While Big Tech dominates the majority of news headlines, it’s not the only engine making waves within the industry. Open source software—the community-based approach that allows anyone to contribute to code development—is responsible for $400 billion in yearly economic value.

Open source is also the driver behind Gitcoin, the blockchain platform that helps developers get paid for their open source work and creation of public goods. The company partners with other organizations that are proponents of open source software, such as the Ethereum Foundation and Protocol Labs.

Founded in 2017 by Kevin Owocki, Scott Moore and Vivek Singh, Gitcoin became a ConsenSys portfolio project, joining companies like MetaMask in advancing the next wave of financial technology (fintech) in blockchain. Gitcoin has paid out $64 million worth of funding, mostly to open source software and community education initiatives through 5 million donations across 250 funding rounds.

“We’re a platform, developer and social-activist community to help people fund what matters to them in the 21st century,” Owocki said to me in a recent interview.

In his latest book, Onchain Capital Allocation Handbook: Explorers Edition, Owocki writes about how open source tools can help web3 communities fund what matters to them.

“I have access to Vitalik Buterin and other smart people in the web3 space, and the book is my way of democratizing that access,” Owocki said.

Gitcoin’s flagship offering is Gitcoin Grants Stack, an all-in-one tool allowing people to fund what matters in their communities by distributing capital on-chain to the things they care about. While Grants Stack is for Gitcoin partners, its offering for other ecosystems is the Allo protocol. 

“Allo is short for allocation, and I think capital allocation is going to be one of the primary use cases of blockchains,” Owocki said. 

Read more: Pakistani Villages as DAOs and the Middle Ground Between Hierarchy and Monarchy: Q&A With Gitcoin’s Azeem Khan

Owock has been interested in tech and software engineering for as long as he can remember. In 2013, he moved to Boulder, Colorado and social activism and community involvement began to appeal to him as well. He joined Boulder Start-up Week, a one week celebration of entrepreneurship and social good, as an organizer. 

“The engineering and the community organizer thing were side by side for me for a while, but in 2017 when blockchain was blowing up, I thought, we now have programmable money—maybe we could program our values into our money, and maybe we could build a community that helps our social values and raises crypto to fund it,” Owocki said. “The dots really connected for me when I realized a big underfunded social good in tech is open source software.”

Owocki also realized a monetizable asset in web3 was software development time.

“Everyone needs software developers,” Owocki said. “If you were going west in the 1800s for gold and there was a gig of selling pickaxes to the gold miners, I felt Gitcoin could be like selling developers to the people who were building on Ethereum. It’s a combination of savvy business opportunity, social activism, understanding the tech and using the open source money to fund the open source developers.”

Four years after moving to Colorado, Owocki founded the Boulder Blockchain Meetup in 2017.

“It’s a group of overly-cerebral nerds who get together to have beers and talk about blockchains,” Owocki said. “I was able to float ideas around social good to the other nerds in Boulder who were into blockchains. Some of those people now are my best friends and it’s been really cool to be involved in that community.”

The seeds of Gitcoin’s evolving social activism components were planted there, but Owocki knew the platform needed to work in the real world. 

“An important value for me is trying the tech we’re talking about,” Owocki said. “The best products are used by the people who create them, and unless we’re actually playing with the tech, we’re just larping and philosophizing. Philosophizing is fun but it’s kind of like intellectual masturbation—it’s not going anywhere.”

Which is why Owocki enjoys trying out tech in the form of a new type of learning he discovered since being in web3: Experiential networked learning.

“I’ll write blog posts about what I’m learning and then blast it out to everyone else, and everyone else is doing the same,” Owocki said. “I’m learning from my friends what excites them and I’m feeding off of their energy and they’re feeding off of mine. I think of this as building an impact network.”

Owocki credited David Ehrlichman, the author and creator of Hats Protocol, for his insight that the best predictor of social change or an activist network being successful is the strength and density of the relationships within the network.

“That makes sense because if I trust you, you trust me and we vibe, we’re going to build a better movement together,” Owocki said. “The relationships are an end in themselves, and you have to treat them as that, but they’re also a means to another end, which is building stronger impact networks.”

In this way, the strength of the impact network in Boulder is not only an important element for Owocki himself, it also helps make Gitcoin stronger as well.

“I’m super proud that we’ve always been dogmatic about our mission,” Owocki said. “At first it was ‘grow open source,’ but actually it’s been about funding what matters for any individual community. That mission has always been at the center of everything that we do, and while I’m super proud we’ve been dogmatic about it, I also think there’s a place for pragmatism.”

In fact, Gitcoin has been pragmatic in the way it has achieved its mission.

“When Gitcoin started off, it was a bounty network—a mechanism where if you do X bug bounty, I will pay you Y,” Owocki said. “That worked well for a while, and we also launched an ethical ad network where developers could put ads that didn’t track you on their Github. We launched an nonfungible token (NFT), we launched Quests and we launched Gitcoin Grants.”

But when Gitcoin Grants launched, Owocki realized they had something truly special.

“It was like, ‘holy shit—this is hotter than all the other stuff combined,’” he said. “Vitalik [Buterin] is blogging about us. The alpha-nerd of the ecosystem is talking about us.”

Owocki and his team then began to build upon Gitcoin Grants, going from $25,000 in round one, to double that in round two. Currently, Gitcoin is running the company’s 22nd quarterly quadratic funding campaign.

“The Internet changed society by allowing us to send information across a network without an intermediary,” Owocki said. “There’s a similar allegory happening now where we can send financial value across a network without an intermediary, and I think what follows is we’re going to rewrite all of finance with blockchains. It’s going to be insurance, how we invest, how we speculate, how we fund public goods and how we fund social activism movements. That’s really exciting because in some ways, we can rip out the surveillance economy that commodifies creators and makes us all slaves to big tech companies. I got here early and I set up shop with Gitcoin, and now I’m trying to pay it forward to the next generation of innovators.”

lead image: Kevin Owocki