Our mission is to build and fund digital public goods. Gitcoin Grants does this by allowing anyone to crowdfund their public goods, historically in web3 but increasingly in web2 open source software and beyond. Recently Kyle Weiss wrote a great overview here on where we've been and where we're going.
Matching partners are the donors who make quadratic funding possible. As the name suggests, they provide the pool of funds that donations from individual contributors are matched from. Since quadratic funding is all about signaling community preference (after all it is the public that decides what is good), these partners are essentially delegating their donation impact to the community, which is in and of itself a somewhat selfless act when they could instead have focused on using a grants program to pick their own select group of recipients.
[TODO: Funder's League Table]
Side rounds are pools of capital dedicated to specific ecosystem causes. They can be focused on a theme (e.g. "DeFi", "Advocacy") or a specific project (e.g. "Uniswap").
The goal of side rounds is twofold:
To date, we have done one major round with Uniswap, in the future, we want this to be a default part of how we grow the impact of Gitcoin Grants.
Themed Round Goals for GR12