ethereum extitutional · a nonprofit rooted in ethereum rooted in gitcoin's social structure

a new institution extitution for ethereum.

join the telegram see the apps what's an extitution?
grow down
the fruiting bodies

two apps, one trust network.

app 01quadratic funding

fund ↗

a quadratic funding platform for ethereum's extitutions. many small donations, one matching pool, math that favors breadth of support over depth of pockets.

enter fund →
app 02trustgraph

trust ↗

a trustgraph that manages gtc governance. peer attestations form a web of trust, and influence follows earned credibility alongside token weight.

enter trust →

what's below the surface?

the idea

an extitution is the inverse of an institution

institution · the walls hold the people

extitution · the network holds the people

advanced understanding · the full comparison

institutions have walls. extitutions have networks.

institution

formal structure

  • coordinates by roles, rules, org charts
  • membership decided at the door
  • optimized for compliance and scale
  • serves banks, asset managers, the s&p 500
hard
extitution

networked coordination

  • coordinates by relationships and open protocols
  • membership is participation
  • optimized for trust and aliveness
  • serves the smallfolk
soft

then there's the exclosure: the bridge between the two.

sources, with gratitude: michel serres, who coined "extitution" · extitutional theory, primavera de filippi and collaborators, who built it into a framework · mycofi →, the book-length version. ethereum has grown extitutions for a decade (hackathons, daos, guilds) without a mandate. that's the job we're taking.

why now

every new ethereum org landed on the institutional side of the map.

ethlabs, ethereum institutional, etherealize: all settlement r&d, custody, wall street gtm. good. the open side of the app layer has no steward. that square is ours.

protocol layer app layer extitutional institutional
protocol × extitutional

argot collective, protocol guild

protocol × institutional

ethlabs · finality, throughput, r&d for institutional-scale settlement

app × extitutional

ethereum extitutional · you are here

app × institutional

ethereum institutional, etherealize · custody, compliance, wall street gtm

the extitutional end

ethereum extitutional · you are here

the institutional end

ethlabs · ethereum institutional · etherealize
the first two: same three anchor funders, ten days apart. etherealize came before.

a barbell strategy puts the weight at the two ends and skips the middle. the institutional end just got ethlabs and ethereum institutional: ten days apart, same three anchor funders. the open app-layer end had no org holding it. now it does.

how we operate

structured like an extitution

01 · what already works

we've proven we can coordinate capital extitutionally. $60m+ moved, 5 million donations. the receipts are below.

02 · governed by trustgraph

no board seats for funders. governed by a sprawling trustgraph: influence follows earned trust, and control stays with the network. no new token launch.

03 · everything open source

both apps, the mechanisms, the research. fork us. that's the point.

github →
04 · built to subtract

like mycelium, the org decomposes itself into the network it feeds. success looks like being unnecessary.

← ethereum extitutional
app 01 · quadratic funding

fund the extitutions of ethereum.

quadratic funding turns many small donations into a democratic signal, and the matching pool follows it. $1 from a hundred people outweighs $100 from one. the crowd decides what ethereum's open layer needs.

preview round 01 apply as a project
how it works

breadth of support beats depth of pockets.

step 01 · donate

back what you trust

any amount counts. every contribution is a signal about what the community actually values, and small ones carry outsized weight.

step 02 · the math

quadratic matching

a project's match grows with the square of the sum of square roots of its contributions. wide support compounds faster than any single check.

match ∝ (Σ √cᵢ)²
step 03 · amplify

the pool follows the crowd

the matching pool tops up the projects with the broadest base of supporters. capital allocation, steered by the people closest to the work.

the platform

round 01: planned for h2 2026.

extitution.io/rounds/extitutions-01

extitutions round 01

planned · h2 2026
$20k
matching pool · seeded by gitcoin
tbd
contributors
tbd
crowdfunded
tbd
projects
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$—k raised · — contributors · est. match $—
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consectetur adipiscing
$—k raised · — contributors · est. match $—
sed · do
eiusmod tempor
$—k raised · — contributors · est. match $—
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et dolore magna
$—k raised · — contributors · est. match $—
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exercitation ullamco
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$—k raised · — contributors · est. match $—
for funders

seed a matching pool. the crowd does the rest.

matching funders set the budget and the domain. the community allocates it, one small donation at a time. transparency reports every quarter. allocation stays with the crowd.

join the telegram see how trust powers this →
← ethereum extitutional
app 02 · trustgraph

governance by web of trust.

token voting measures capital. trustgraph measures credibility. the proposed pilot gives gtc governance both axes: what you hold, and who vouches for you.

