the squeeze of ai displacement and platform rent in their actual towns. 10. this is my personal interpretation, not a decision by gitcoin governance, and not financial advice. dates are targets, not commitments, and all of it may change as we learn. this post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, make your own decisions. 11. if you think im doing it wrong, REeEEeeeE at my in the comments. 12. if you think im doing it wrong, and constructively/earnestly want to help right the ship, @ me on gov.gitcoin.co - make sure you tag the transition stewards (there are a half dozen of them, and they're here to hold all of us accountable to a new direction!) tldr 1. what we care about is people using this stuff where they live. the 1st private alpha is live but that number is small today. 2. if you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is fill out this form and start contributing: forms.gle/gh7vNtZJhpCBBRJD9 3. lets not get ahead of ourselves. 4. yall shouldve heeded the words of @VitalikButerin in 2017 and you should heed mine today - ask yourself "have we earned it?"

"fund what matters" has been @gitcoin's mantra since 2023, and the longer i sit with it, the more it reads as a critique of how money moves today. most funding still runs through hierarchies: a foundation board, or a program officer with a stack of applications and a quarterly deadline. a few people at the top decide what matters for everyone below them, and each layer of review slows the money down and shrinks what can get funded to whatever that small group has time to read. networks can do this better. QF was an early example of this with small donors steering a big matching pool. when thousands of people each chip in $5 or $10 to the projects they actually use and care about, you get a signal no committee could produce. and it grows with the number of participants instead of the number of reviewers. but QF is one mechanism of many. retro funding, conviction voting, dependency-graph funding like deep funding, and ai agents allocating on a community's behalf are all early and all promising. some of the best ideas are ancient: rotating savings circles, rotating labour circles, or the mutual aid societies that insured workers before the welfare state. they could run again on new rails. the stakes keep rising, too. ai is making it cheap to build almost anything, so the list of things worth funding is about to get very long, and a grants committee can't read any faster than it could a decade ago. whoever decides where the money goes decides what gets built. i want that to be all of us.