What areas of the ecosystem are currently lacking good funding mechanisms?

Reading Resources

• Retroactive Public Goods Funding by Optimism‌

• Vitalik Buterin at EthCC 2021 : Things that matter outside of defi

Themes from Vitalik's EthCC 2021 talk. These indicate areas of the ecosystem that are currently underfunded.

1. Variety of utility

2. Higher quality social media

3. Ethereum login (similar to log in with Google) - example Eauth

4. Building the attestation ecosystem (proof of humanity, POAP, participation NFT's, Open Certs)

5. Retroactive public goods funding --DAO results oracle that judges what projects were valuable to a community's goals, after the fact. (Tannr Allard has done some work in this direction.)

   --quote from this talk "Decentralized decision making is much better at retrospective decisions than at prospective ones"

6. DeFi --> DeGov

7. Diversify power holders from a handful of de-fi whales

8. Safeguards against corrupt gov systems (example de-fi where 5 central people own half of the governance). Resistant to attack. Speed limit on innovations. More diverse sets of stakeholders making decisions. Safeguard against people with low technical knowledge and a narrow-minded profit motive driving the ecosystem's evolution.

Two themes from the EF's mission:

• Educational

• Public adoption / use-cases

Interview questions to assist research:

• What are the top three funding gaps in the Ethereum ecosystem?

• Would you want some guide rails if you were dropped into a DAO like this?