Meet the GitCoin Creator Offering the Green Pill to the Internet
Kevin Owocki Wants Crypto and Web3 to Promote the Public Good
By James Anderson
Hey there, Waywards reader.
I put together another faux highlight reel of me shooting hoops, but I decided to spare all of you another email and post about that; however, if my sorry excuse for athleticism — observable in videos illustrating dribbling skills and shots to practice to stay physically active while having fun — might still be of interest, you can check out my February Faux Highlight Reel: Part I and my February Faux Highlight Reel: Part II compilations. Shout out to my brother-in-law for providing the brief guitar jam used as background music in both of those mock basketball mixtapes.
With this post, though, I instead present you with a profile of a software engineer who’s working on realizing a world wide web that privileges the public good. An editor commissioned me to write this piece, but the editor’s outlet that planned to run the story declined to publish it in the wake of the FTX collapse, given how that probably affected people’s views on cryptoeconomics — a topic broached in this profile. So as not to let a good article go to waste, I’m sharing it below. You’re welcome to share and x-post the profile story as well. I encourage you to do that with attribution and a link back to the original found here on Waywards.
Regenerative cryptoeconomics. ImpactDAOs. Addressing global coordination failures. Quadratic funding throughout the Quadratic Lands. Sybil resistance. Defeating Moloch. A solarpunk future.
Kevin Owocki, author of “GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate the World,” published last year, affirms all the above.
Seen as "something of a rock star" amid other "#BUIDLathon" (hackathon) attendees at the ETHDenver 2022 conference, a gathering geared toward the exploration and cultivation of a reconfigured Internet, Owocki’s fame correlates with his yeoman’s work to recuperate cryptoeconomics and to construct a Web3 world fueled by carbon-neutral blockchain-based incentives and coordinated production of digital public goods.
His book, replete with illustrations of concepts and insights ranging from game theory to Bentosim (“the theory that self-interest is multi-dimensional”), offers a hope-filled explanation of Web3, with some stylistic disregard for syntax. The author refers to Web3 as “a global, immutable (incorruptible), transparent programmable mechanism for human resource allocation. For human coordination. Because web3 is a foundation for coordination, Web3 is a schelling point for the hopeful.”
Conduit for a Regenerative Web & World Beyond Coordination Failures
Owocki, an older millennial who graduated with a computer science degree from the University of Delaware in 2006, believes we can overcome our coordination failures and defeat “Moloch.”
That is, coordination failures can be conceived of as “an all powerful demon out there, manipulating us to prevent our mutual success,” and the “shared psychic manifestation of coordination failure is Moloch,” so named, Owocki avers, so we might slay it. Like a vigilant, valiant knight incessantly defending the cyber realm and its digital commons, the Colorado-based programmer devotes most of his time and energy to fighting Moloch, optimizing digital coordination through his own contributions to public goods as a programmer and to culture as a public intellectual.
Per “GreenPilled,” Moloch, the coordination failure monster, rears his ugly head when individuals “could achieve a desirable outcome by working together, but fail to do so because they don’t coordinate their decision making.” Perhaps they don’t coordinate effectively or in a way that reflects the values of regenerative cryptoeconomics systems. “Basically,” Owocki simplified, “a regenerative system is just a system that increases in capacity over time.”
He sees the values embedded in such systems as related to satisfaction of people’s needs. (An apropos point he makes in the new book is that programmable money, i.e. crypto, means you can program values into currency.) While market systems are notorious for not encouraging actors involved to consider effects of their transactions outside of the exchanges, coordination via regenerative crypto, Owocki contends, produces positive “externalities,” an ECON 101 term for outcomes of a given mode of organizing production and allocation that are external to the production and exchange processes. The value of regenerative cryptoeconomics, the work of this innovative coder and public goods promoter helps inform us, comes by way of sustainable equilibrium and resiliency in response to shocks to the system.
