The Future of RPGF: From Experiments to Economic Engine

Current RPGF relies on human committees or token-weighted voting, leading to politicization and high coordination overhead. This creates a winner-takes-most dynamic where marketing often beats merit.

• Sybil attacks and vote-buying are rampant, with >30% of funds in some rounds potentially misallocated.
• Decision latency of weeks or months prevents agile funding for critical infra.
• Creates perverse incentives for builders to optimize for narrative over network value.

It's impossible to accurately measure a public good's downstream economic impact. Current methods use crude proxies like GitHub commits or Twitter mentions, which are easily gamed and miss the real value.

• No on-chain attribution for how a library or standard enabled a $100M+ protocol.
• Leads to underspending on foundational tech (e.g., cryptography, client diversity) and overspending on visible dApps.
• This mispricing starves the infrastructure that creates the most long-term, non-capturable value.

RPGF capital is locked in episodic, batch-based distributions, creating a feast-or-famine cycle for builders. This kills long-term R&D and forces talent to chase grants instead of users.

• Capital sits idle for months between rounds, missing compounding opportunities.
• Creates boom-bust cycles for developer ecosystems, similar to traditional grant funding.
• Fails to create a permissionless, continuous funding rail that matches the pace of innovation.

Traditional RPGF rounds are black boxes, vulnerable to vote-buying and social coordination. Impact is subjective and hard to quantify.

• Sybil-resistance via proof-of-personhood (Worldcoin) or stake-weighted voting.
• On-chain attestations from protocols like EAS create transparent, portable reputation graphs.
• Objective metrics from Dune Analytics, The Graph, and Chainscore quantify protocol usage and developer activity.

Manual grant committees don't scale. The future is programmatic distribution based on verifiable, on-chain outcomes.

• Smart contract payouts triggered by milestones (e.g., mainnet launch, $10M+ TVL).
• Optimism's Citizen House experiments with badge-weighted voting for allocators.
• Protocols like Coordinape enable peer-to-peer reward distribution within DAOs, automating internal RPGF.

One-off grants create dependency. The endgame is self-sustaining economic engines where public goods capture value.

• Protocol-owned liquidity funds grants via revenue (e.g., Uniswap DAO treasury).
• Fee switch mechanisms direct a percentage of protocol revenue (e.g., from Layer 2 sequencers) to a perpetual funding pool.
• Gitcoin Allo Protocol's matching pools leverage quadratic funding to amplify community donations.

RPGF requires deep, programmable liquidity that isn't trapped on a single chain. Hyperliquid L1 is built for on-chain derivatives and capital efficiency.

• Native perpetuals DEX provides a $100M+ liquidity sink for treasury assets.
• High-throughput orderbook enables complex, programmatic treasury management strategies (hedging, yield).
• Serves as a capital engine for protocols to generate yield for their RPGF pools from their own treasury assets.

Unchecked quadratic funding models are inherently vulnerable to collusion and fake identities, draining funds from legitimate builders. The solution is a multi-layered attestation stack combining on-chain history, social graphs, and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Key Benefit: Sybil resistance via Gitcoin Passport and World ID integration.
• Key Benefit: Funds flow to proven contributors, not just popular proposals.

Retroactive value assessment is subjective, leading to inconsistent funding and contributor burnout. The solution is programmatic outcome verification using on-chain metrics and milestone-based payouts via Sablier or Superfluid streams.

• Key Benefit: Objective KPIs (e.g., protocol revenue, DAU) replace committee bias.
• Key Benefit: Continuous funding streams align incentives with long-term impact.

RPGF can become a tool for treasury diversification by incumbent protocols, not innovation funding. The solution is mandating recipient lock-ups and directing capital to nascent ecosystems via specialized rounds (e.g., L2-specific funding).

• Key Benefit: Prevents capital recycling back to established DAO treasuries.
• Key Benefit: Forces strategic allocation to high-growth, underfunded verticals.

Funding public goods with a protocol's native token creates sell pressure, undermining the very treasury funding the program. The solution is a dual-token model or funding via protocol revenue/MEV, as seen with Optimism's sequencer fees funding RetroPGF.

• Key Benefit: Decouples funding from token inflation and price volatility.
• Key Benefit: Creates a sustainable flywheel where usage funds innovation.

Protocols like Uniswap and Arbitrum hold billions in treasuries but lack systematic, high-impact deployment mechanisms. RPGF provides a data-driven alternative to speculative grants and opaque foundation spending.\n- Transparent Allocation: On-chain voting and results.\n- Merit-Based Funding: Rewards proven, shipped work, not promises.\n- Capital Efficiency: Funds flow to projects with demonstrated user adoption.

Projects like Gitcoin Passport and Orange Protocol are building the identity layer for RPGF. This moves beyond simple token voting to sybil-resistant contribution scoring.\n- Sybil Resistance: Combats vote-buying and airdrop farming.\n- Portable Reputation: Builders carry their proof-of-work across ecosystems.\n- Automated Eligibility: Smart contracts gate funding rounds based on verifiable credentials.

The mathematical elegance of Quadratic Funding (pioneered by Gitcoin) optimizes for democratic preference. Large matching pools from entities like Optimism Collective and Ethereum Foundation provide the economic flywheel.\n- Plural Funding: Small donations signal value, amplified by capital.\n- Predictable Cycles: Builders can plan for seasonal funding rounds.\n- Ecosystem Alignment: Funders become co-investors in the public goods stack.

The future is continuous, specialized funding rounds, not one-off grants. Look to Optimism's RetroPGF and Arbitrum's STIP as blueprints for programmatic, recurring capital allocation.\n- Specialized Tracks: Infrastructure, Dev Tooling, End-User Apps.\n- Professional Voters: Delegate ecosystems like Karma GAP emerge.\n- Outcome Measurement: Funding tied to verifiable metrics, not milestones.

Building RPGF is complex. New primitives like Allo Protocol, Hypercerts, and Jokerace abstract the coordination layer, allowing any community to spin up a funding round.\n- Modular Design: Plug in voting, payout, and reputation modules.\n- Cross-Chain Payouts: Distribute funds natively on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum.\n- Immutable Records: Hypercerts provide NFTs for provable funding impact.

RPGF's ultimate role is to bootstrap and sustain Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL). Funded projects build critical tooling and apps that drive fees, which are then partially recycled back into future RPGF rounds.\n- Virtuous Cycle: Fund Public Goods → Increase Protocol Utility → Capture Fees → Re-fund.\n- Sustainable Model: Reduces reliance on token inflation or VC funding.\n- Value Capture: Aligns long-term builders with the protocol's success.