Impact

In our last post, we provided a snapshot on the open source software projects building on Arbitrum. In this post, we will apply a series of experimental impact metrics to identify positive growth and network contribution trends across a cohort of more than 300 major projects on Arbitrum.

We believe impact metrics such as these are instrumental in helping the Arbitrum DAO better design incentives and allocate capital across its ecosystem. The metrics we've included are all derived from both onchain and off-chain project data. They include well-established crypto indicators like active users, sequencer fees, and transaction counts as well as common OSS metrics like full-time active developers, issues closed, and new contributors.

The real value, however, lies in combining simple metrics in novel ways to filter and benchmark projects' contributions. We introduce four "impact pools" that can assist with this type of analysis. The pools are:

• Sustainable user growth: projects that not only bring large numbers of active users to the network but also retain and connect them easily to other dapps
• Developer growth: projects with the most developer activity and new contributors to its GitHub repos in recent months
• Blockspace demand: projects with the most transactions and sequencer fee contributions
• Momentum: projects with a mix of positive developer and onchain user trends

Gitcoin has been providing grants to open source software teams since 2019.

Over the last four years, more than $38M has been distributed via quadratic funding across 3,000+ projects and over 18,000 project applications. This includes both $22M in matching funds and $16M in direct donations from the community. On average, for every $1.00 put up by a matching fund donor, they have raised an additional $0.75 from the community.

(Overall, Gitcoin has allocated more than $50M towards public goods through a range of mechanisms, including direct donations and bounties, as well as quadratic funding.)

Although there are often anecdotal reports about Gitcoin's impact from projects, there have been few attempts to look longitudinally across a cohort of projects and track their impact over multiple years.

In this piece, we identify a group of 50 open source software projects that have received significant funding across multiple Gitcoin Grants rounds and then we examine the relationship between grants and growth.

Within this cohort, we see that for every $1M that has been paid out in grants since 2019, there are 7 full-time developers who are still around today. If we factor in the crowdfund multiplier, then every $1M put into the matching pool is associated with 13 retained full-time developers. These results have held up even during the bear market.