Matching Donation Project
update
2024/08/09: A detailed report on the results of the first experiment is now available!
2024/07/13: A press release from Code for Japan, with whom we are collaborating, is now available!
‘DigDAO Matching Donations’ is a project jointly run with Code for Japan to explore new models for distributing funds for public goods.
Through this project, we are experimenting with a distribution mechanism called Quadratic Funding (QF), which distributes funds to Civictech projects based on user support (donations).
DigDAO’s commitment to the distribution of funds to public goods
DigDAO will spin out of the Digital Agency Web3 Research Community in 2023, with the aim of experimenting and implementing a better mechanism for the transformation of the executive branch, something from the experiments happening in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Therefore, the project aims to present a new model of ‘distribution of funds for public goods’.
Currently, the public administration distributes funds for public benefit projects (public goods) on a vetting system. (‘public procurement’).
However, we believe that projects with a small/bottom-up nature like Civictech have a lot of uncertainty in distributing budgets from the beginning & that a centralised entity such as the public administration should not be the judge of excellence.
What is Quadratic Funding (QF)?
QF is a good mechanism for distributing funds for public goods (public interest projects such as Civictech) based on the needs of citizens.
- the public administration budgets for the rough issues it wants to solve (this is called the ‘funding pool’). The issue to be budgeted for can be the prevention of congestion at municipal counters, or the digitisation of administrative services)
- invite and list projects that solve that issue
- citizens can donate to projects on the list that they find attractive
- each project receives from the funding pool an amount calculated by the QF mechanism based on the number and amount of donors obtained
For background formulae, see 【解説記事】初めてのQuadratic Funding.
Quadratic Funding has been used as a mechanism to support digital public goods in a democratic way, including distributing over 9 billion Ethereum ecosystem funds and being used in Taiwan.
Developing a QF tool for credit card payments.
The platform being developed in this project has been released and provided with source code under a ‘GPL-3.0 licence’.
Companies, government agencies and others can utilise this source code to develop and release customised tools to boost the distribution of funds to public goods.
For more information on the project’s philosophy and overview, see the following pages.