Retrofunding
2025 · Product, research, and branding
Overview
Retrofunding, or RetroPublicGoodsFunding (RPGF) is a metrics-based funding mechanism designed to reward open-source projects after they’ve delivered impact. Built on Gitcoin’s Grants Stack and powered by the Allo Protocol, it reimagines public goods funding by shifting the focus from future potential to proven results. The tool makes it easy for communities to deploy and manage their own retroactive rounds, offering a scalable, transparent, and trust-aligned alternative to traditional grant systems.
Problem
While Gitcoin’s flagship Quadratic Funding rounds successfully support early-stage projects, they fall short in rewarding long-term builders. These mature contributors often lack the donor appeal needed to succeed in QF, despite delivering sustained impact over multiple rounds. Meanwhile, round operators struggled to design fair retro mechanisms that weren’t vulnerable to subjectivity, popularity bias, or voter fatigue. There was no streamlined way to assess impact, and no infrastructure to run retroactive rounds efficiently. This created a gap in the funding lifecycle, where impactful projects aged out of QF eligibility but weren’t being meaningfully rewarded, ultimately discouraging long-term contribution to the ecosystem.
Solution
Retrofunding was introduced to close this gap. Built as a standalone grants flow within Gitcoin’s Allo-powered Grants Stack, it enables communities to run retroactive rounds with ease. In GG23, Gitcoin launched a $600K retro round for mature OSS projects, distributing a minimum of $10K to each selected builder.
The solution prioritized impact-based voting. Rather than asking badgeholders to rank individual projects, the round centered on voting for impact metrics, such as protocol growth, ecosystem expansion, and retention. These votes then informed the final distribution using data from sources like Open Source Observer (OSO).
Behind the scenes, the RPGF admin tool allowed operators to configure, launch, and manage rounds seamlessly, assigning badge tokens, reviewing applications, setting eligibility criteria, collecting votes, and distributing funds all in one flow. This design aligned incentives, reduced cognitive load on badgeholders, and ensured high-trust outcomes.
Design process
The design process for Retrofunding was grounded in Gitcoin’s mission to build trust-minimized, scalable funding mechanisms for public goods. We worked cross-functionally to turn a theoretical model into a repeatable product offering, balancing usability, transparency, and flexibility.
Research and Discovery
To design a retroactive model that worked in practice, we:
Studied previous RetroPGF rounds from Optimism and reviewed community governance discussions around impact evaluation.
Partnered with Open Source Observer to define objective, transparent impact signals, including multi-round funding history, GitHub activity, and donor retention.
Conducted internal interviews with round managers and badgeholders to identify the risks and friction points in badge voting, and how we could streamline that experience.
These insights led us to prioritize metric-based voting, a curated project list, and admin tools that ensured governance alignment without increasing operator burden.
Ideation and Prototyping
With clear goals in mind, we:
Designed the Easy RPGF admin experience to allow any community to deploy their own retro round in just a few steps.
Created clean interfaces for badgeholder voting, focusing on simplicity and metric clarity to prevent decision fatigue.
Worked with engineering to ensure the end-to-end flow could operate without custom dev work—from token assignment to final distribution.
We iterated closely with internal stakeholders and DAO contributors to validate both the operator and voter experiences before launch.
Impact
The first Retrofunding round launched as part of GG23 and distributed $600K to 30 of the most impactful OSS projects in Gitcoin’s ecosystem including Blockscout, Dappnode, Beaconcha.in, and Ethers.js. Each project received at least $10K.
Badgeholders praised the metric-based voting system for reducing ambiguity and decision fatigue, while operators reported a significantly smoother round setup process. By replacing subjective judgment with quantifiable signals, Retrofunding introduced a trust-aligned alternative to donor-based funding, shaping a new way of valuing long-term public goods work.
The tooling also laid the groundwork for future RPGF rounds, both within Gitcoin and for external partners interested in deploying their own impact-based grants.
Next steps
Retro Funding is now a core component of Gitcoin’s Grants Stack. Moving forward, we’re expanding the product to support:
More complex metric configurations, including weighting and thresholds
Continuous retro rounds with recurring distributions
Deeper integrations with data providers like OSO and GitHub
External adoption by ecosystem partners, including Optimism’s Superchain programs
By evolving the RPGF experience, Gitcoin aims to support the entire lifecycle of public goods, from idea to impact, while offering reproducible funding tools to the broader web3 ecosystem.