Owocki considers ImpactDAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations creating positive externalities in their given ecosystems, to be the “atomic unit” of the regenerative cryptoeconomics movement. It’s a movement he’s played a pivotal role in refactoring, debugging and back ending, to borrow software developer speech.
GitCoin and Support for Digital Public Goods
In 2017, he co-founded GitCoin, a crowdfunding platform and ImpactDAO par excellence.
“GitCoin was basically, like, my fifth or so blockchain side project. [I] built a lot of stuff that people didn't like, or didn't want — the software engineer in me,” Owocki recounted.
He came to the project with Web2 CTO experience. Having hired about 45 software engineers while in his previous executive-level occupation, Owocki realized inordinate time and labor went into that recruiting.
In addition to solving the recruitment problem with a new platform, he wanted to support open-source software.
“I’ve built every startup that I've ever been involved [in] off of open-source software,” he said. “When I want to start a new website, I download my own open source web server, an open source database server, and I use an open source programming language called Python. To me, it's just really incredible that we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, and that open-source software creates such value for the world. But there's not a good business model to monetize open source software. It's a digital public good.”
Not sure about the importance of public goods, digital or otherwise? Allow an Owockian pinch and zoom on that topic to persuade you.
Owocki sees public goods as resources that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning a person can’t exclude another from using them and a person consuming them doesn’t stop another from doing so. In his book, he refers to those goods as “stuff we all use but don’t pay for (and sometimes take for granted),” though it might be more accurate to claim we don’t purchase those goods directly; nevertheless, society benefits from their existence.
With help, Owocki started GitCoin in 2017 to give software engineers opportunities to earn income (read: quit their ethically dubious corporate tech and Wall Street jobs) by working on those taken-for-granted resources.
“The flagship product, GitCoin grants, is a place where you can host a grant that allows you to get coins, pun intended, for your work in digital public goods,” he said.
A bit more than halfway through “GreenPilled,” the reader finds a teal and yellow unicorn galloping across the top of page 81, wherein Owocki envisions “a mythical place where we’ve rewritten the laws of economics to support public goods, prevent coordination failures, and create human thriving.” The practice of regenerative crypto constitutes a vessel capable of transporting us to the fabled “Quadratic Lands,” as he terms that desirable, Moloch-free zone. The platform he co-created appears to facilitate movement in that direction.
GitCoin creators can get coins via “quadratic funding” that matches crowd contributions.
“Two weeks of every quarter, GitCoin runs a ‘quadratic funding’ matching round,” Owocki explained. “And basically, there's a matching pool that's deployed contemporaneously, which is just a fancy way of saying at the same time as crowdfunding campaigns. If you raise $10 from 10 contributors, and I raise $10 from one contributor, then you'll get like 95 percent of the matching pool, because we're optimizing for the number of unique identities that have contributed to a grant, as opposed to just the amount that goes into the grant. So we're kind of optimizing for the preferences of the poor and the many over the rich and the few and pushing the power to fund an ecosystem out to each of the participants in the ecosystem, which is really powerful.”
In effect, the platform optimizes for the number of contributors to a grant, not for the amount funded, which raises an issue Owocki has focused on as of late.
“There's this problem where if you make up a bunch of identities, then you can route the funding to your favorite projects without actually having those popular projects be popular,” he said, “and that's called the Sybil Resistance problem.”
Owocki, by his own admission, has become obsessed with it. He devoted the second season of his GreenPill podcast largely to the themes of digital identity and Sybil Resistance, and the latest project-product from GitCoin reflects Owocki’s recent obsession.
“GitCoin just launched this thing called Passport, which is basically a self-sovereign and decentralized way of building digital identity, that Sybil Resistance,” he said about the new system for verification and authentication that doesn’t store personal information.
In relation, he waxed optimistic, with a healthy dose of humility.
