What is the Quadratic Funding Incubator (QFI)?
We are a small team, working on privacy technology that leverages ZKPs to empower radical democracy. We’re working to create a scalable way to support Quadratic Funding by building infrastructure that enables community organizers to run Quadratic Funding Rounds.
We are looking for dreamers trying to become Quadratic Funding Operators, who need a little help to do a lot of good. We support grassroots Quadratic Funding organizers building a vibrant and diverse community around public goods funding that reaches across the Ethereum Ecosystem by offering grants, resources, and mentorship.
We offer help in planning, operations, technical guidance, marketing strategy, and impact analysis with a the goal of empowering organizers to become technically independent and ready to receive matching funds/grants. We want to activate more operators that will continue to run QF rounds for their communities.
In general it’s perhaps useful to think of QFI as project consultants. We offer you technical training & operational guidance but we do not directly execute QF rounds.
Specifically, we look to support community operators in the following ways:
- Financial support via grants for grassroots adoption of QF around the world
- Technical guidance to deploy ZK-powered Quadratic Funding infrastructure
- Operational help in terms of thinking through how to structure & manage round logistics
- Marketing & comms strategy to ensure your community has adequate content & education
- Impact analysis to help you set goals & measure success
We’re also building with a vision to enable communities to become completely independent. The goal is for organizers to eventually be able to run QF rounds without any involvement from us. Therefore, here’s a few examples of areas we do NOT provide support:
- Smart contract or website deployment (though we provide guidance on how)
- Direct technical or operational support for QF users
- Legal guidance on running QF rounds
We want to activate more QF operators that will continue to run rounds for their communities. To make the end game for us unambiguous:
The goal of the Quadratic Funding Incubator is to ensure there is enough [real] QF adoption and diversity for it to no longer need to exist. There are no unrelated “third parties” or “perceived leaders” we work with; There are seeds we are planting with community leaders around the world, not all of them will grow.
Learn more about how we help community organizers.
Background
The idea started as a scalable way to support Quadratic Funding projects. Leveraging what we learned scaling CLR.fund to drive more QF/QV adoption. Broadly speaking, the EF wanted to decentralize/democratize how funds are allocated, PSE wants to drive privacy adoption. ZK-QF allows more direct community participation than traditional grant funding / achieves both goals.
We are not kingmakers, if EF or anyone else monopolized QF we would have failed in our mission; if anything we aim to be throne breakers. To us, everything we do is an opportunity to slowly create new leaders that believe in QF and Privacy in diverse communities around the world. To us, community organizers are our first priority. The business process is tedious, there is risk involved, failure is absolutely an option, but we’re willing drive that diversity and adoption.
We believe advocacy demands representation. We want to tackle the problem regionally and give voters a sense of ownership over their community.
The team is growing and there is more demand for these QF rounds than we can handle at the moment. We've been encouraging experiments and developing UX around their needs.
Look forward to collaborating together☀️
Learn more about our work
View our case studies to get a sense of different ways we’ve collaborated with communities.