Leaving Devconnect, I felt the weight of being in a niche that might be stagnating. Public goods funding in Ethereum has lost mindshare. PGF is seen as a cost center to many ecosystems, Vitalik is focused elsewhere. Builder energy is real, but attention has drifted. Discussing this with @carl_cervone, we focused on one core issue. Most teams failed to execute well. There is a lot of well-intentioned mediocrity. In a rising market, mediocrity gets hidden. CT has an immune system for obvious scams now, but not for pervasive mediocrity. Some bright spots: - Its been great to see the rise of @OctantApp - they are focusing on the demand side with their new vault play - which I think is super smart. I want them (and their vault users) to raise a shit ton of funds and then be discerning about how to spend it. - I love what @SilviProtocol is doing with bioregional financing. Peer to peer proof of tree planting is very cool, this model could completely bypass the existing middleman-ridden NGO structure for reforestation. - @deep_funding is doing great work attracting talent from new places (AI). And scaling human judgement to fund OSS dependancies. - I like how @TheDevanshMehta thinks about connecting revenue centers & cost centers for ecosystems. Just like how its hard to survive in nature w/o energy, its hard to survive in business without revenue. By connecting cost/revenue centers. we are able to finance ecosystem public goods in tandem with their growth. - IMO The clearest direction for @gitcoin GG25 is to focus on keeping our own spend (relatively) low while proving out our ability to build coalitions that have impact (and get upside) in 1 to 2 frontier metas with real momentum (maybe x402, AI, stablecoins, DePIN, interop, infofi privacy). Tangibly this means running public goods funding rounds there, and pairing it with token investments to build dealflow and treasury longevity. The PGF rounds build dealflow for the investment engine. - There are others that are doing great things I likely missed. Shill them in the comments and Ill RT the best takes. Thanks @carl_cervone for helping me sensemake here!

another bright spot is @Celo growth - @sodofi_ idk if correlation or causation but Celo has always seemed aligned to PGF experiments