Gitcoin Round 7 concluded with highest than ever CLR matching

Round 7 of Gitcoin grants has been successfully concluded. This allowed matching partners to contribute to the wide variety of community- selected projects through Gitcoin’s quadratic funding mechanism. Quadratic funding is an innovative democratized funding model that allocates more funds to the projects with more number of independent donors eliminating institutionalized big donors. This ensures that the blockchain and DeFi community as a whole determines which project gets the most funding without capitalization overriding it. Round 7 is not only astonished for the amount of funds it received but also for experiments it included to attract the donor side. Gitcoin announced its first formal experiment in 2019 with CLR with $25,000 in matching contributions from Gitcoin’s CLR Fund which was sponsored by Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys.

The list of matchers were:

• Chainlink, a smart contract oracle project
• Optimism, a layer-2 optimistic rollup
• The Ethereum Foundation
• Balancer, a decentralized exchange
• Synthetix, a synthetic assets platform
• Yearn, a collateralized-lending platform
• Three Arrows Capital, an investment fund
• Defiance Capital, another investment fund
• Future Fund, which is totally not an investment fund! (/s)
• $MEME, a memecoin
• Yam, a defi project
• Some individual contributors: ferretpatrol, bantg, Mariano Conti, Robert Leshner, Eric Conner, 10b576da0

Round 7 received unexpected funds

Round 7 helped significantly in increasing funds for projects popular among the community. Vetalik in his blogpost mentioned that this round received $274,830 in contributions and $450,000 in matched funds distributed across 857 projects. The category structure was once again restructured and renamed as "dapp tech", "infrastructure tech" and "community". He also informed that some of the funds will be reserved as a "rainy day fund" for future rounds in case future matchers are less forthcoming.

What's new in this round

Verification option to identify fake accounts

In order to compete with fake accounts and other attacks on Gitcoin Grants, Round 7 introduced an additional verification option with the decentralized social-graph-based BrightID. It allows people to prove to applications that they are not using multiple accounts. It solves the unique identity problem through the creation and analysis of a social graph. The social graph contains cryptographically signed connections between people.

Experiment for low gas transfer

Round 7 was the first round where Gitcoin Grants experimented with using the zkSync ZK rollup to decrease fees for payments. zkSync is a scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum. Its current functionality scope includes low gas transfers of ETH and ERC20 tokens in the Ethereum network.

Most funded round that ever

Vitalik informed that this round is the first round where top recipients on all sides received quite a large amount.  On the infrastructure side, the White Hat Hacking project received a total of $39,258, and the Bankless podcast got $47,620. Round 5 offered a pool of $250k for matching that was to be used for the COVID19 and Ethereum project. Round 6 of their coveted CLR Grant matching round concluded with $175000 in matching.

“This is a significant milestone for the ecosystem because it shows that Gitcoin Grants is expanding beyond reliance on a very small number of funders, and is moving toward something more sustainable” said Vitalik

Round 7 has been the biggest round yet. This can be seen as a step towards empowering developers worldwide to create secure decentralized systems that enable to redefine crypto industry with universally connected smart contracts.