Gitcoin’s co-founder wants to return from the sidelines

Gitcoin co-founder Kevin Owocki has revealed his intention to return to the DAO dedicated to building digital public goods infrastructure.

This time, however, Owocki says he does not plan to take center stage but rather work with the community and find out where he can add value.

In an interview with Blockworks, Owocki said he believes he can contribute to the ecosystem by spreading awareness and information.

“I’m really trying to add value from the edges and be a network catalyst to help synthesize information across different stakeholders,” Owocki told Blockworks. “I’m not returning as some sort of benevolent dictator.”

With Gitcoin’s governance process decentralized, Owocki plans to submit proposals over the next couple of months and gauge community interest.

“I always say there are three different types of feedback: There’s do feedback — which is ‘I want you to do this’; there’s try feedback — which is ‘I want you to try this’; then there’s considered feedback,” Owocki said. “I’ve been very mindful that at this stage, I’m really just giving considered feedback.”

Envisioning next steps

One area that Owocki is interested in working on is helping Gitcoin go to market through grants.

“If Gitcoin grants 1.0 was like a screwdriver — it is just quadratic funding, then Gitcoin grants 2.0 would be a Swiss army knife — it’s got quadratic funding, quadratic voting and the team is building milestone-based payments and conviction voting and dominance insurance contracts,” he said.

Owocki sees himself playing a role in finding products suitable for market participants and also building trust among the different parts of the ecosystem.

Eventually, Owocki notes that he intends to deliver his own version of an “Endgame Plan” — similar to that of MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen.

“I may do something like that, but instead of it being top-down, it’s going to be more of a bottoms-up synthesis of different participants. It’s not going to be my vision, it’s going to be the things that are genuinely coming from the participants in the network,” Owocki said.

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