omniharmonicQuadratic Funding
Quadratic funding is a resource allocation mechanism designed to optimally fund public goods by rewarding the breadth of community support rather than the depth of individual contributions. In a quadratic funding round, a matching pool supplements individual donations using a formula where the match is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of individual contributions. In practice, this means a project with many small donors receives far more matching funds than one with a single large donor — even if the total contributed is the same.
This mechanism addresses a fundamental challenge in public goods provision: how to fund projects that benefit many people without relying on centralized allocation (which is politically captured) or pure market mechanisms (which undervalue non-excludable goods). Quadratic funding creates a mathematically optimal bridge between individual preferences and collective benefit, leveraging the wisdom of crowds to direct resources where community support is broadest.
Quadratic funding was pioneered by Vitalik Buterin, Zoe Hitzig, and Glen Weyl, and has been implemented most prominently through Gitcoin Grants on the Ethereum ecosystem, where it has allocated tens of millions of dollars to open-source software and public goods. It connects to quadratic-voting as a complementary mechanism design, to regenerative-finance as a tool for funding regenerative outcomes, and to commons-governance as a way to resource shared infrastructure without centralized control.