VDP-30 [Funding] VitaDAO Gitcoin Quadratic Longevity Funding Round 2 + VitaDAO Longevity Fellowship

This proposal requests a total of $55,000 USDC to take part in a Gitcoin round as well as to fund Longevity Fellowships.

Summary

Proposal for VitaDAO to donate $40,000 USDC to match donations for longevity research initiatives through the next upcoming quadratic donation round on Gitcoin in March 2022, as well as to provide $15,000 USDC donation to fund VitaDAO Longevity Fellows with micro-grants of up to $3,000 USDC.

• Project Lead: Vincent Weisser#9975
• Team: timrpeterson#8928, Tyler Golato#5399, Retromancers#3866, Laurence Ion#4088, Scott Moore, Alex Dobrin

Description

In collaboration with Gitcoin, VitaDAO should co-organize a donation round for longevity-related projects in March 2022. The donation round would utilise quadratic funding which tackles the tragedy of the commons, a common problem with public goods such as funding longevity research. As part of this donation round, VitaDAO should provide 40,000 USDC as a matching donor.

Motivation

The goal is to advance longevity research beyond our core focus of directly funding research with intellectual property. We are collaborating with Gitcoin to advance unique ways to fund research through crypto and by the crypto community.

Individuals like Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl and others proposed a system called quadratic funding, where some donors quadratically match donations from other donors. This results in a situation where individual donors may spend just as much as it benefits themselves, but due to these matching donations, effectively cause a total spend that takes into account the benefit of others. For more information on how quadratic funding works, see this blog post by Vitalik Buterin as well as “WTF is Quadratic Funding?”.

Gitcoin proved this in practice, funding projects with millions of dollars already. As a pioneer in quadratic funding with experience from previous donation rounds and a high-profile network of donors, Gitcoin is the ideal partner for VitaDAO to organize a donation round specifically for longevity-related projects.

Specification

The VitaDAO Longevity Working Group has curated a list of over 30 projects that seem like a good fit for this donation round. The curation process focused on smaller, relatively underfunded initiatives that could benefit a lot from additional funding.

You can see the already onboarded projects from last round here: https://gitcoin.co/grants/explorer/?&grant_tags=Longevity

Implementation and Timeline

By the end of February, the project list will be finalized and sent to Gitcoin. The funding round is set to start in March 2022 and last for 2 weeks.

Budget

The budget of 40,000 USDC represents a donation from VitaDAO as a matching funder to Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding Round in March 2022. Additionally 15,000 USDC would be donated to fund VitaDAO Longevity Fellows.

Explainer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJljTtLnymE

For more information, please see the phase 2 proposal and discussion on Discourse.