VDP-13 VitaDAO Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Proposal

NOTE: This is a duplicate of an on chain proposal from prior to VitaDAO's using snapshot, and is present here for completeness on snapshot. No snapshot vote occurred.

Summary

Proposal for VitaDAO to donate $64,299 USDC to match donations for longevity research initiatives through a quadratic donation round on Gitcoin in early December.

Proposal Details

In collaboration with Gitcoin, VitaDAO should co-organize a donation round for longevity-related projects in early December. The donation round would utilise quadratic funding which tackles 3 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 64,299 USDC as a matching donor.

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 15-30 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.

The suggested amount of donating $64,299 to this round follows the time in minutes that Jeanne Calment, the oldest known human to have lived, has been alive.

Implementation and Timeline

By the end of November, the project list will be finalized and sent to Gitcoin. The funding round is set to start on Dec 1st, 2021 and last for 2 weeks.

Budget

The budget of 64,299 USDC represents a donation from VitaDAO as a matching funder to Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding Round in December 2021.

Explainer

Youtube Quadratic Voting Explainer

More information

For the full proposal with more details, see the discussion on Discourse here.