“I don't know if that work will contribute to anything as big as GitCoin,” Owocki said. “But moving the entire ecosystem from ‘one token, one vote,’ to ‘one human, one vote,’ feels as big as GitCoin, probably bigger if the ecosystem can do it.”
Working on GitCoin over the years, he and his collaborators realized the infrastructure for funding open-source software could be exapted to fund other digital public goods, like climate technology, longevity research and investigative journalism, to name only a few.
Some of that’s already happening. Owocki anticipates expansion into other areas. He’s just not likely to be at the helm when it happens.
“One of the things that we realized when we realized that GitCoin was a significant pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem was that you can’t have a centralized pillar of a decentralized ecosystem,” he said. To better align with regenerative values, they re-launched GitCoin as a DAO in 2021, decentralizing governance, computation, system development and network economics.
“In order to make sure it’s decentralized and the DAO has no CEO, I’ve actually disaffiliated from GitCoin DAO leadership,” Owocki said about the move he made in June 2022 to cede the “soft power” he accumulated prior to stepping down. “GetCoin’s my baby, and I love it. But it was a tactical setback in search of a more strategic objective, which was decentralization of this pillar of the Ethereum ecosystem.”
While no longer the brains behind current GitCoin operations, the formidable enemy of Moloch remains interested in what’s “adjacent to and around” the community, keen to explore what could be built atop existing protocols, eager to help us answer the question as to how we create “a more regenerative crypto economic Internet.”
Bridging Ideological Divides
The quest to popularize and to bring to fruition that kind of digital network has seen him formally lecturing and also debating with Erik Vorhees, a Bitcoin fan who founded the ShapeShift open-source crypto platform. Their debate engaged the ideological divide between individualists and collectivists. Those who veer toward collectivism tend to care about solving problems that ostensibly demand social action to address, like climate chaos, rising authoritarianism and adequate funding for journalism, Owocki said. Self-identifying individualist types are often more concerned about sovereignty and privacy, he added; the latter tribe disavows or purports to condemn coercion, and views government taxation as undesirably coercive.
With Web3, Owocki claims we can move past a polarizing dichotomy by combining collectivist concern for the common good with mechanisms enabling non-coercive forms of coordination.
“I think that there's a huge opportunity to allow people to fund public goods using Web3 technology because it's just way more efficient; it’s not coercive,” he shared. “Look at quadratic funding in the Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum ecosystem doesn't have to tax its citizens in order to fund its public goods because stuff like GitCoin and Optimism are so efficient and so good at measuring the preferences of the community members that it can route capital to people … without there having to be taxes.”
Advancing a Utopic Vision
To fuel the journey toward the Quadratic Lands so that community support for public goods and for the people who use and appreciate them might become reality requires ongoing efforts to overcome the tyranny of Moloch, in Owocki’s language. The guy trying to give the green pill to the Internet to awaken users to a realm of possibilities derives inspiration for that from an art movement that’s based on telling stories of a world in which we’ve solved sustainability and collective action problems.
Innovators in the cryptocurrency space are probably familiar with the label “cypherpunk,” referring to anyone advocating for cryptography and use of privacy-enabling technologies. To slay Moloch, however, Owocki adopts a “solarpunk” outlook as well.
“Solar punk is sort of taking the punk moniker that was popularized by Satoshi and the cypherpunks and creating a different value system that's more around sustainability and collective action,” he said. “The cypherpunks were all about sovereignty and privacy-preserving technology. What if we could create both a more cypherpunk and solarpunk world is sort of the big idea behind a lot of the art movements these people have been inspired by.”
In the book he published last year, Owocki calls solarpunk “optimistic,” as well as “high tech” and “high life” — a close approximation of his own proclivities, values and commitments — and he connects the aesthetic vision to the movement driving and inspiring his own work.
“By practicing Regenerative CryptoEconomics, we can build a more solarpunk future,” Owocki enthusiastically encourages us.
Many thanks to Owocki’s assistant for providing the photo of the man featured above.