In March, leading Block Producers EOS Nation and EOS Asia were awarded a $631,000 grant from Block.one's EOS VC to begin developing an EOS crowdfunding platform. This open-source platform will become a self-funded, community-driven portal designed to fund EOSIO-based projects. Its creation signals the beginning of a new era of collaboration between Block.one, Block Producers, and the broader EOS community.

This new platform will be called Pomelo, and the landing page is now live: https://pomelo.io/

Inspired by Gitcoin

Gitcoin facilitates the production of decentralized applications on Ethereum. With over $20 million in funding provided to thousands of developers, Gitcoin has been wildly successful. Pomelo will build on this success, adapting elements of Gitcoin's model to the needs of the EOSIO community. One of the most important elements that will be adapted to Pomelo is quadratic funding.

Quadratic funding was described in a paper Vitalik Buterin and others published in August of 2020, titled, "A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods." Here's how the paper summarized the Quadratic Finance mechanism:

"In a standard linear private market, the funding received by a provider is the sum of the contributions made by the funders. In our “Quadratic Finance” (QF) mechanism, the funding received by a provider is the square of the sum of the square roots of the contributions made by the funders. Holding fixed contribution amounts, funding thus grows with the square of the number of members. However, small contributions are heavily subsidized (as these are the most likely to be distorted by free-riding incentives) while large ones are least subsidized, as these are more like private goods."

Pomelo will utilize funds drawn from a matching pool to fund projects. Quadratic funding means that projects with grassroots support will receive more matching pool funds than projects with a smaller number of larger contributors. To play around with this idea to see how that might look, check out this quadratic funding calculator.

Democratized Crowdfunding

"I'm really excited to see how Pomelo will multiply every small contribution, giving everyone a big say what gets funded from the matching pool. So this not only unlocks new funding for the EOS community's favorite projects, but it really democratizes the whole process." - Daniel Keyes, EOS Nation

Pomelo will provide opportunities to rally EOS community members behind their favorite projects. Block.one is supporting the platform from the outset. EOS Asia is building the application front end. The business logic will be an EOS Nation product until it becomes decentralized. But it will be a much larger cross-section of the EOS community that ultimately decides which projects are worth supporting.

The plan is to host one funding round every quarter beginning in fall of 2021. Funding will be open only during the first 2-3 weeks of the round. Round one will consist only of grants, while round two will introduce a bounty feature, which will not involve matching funds. Resistance to sybil attacks will be achieved by a variety of measures currently under development. Platform users will be able to login using social media accounts, and projects will be subjected to KYC in order to receive matching funds.

Funding open source software has never been easy. But Pomelo aims to make it easier for the EOS community. And with quadratic funding as a force multiplier, even small contributions can make a big difference in getting awesome projects funded. For the latest updates on Pomelo as it unfolds, you can join EOS Nation on Telegram or follow them on Twitter.

Pomelo Finney

To celebrate the upcoming launch of Pomelo, Cryptowriter will mint a special edition Pomelo CryptoFinney! The first 200 people to sign up for the EOS Nation newsletter on this page will receive a Pomelo Finney. Another 50 Pomelo Finneys will be reserved for future promos from both Cryptowriter and EOS Nation leading up to the launch of the platform. Make sure to subscribe to this publication (it’s free for now) to stay up to date on these promos!

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