To what extent can quadratic funding provision tools for thought?

Matt Clancy

GitCoin

Quadratic funding lacks incentives to compensate researchers for pre-proposal speculative work

The crowd probably can’t reliably assess early-stage research

Retroactive public goods funding

# Quadratic funding of public goods

Vitalik Buterin and [[zDBZFsgnPcSSJpiuMxWp4Nh:::Glen Weyl]] propose that [[z3jCUDrVBqehbaiy9nEd6Gv:::Quadratic voting]] can be used to efficiently determine the value of a public good, which can then guide the disbursement of philanthropic or public funds. [[zR6iWHJheupeWUcix3oq4Ha:::Matt Clancy]] gave this notion a great name: “Optimal Kickstarter.”

[[zJChm6ckdY4WG1znneHs2mP:::GitCoin]] has experimentally implemented this procedure using funds provided by the Ethereum Foundation.

[clr.fund](https://blog.clr.fund) aspires to implement this mechanism permissionlessly.

[GitHub - gitcoinco/quadratic-funding: This is an open source implementation of quadratic funding, a design for philanthropic and publicly-funded seeding, which allows for optimal provisioning of funds to an ecosystem of public goods.](https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding)

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## References

Buterin, V., Hitzig, Z., & Weyl, G. E. (2018). Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds. SSRN. <https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3243656>

Clancy, M. (2020, May 14). Optimal Kickstarter. <https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/optimal-kickstarter>






