Quadratic Funding

Quadratic Funding (QF) is a mechanism for allocating matching funds to public goods projects. It was introduced in the 2018 paper Liberal Radicalism: A Flexible Design For Philanthropic Matching Funds by Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and E. Glen Weyl.

The core insight: matching funds should be proportional to the number of contributors, not the total amount raised. A project with 100 people each donating $1 signals broader legitimacy than one person donating $100 — QF rewards the former more heavily.

The Mechanism

Each project's match is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of individual contributions:

match ∝ ( √c₁ + √c₂ + ... + √cₙ )²

This means small contributions from many people are amplified more than large contributions from few. It operationalizes the idea that community support — not wealth — should determine what gets funded.

Gitcoin

Gitcoin is the primary implementation of QF for the Ethereum ecosystem. Its Gitcoin Grants program has run multiple rounds funding open source software, community infrastructure, and public goods projects — many of them directly adjacent to the ZuVillage and network-state ecosystem.

Significance

QF is one of the cleaner examples of a governance mechanism that emerged from the crypto/Ethereum intellectual tradition and has been applied in practice at scale. It sits at the intersection of pluralism (weighting breadth of support across diverse contributors) and the d/acc principle of building infrastructure that resists capture by large actors.

Glen Weyl, one of the paper's co-authors, is also co-author of the Plurality book.

Primary Sources

• Liberal Radicalism paper — Buterin, Hitzig, Weyl (2018)
• Gitcoin.co

See Also

• Pluralism
• Grants
• Ethereum