The Gitcoin CLR Round 4 recently completed, and it was quite a success. Nearly $150,000 in pre-matched grant funding was raised from more than 6,000 individual contributors this go-around, a productive swell that shows the Ethereum community is increasingly blooming and organizing.  

But growth is a constant and active process, particularly around the maturing Ethereum ecosystem. No one knows this better than the Gitcoin team, which rolls out new user-friendly and community-minded features with impressive rapidity.

As such, the Gitcoin Grants experience evolves from round to round as its maestros actively extend and optimize its constituent parts. One notable addition in Round 4 was the creation of a dedicated “Media” grants section alongside a “Tech” category. And per pent up community demand for more Ethereum marketing efforts, the top media projects’ first run was certainly a strong one, with several initiatives earning several thousands of Dai in matched funds.  

In his overview post on Round 4, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin expounded on various things, but one suggestion he made that’s since stirred up further stakeholder discussions was the possibility of adding “negative signaling” to future Gitcoin Grants rounds. For example, roughly speaking one might donate 1 Dai against a particular project to cancel out a 1 Dai donation for that project. The idea? Having game-theoretic recourse if you think a given effort is unduly receiving too much funding.

This kind of mechanism could be implemented on Gitcoin in various ways, too, like through diverting funds granted against media projects to tech projects. So there are several different paths ahead, but which one should the Ethereum community take? To the extent that we all have a say, this is the juncture — at the crossroads of consensus — where Burn Signal can really shine.

BURN, BABY, BURN


Burn Signal is, in short, a signalling project where users can burn ETH to signal a preference on a specific matter through a simple, Twitter-like interface.

Traditional coin voting systems are strongly hampered by the plutocracy problem: a whale with a trove of coins can drown out the votes of less-wealthy users. Burn Signal comes out much stronger in this regard, as it relies on a quadratic voting mechanism and anti-sybil BrightID scores to defend against plutocracy.

In the least, then, Burn Signal stands as a significant improvement over regular coin voting methods, and it’s open and ripe to be used for the community. It’s also #BuiltOnEthereum and will be interwoven with the tech of other amazing ecosystem projects, namely The Graph, IPFS, and 3Box.

We’re confident that the Burn Signal app will be an awesome outlet for seeking feedback and ascertaining consensus around important topics around Ethereum, e.g. the possibility of negative signalling on Gitcoin. Of course, Burn Signal can’t solve all of Ethereum’s problems, but it most definitely can help to solve how we solve those problems. And that’s the great mission at hand.

If you want to learn more or feel like hopping into the trenches with us, do reach out!