see it in action read the mechanism

backed by the gitcoin foundation at the legal layer · a cayman foundation

how it works

attest. graph. govern.

step 01 · attest

vouch for real work

members attest to people they've actually built with. onchain, public, revocable. every vouch puts your own reputation behind someone else's.

step 02 · the graph

trust compounds

attestations compose into a trust graph and weight flows through it. one vouch from a trusted node outweighs twenty from unknown wallets.

weight ∝ eigentrust(graph)
step 03 · govern

dual-axis decisions

proposals pass on trust-weighted signal alongside gtc weight. sybil weight decays toward zero. contributors earn a voice they can't buy.

the platform

gtc governance, on the graph.

extitution.io/gov/gtc

gtc governance

planned · h2 2026
tbd
attested members
tbd
active attestations
tbd
trust participation
tbd
sybil damping factor
gcp-000
lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
gtc
—
trust
—
lorem · ipsum
gcp-001
consectetur adipiscing elit sed do
gtc
—
trust
—
dolor · sit
gcp-002
eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore
gtc
—
trust
—
amet · elit
your neighborhood of the graph you

node size = earned trust weight. attestations decay without renewal, so the graph stays alive and current.

for gtc holders

capital and credibility, both on the record.

the proposed pilot starts with gtc governance. get attested, delegate along trust lines you actually believe in, and help tune the mechanism in the open.

join the telegram see how trust powers funding →
← ethereum extitutional
gitcoin impact · 2019 → today

the receipts.

ethereum extitutional runs on gitcoin 3.0. before this site existed, gitcoin spent 7 years proving that community capital allocation works at scale: $60M+ moved, 5 million donations, 3,715 projects. this page is the record.

join the telegram source: gitcoin.co/impact
by the numbers

seven years of quadratic funding, measured.

$60m+
funding distributed
5m+
unique donations
270k
unique supporters
3,715
projects funded
230+
funding rounds
$28.2b
grantee market cap today
$3m+
fraud prevented
2019
year one of the experiment
$0.7m2019
$2.8m2020
$13.2m2021
$21.4m2022

annual funding distributed, the growth years

case studies

small checks, outsized futures.

the wins below belong to the teams that built them. gitcoin's part was early money at the right moment, allocated by the crowd.

layer 2

optimism

quadratic funding helped sustain the early plasma research team before there was a token, a business model, or a name. the team's work grew into one of ethereum's leading L2s.

read the case study →
defi

1inch

a $50k grant helped carry the co-founders from hackathon tables toward a dex aggregator that has cleared $250b+ in trading volume. their code, their win.

read the case study →
core protocol

eip-1559

the community crowdfunded implementation work on ethereum's fee-burning upgrade, and the donations doubled as a public signal of demand for it.

read the case study →
builders

austin griffith

grants income helped one developer quit his job and build onboarding tools (scaffold-eth, buidlguidl) that pulled thousands of developers into ethereum.

read the case study →
policy

coin center

community-backed funding for the policy shop defending crypto in washington and in court. advocacy as a public good, funded like one.

read the case study →
regen

shamba network

equipping smallholder farmers to conserve ecosystems. climate impact on the ground, funded by strangers on the internet through quadratic magic.

read the case study →
what people said
"all donors to the gitcoin matching pool deserve to get big beautiful statues."vitalik buterin · 2022
"work should be paid, and work made in the open should even be paid more."lefteris karapetsas · rotki
what's next

the next decade of receipts gets written at the app layer.

fund and trust are the same playbook, rebuilt for ethereum's extitutions. be early to round one.

join the telegram see the apps
← ethereum extitutional
mycofi · mycelial finance

economics, designed like fungus.

mycofi explores mycoeconomics: economic systems inspired by the intelligence of fungal networks. finance built on cooperation, mutual aid, and nature's own resource allocation algorithms. it's the intellectual root system this whole site grows from.

read the book mycofi.earth buy a copy

by jeff emmett & jessica zartler · foreword by scott morris · published by greenpill network · 2024

the concepts

four spores.

money

permaculture currencies

from currency monocultures to diverse, resilient permaculture currencies: multi-dimensional money representing localized forms of value, for groups that prioritize cooperation and mutual aid.

metabolism

compost capitalism

transforming extractive economic structures into nourishment for regenerative systems. the old economy becomes soil.

coordination

psilocybernetics

mycelial wisdom converging with cybernetic systems thinking: feedback loops for collective coordination, tuned the way a forest tunes itself.

ethos

mycopunk principles

the design stance underneath it all:

regenerativeredistributivenetworkedhumbleanti-fragilefractalmutualistemergentpolycentric
why it's here

the book is the root system. the apps are the fruiting bodies.

