Quadratic funding

Quadratic funding matches community contributions such that many small gifts outweigh few large ones — the match scales with the square of the sum of square roots. Strip the math and what remains is a moral claim startlingly close to this project's prompt: the breadth of love matters more than the depth of any one wallet. A thousand people giving $1 signals more love than one person giving $10,000, and the mechanism amplifies accordingly. QF was an attempt to make aggregate affection legible enough to fund — arguably the largest experiment ever run in this direction, with hundreds of millions of dollars of evidence via Gitcoin and its descendants.

Its sibling, retroactive public-goods funding, embodies the other half: reward what already proved valuable, freeing builders to work from love rather than pitch. (Which is dana with a foundation-sized purse — see 🎁dharma-gift.)

1. The love was real. Millions of small contributions flowed to unglamorous shared infrastructure nobody was obligated to fund. The thesis — people will fund what they love if the rails exist and their small gift is amplified — is confirmed, not speculative.
2. The measure got farmed. The moment "many small donors" became the metric that unlocked matching, it was manufactured: sybils, collusion rings, airdrop-driven pseudo-love. Textbook Goodhart (🩸goodharts-law) — and the countermeasure arms race (identity proofs, passports, fraud scoring) pulled the system toward surveillance, which is itself a love-hostile texture: auditing your donors to verify their affection is genuine.
3. Aggregation abstracted the relation. Rounds needed categories, eligibility criteria, registries — exactly the prefiguration this project now refuses (🪢relationality). Grantees optimized for round-legibility; givers scrolled a marketplace of causes. The flow scaled; the relationship mostly didn't survive the pooling.
4. Event-shape fought practice-shape. Quarterly rounds made funding a campaign — spike, leaderboard-adjacent energy, silence — rather than a rhythm (🪷metta).

Inherit: amplification of small gifts (growth-in-giving made mechanical); retroactivity; the proof that strangers' love can be pooled at all.

Invert: where QF scaled up and abstracted, the next attempt scales down and particularizes — circles small enough for acquaintance (🏡localism), stories attached to flows, no public metric-targets, matching triggered by relation ("someone I trust loves this") rather than by count ("N wallets donated"). One candidate synthesis: quadratic logic inside webs of acquaintance — amplify breadth of love only among people who can vouch for each other's realness the human way, making sybils not merely expensive but meaningless.