An NFT collection with the official participation of Vitalik Buterin was launched last week. The collection has been under the radar, with a late surge in interest and a 30-fold increase in price in a few days. It aims to support an important concept in our ecosystem: the public good.
Vitalik Buterin’s initiative for the public good
This collection of NFTs, called “The Quadratic Funding Collection” (or Gitcoin Presents), was launched on 1 March 2023. It is part of the inauguration of a new platform called Metalabel.
In a nutshell, the platform is defined as a solution for groups of creators to collaborate, publish work and support each other.
At the initiative of this first collection, we find a team composed of Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum Foundation, Zoë Hitzig, economist at Harvard, and Glen Weyl, founder of RadicalxChange, Kevin Owocki and Scott Moore, co-founders of Gitcoin.
This one pays tribute to the work of Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl. Entitled “Liberal Radicalism”, it aimed to propose a more equitable model for funding public goods projects. A belief shared by the founders of Gitcoin, a platform for open source software developers.
Their paper, published in 2018, proposed a new mathematical basis for directing resources to projects in a way that benefits the most people – an approach now known as quadratic funding.
The collection has been a great success
Despite no official communication from Vitalik Buterin, the NFT series was a great success. A total of 9,209 coins were sold, raising ETH 390 (about $780,000 at the time) for the public good.
It took a few days for the existence of this collection to become known to the general public. The collection was offered for sale at ETH 0.01 and reached a low of more than ETH 0.5. It is currently stagnating at around ETH 0.3. With 9,475 ETH in volume, or nearly $13 million, Gitcoin Presents has taken OpenSea by storm.
Twelve of the tokens in the collection were special editions, reserved for collectors for a mint price of ETH 10, or over $15,000. They allowed buyers to receive a copy of the original document signed by the three authors, Buterin, Hitzig and Weyl. The lowest price is now 58 ETH.
Limited edition of the Gitcoin Presents collection
Of this amount, 70% went to the Gitcoin Grants Matching Pool, which is used to pay grants to developers on the Gitcoin platform. In addition, 20% went to the Plurality Institute, an organisation working in the field of human coordination, and 10% went to the Metalabel platform.
It is important to note that Gitcoin has played a pioneering role in the concept of public goods. Indeed, in the cryptocurrency industry, this refers to a product or service that brings value to the world, but is not truly owned by anyone.
Like Bitcoin, the people working on its development are not natively paid. The success of the launch of this collection is a testament to people’s interest in the issue of public good, which is crucial to bringing real value to our world.
