The Gitcoin Schelling Point was a key feature of the 2023 EthDenver event. Hosted by Gitcoin, a decentralized platform for funding open-source projects, the Schelling Point was designed to help attendees coordinate and collaborate around shared interests and goals of blockchain innovation.
At its core, the Schelling Point is a simple concept: it’s a place where people can come together and agree on a common course of action, even in the absence of formal rules or leadership. The name comes from the economist Thomas Schelling, who used the term to describe the way that people can coordinate without explicit communication, simply by recognizing that certain actions are more likely to be taken by a critical mass of individuals.
At EthDenver 2023, the Gitcoin team used the Schelling Point to create a space where attendees could share their ideas and interests, and find others who were working on similar projects. By creating a physical space where people could gather, Gitcoin was able to help facilitate collaboration and coordination in a way that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise.
One group that made particularly effective use of the Schelling Point was Foresight Ventures, a venture capital firm dedicated to backing Web3 projects that embody an ethos of decentralization while moving crypto towards long-term, mainstream adoption. Foresight Ventures set up a booth at the Schelling Point and used it as a base of operations for the duration of the event. During the conference, Forest Bai, the founder of Foresight Ventures also gave a speech on the main conference stage covering Decentralized Science and VC’s responsibility in the movement.
Forest introduced the concept of Decentralized Science (DeSci),which is a movement that aims to build public infrastructure for funding, creating, reviewing, crediting, and storing scientific knowledge fairly using the Web3 stack.
Decentralized Science has the potential to revolutionize the way scientific research is conducted and funded, making it more democratic, transparent, and open. By enabling global collaboration and incentivizing peer-review, it has the potential to accelerate the pace of discovery and drive innovation forward.
The key takeaways from Forest’s speech:
- The power of decentralized decision-making: One of the key benefits of decentralized science is that funding decisions are made by the public, rather than a select group of individuals or organizations. By using mechanisms such as quadratic donations or DAOs, the public has more say in which projects receive funding, which can help ensure that resources are allocated fairly and equitably.
- Global collaboration and dynamic teams: Decentralized science also enables scientists and researchers from all over the world to collaborate in dynamic teams, breaking down geographic barriers and potentially accelerating the pace of discovery. By leveraging Web3 stack, they can share data and resources more easily, and work together on projects in real-time.
- Transparent and faster funding mechanisms: In contrast to traditional science, where funding decisions are opaque and made behind closed doors, decentralized science allows for more transparent funding mechanisms. Funding decisions are made online and in public, and new funding mechanisms are constantly being explored. Traditional funding also often takes a very long time to be approved, but publicly voted funding rounds can close much, much quicker.
- Sharing laboratory services: Another potential benefit of decentralized science is that it can make sharing laboratory services easier and more transparent, using Web3 primitives. By pooling resources and sharing access to expensive equipment or specialized facilities, researchers can potentially reduce costs and increase efficiency.
- Incentivizing peer-review: Decentralized science also offers new ways to incentivize peer-review. By earning tokens and reputation for reviewing work, scientists and researchers may be more likely to contribute to the review process, which can help ensure that research is seriously vetted and of high quality.
- Ownership of intellectual property: In a decentralized science ecosystem, researchers own the intellectual property they generate and can distribute it according to transparent terms. This can help ensure that the benefits of research are distributed more fairly and that researchers have more control over how their work is used.
- Transparency in research: Finally, decentralized science can help promote greater transparency in research by having all steps, including data from unsuccessful efforts, recorded on-chain. This can help reduce waste in the research process and enable other researchers to learn from previous attempts, potentially leading to more rapid progress in scientific discovery.
By establishing a presence at the Schelling Point, Foresight Ventures was able to connect with a large number of potential applicants and partners. They were also able to build relationships with other attendees who were interested in the blockchain space, and potentially find new investments or partnerships.
Overall, the Gitcoin Schelling Point was a major success at EthDenver 2023. By creating a physical space where attendees could come together and collaborate, Gitcoin helped to facilitate the development of new projects and partnerships within the blockchain community. And by using the Schelling Point as a central organizing principle, Gitcoin was able to create a sense of shared purpose and direction among attendees, even in the absence of formal rules or leadership.
About Foresight Ventures
Foresight Ventures is a crypto fund with $400M AUM focused on backing Web3 projects that embody an ethos of decentralization while moving crypto towards long-term, mainstream adoption. Foresight Ventures manages multiple funds: a VC fund, an actively-managed secondary fund, a multi-strategy FOF, and a private market secondary fund. As a one-stop shop for crypto projects, Foresight Ventures provides incubation, investment, and advisory throughout the project life cycle.