fund is a mycorrhizal network for capital: many small nutrient flows, routed to where the ecosystem says they matter. trust is chemical signaling: reputation flowing through a living web. mycofi wrote the patterns. ethereum extitutional grows them onchain.

fund → trust →
homework

read it, then come build with us.

read the book join the telegram
← ethereum extitutional
the design philosophy · practical pluralism

practical pluralism.

an essay by auryn macmillan (clrfund) & kevin owocki (gitcoin), may 2022. reproduced here because it's the design philosophy this org runs on. read the original on medium.

read on medium the 2026 update on x
the essay · may 2022

The Ethereum network is secured by block producers (currently miners, soon to be replaced by validators). They are the foundation of consensus in the Ethereum network, upon which there are trillions of dollars of assets and untold untapped potential for human coordination.

Having well-designed, secure, and dependable block producers to protect this value is a great strategy to defend the network.

One of the key strategies employed by the Ethereum community to ensure secure and reliable block production is client diversity. This means, more than one implementation of the specification — they can be differentiated by language, architecture, features or which part of the network they specialize in. If a single client were used by 2/3rds (66%) of validators and it experienced a serious bug, there's a very real risk this could lead to chain instability for users and monetary loss for node operators. By treating client diversity as a public good and fostering an environment where many independent client teams are incentivized to implement the Ethereum protocol in disparate code bases, the Ethereum community bakes in a measure of anti-fragility and resilience against bugs in any one implementation.

time → resource availability →
client diversity is pluralism in practice. many implementations, all alive: no single bug can take the network down.

Pluralism — the understanding that diversity of people, beliefs, opinions, mechanisms, approaches, implementations, etc within a given context generally results in better outcomes than in the absence of such diversity. Nowhere is this more evident than in ecosystems with rich biodiversity; ecosystems where radically different flora and fauna work in a harmoniously competitive act of mutual regulation and perpetuation. This can be seen in how the success of one species feeds and is kept in check by the success of another species, and so on.

Pluralism itself is a primitive for antifragile, resilient, and regenerative systems. As an ecosystem, Ethereum has done a great job fostering diversity in its mining and validating clients. Similarly, we should insist on pluralism across the full stack of web3 technologies and culture. This includes discrete products like wallets, RPC nodes, DAO tooling, public goods funding mechanisms, AMMs, stablecoins, and developer tooling, as well as the intangibles influences like the people, groups, communities, and opinions which participate in and hold sway over our ecosystem.

monoculture: one bug, everyone falls pluralism: damage stays local
the ecosystem argument, drawn. diversity of species is what makes the forest hard to kill.

We are writing this essay because we believe in client diversity. We believe in Pluralism as a primitive. And we want you to join us in extending the ethos of client diversity & pluralism to other layers of the stack. By having pluralism as a core value of each vertical, we make it more likely the space tends towards capture-resistance — not fragility. Participants should be able to choose to use or not use any one of a number of options for any given need.

By having pluralism at the beating heart of each niche, we ensure the space is antifragile. If there is a major bug discovered in one system, the resulting cascading harm can only go so far because there will always be another dApp ready to pick up the slack. For web3 to truly express itself, diversity and pluralism must be core values.

To all those who would seek to build, enshrine, and defend moats in our shared virtual machine, to build systems incapable of composition, incapable of componentization, incapable of being permissionlessly replaced by some alternative:

We say this is a pattern of the past, an antipattern in web3. It's a pattern enabled by permissioned access to, and control of, data.

This pattern will be made redundant in our version of the internet, made redundant by our shared virtual machine.

The future will be dominated by much more emergent systems; organic compositions of many discrete and interchangeable components, built by disparate people, in combinations never dreamt of by their creators.

It is through this diversity that we build anti-fragility, and a resilience to capture, censorship, and stagnation.

We challenge the protocols at the center of the NFT, DeFi, DAO Tooling ecosystems to adopt practical pluralism as part of their design philosophy & broader Ethos.

Special thank you to TJ Rush, Trent Van Epps, and members of GitcoinDAO, for reviewing drafts of this essay.

the 2026 update · from kevin's x thread, dec 2025

reforming eth public goods funding in 2026+.

ten takes from the year-end thread with vitalik on the greenpill podcast: pluralism, applied to public goods funding.

tldr · where a reformed pgf space could go
  • provable mechanisms over unprovable vibes: verifiable, flowing, dependency-driven funding.
  • privacy + open source prioritized: the public goods that are existential for ethereum's survival.
  • fund your dependencies: capital routed by real upstream impact, not popularity contests.
  • sustainable revenue flows: sequencer fees, oss licensing, yield-based pgf instead of hoping donors show up.
  • ai + zk as coordination tech: ai evaluates huge dependency graphs, zk enables manipulation-resistant governance.
  • coalitional funding: a network of pgf funding sources instead of one big pot.
  • pluralism as strength: many pgf innovators create antifragility and reduce capture risk.
01 · where the money comes from

most funding still flows from traditional L1/L2 grant programs, with a long tail of onchain innovation growing since 2019.

