J ♠ · Strategy · Draft

Quadratic Funding

A matching pool that rewards projects for how many people back them, not how much money they give.

The Quadratic Funding card: J ♠ of Strategy

How it works

Donors give to the projects they like. A separate matching pool sits beside the donations. At the end of the round, each project's match is computed from the square root of every contribution, summed and squared. Many small donations therefore pull more matching money than one large donation of the same total. The pool is split in proportion to these values. The result rewards broad support over deep pockets.

Use it when

  • You fund public goods and want the crowd, not whales, to set priorities.
  • You have a matching pool and many small projects to split it across.

Watch out for

  • Sybil attacks: one person with many wallets looks like many people.
  • Collusion between projects and donors to farm the match.

Example

Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin ran quadratic funding rounds for Ethereum public goods from 2019, matching millions of dollars across thousands of small donors.

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