02 · pluralism is a feature

many funders means less capture, more surface area for good ideas, redundancy, no kingmakers, and routes around broken institutions. client diversity, but for pgf.

03 · the vibes era is over

proof of impact over vibes. tight apertures over "fund everything." mechanisms that survive an adversarial world.

04 · structural revenue flows

connect revenue centers (block rewards, sequencer fees, protocol fees) to cost centers. make public goods as provable as blocks, then route revenue to them automatically.

05 · oss licensing as revenue engine

harberger-style openness taxes, "fund your dependencies" in the license, profit-sharing only when someone goes proprietary. a tiny fraction of the trillions built on oss becomes a sustainable pgf river.

06 · yield-based pgf

people donate yield far more readily than principal. huge psychologically and structurally.

07 · fund your dependencies

deep funding builds a real dependency graph, ranks millions of edges with ai, spot-checks with jurors, and pays by actual upstream value. accountability becomes endogenous.

08 · the polycentric tree

every l2, app-chain, and protocol funds its own upstream dependencies, and the flows spread outward like mycelium. coalitional funding replaces one big donor.

09 · build with the new

legacy treasuries resist change. new ecosystems are hungry and open to new primitives. the energy is on the frontier.

10 · ai + zk are the superpowers

ai gives us scale. zk gives us integrity. together they turn funding from an art into an engineering discipline.

"ethereum public goods funding is not dying, it's molting."from the 2026 thread
"a world where oss dependencies are not an afterthought but a core part of ethereum's economic engine."from the 2026 thread
the movement

a rich, decentralized exploration of the design space.

dozens of teams are exploring pgf mechanisms in parallel: grants programs, retro funding, dependency funding, yield funding, web-of-trust governance. gitcoin is just the schelling point where the movement finds each other. ethereum extitutional is one more species in the forest.

join the telegram see the apps
☭̸
powered by gitcoin · the receipts

this playbook already moved $60,000,000.

$60m+
funding distributed
5m+
unique donations
3,715
projects funded
270k
unique supporters

gitcoin grants took 1inch from a hackathon table to $250b+ in volume, funded optimism's research before it had a name, and paid for eip-1559. quadratic funding works. there's a decade of receipts.

see the impact →
the movement · public goods funding is a pluralism now

we stand on the shoulders of giants.

in honor of the dozens of teams who have pushed extitutional structures forward.

quadratic funding
crowd-weighted matching
retro funding
reward what already worked
dependency funding
pay your upstream
yield funding
principal stays, yield flows

a rich, decentralized exploration of the design space by dozens of independent teams. gitcoin is just the schelling point where the movement finds each other.

explore the pluralist forest →
← ethereum extitutional
certification · issued 2026

certified commie free.

people hear "public goods funding" and picture a politburo. so let's be explicit about what this org runs on (voluntary, priced, plural, forkable) and what it wants nothing to do with (central plans, coerced capital, one committee allocating for everyone).

the ails of statist communism

central planning fails on information, incentives, and exit.

information

the planner flies blind

prices are compressed knowledge: millions of local facts squeezed into one number. abolish them and the planner allocates by guesswork. hayek called it in 1945; gosplan spent the next four decades proving him right, trying to plan output for millions of distinct goods no committee could possibly understand.

incentives

nobody owns the downside

when the state owns the harvest, quotas beat weather reports. the great leap forward starved tens of millions; the 1932-33 soviet famine, millions more. these were not droughts. they were allocation decisions made far from the fields, enforced at gunpoint.

exit

the wall test

voluntary systems compete for members. coercive ones build walls to keep them in (berlin, 1961). any economic system that needs a wall has already lost the argument. everything here is opt-in, forkable, and leavable.

what runs here instead

markets for public goods.

quadratic funding is price discovery: 270k people signaling with their own money, matched by a pool the funders opted into. governance is a trustgraph you can exit. the code is open source, so forking us is a right, not a crime. no five-year plan, no politburo, no wall.

commies are not welcome here. mutualists, market anarchists, quadratic freaks, solarpunks, and capitalists who pay their upstream: extremely welcome.

join the telegram see fund →