Today we are delighted to announce

Today we are pleased to announce that we have received a $50,000 donation from @GCCofCommons as our early startup funding. Below is the interview record with Hazel Hu, the host of GCC, in the hope of helping everyone to understand more about GCC, a public goods donation organization.

PS: GCC contact information

Apply for funding:

https://t.co/MDELQGO6af

Official website:

https://t.co/lK2aTCbVTV

Twitter:

https://t.co/TlUoJjavfi

TG:

https://t.co/UgPyP7Sqr0

Interview Record

Wuyue: Today, let's welcome Hazel Hu, the host of GCC, as the guest of this interview. From the perspective of being the head of web3 research at Geek, I feel that the most refreshing aspect is that within the Chinese-speaking community, GCC is currently the only donation fund that is completely dedicated to supporting public goods, without the aim of profit or return on investment. Hazel, could you briefly introduce GCC to everyone? Let more people deeply understand the values of your organization?

Hazel: Thank you for the invitation. GCC's full name is Global Chinese Community of Universal Digital Commons, representing the vision of the Chinese-speaking community to contribute to the global digital commons. The GCC Fund is a donation fund under GCC, supporting the development of global digital public goods and donating to and supporting Chinese-language builders.

GCC originated from the Chinese-language public goods donation on Gitcoin. As early as the 15th round of Gitcoin Grants in October 2022, the well-known domestic Ethereum developer community Plancker DAO, together with Scroll, organized a $50,000 matching donation for open source projects in the Greater China region, and the concept of GCC began to take root from there.

I personally attended a sharing session by Nicholas Hu, the main donor of GCC, at the DAO Black Mountain event in April 2023 (we will affectionately call him Lao Hu from now on). At that time, he was planning to raise $2 million and transform the quarterly donation rounds into a more fixed organizational form. At that time, I was still a screw at a large company, and I never thought that three months later, I would resign from my previous job and join this nascent organization. In early 2024, I started as the host of GCC.

Several issues pointed out by Lao Hu at that time still exist today, such as the lack of support for open source culture in the Chinese-speaking community, the dominance of government and corporate organizations in public goods governance, limited attention to and decentralization of public governance, and the English language proficiency of Chinese developers hindering communication and collaboration with the international community, and so on.

Since GCC began operating in an organizational form in the second half of last year, we have evolved and generated many new ideas. First, we continue to donate to Gitcoin. After Gitcoin Grants 15, Beta Round, we have donated consecutively in the 18th and 19th rounds, focusing on areas such as blockchain infrastructure, cryptographic technology, decentralized science, staking/LSD-fi for public goods feedback, education and policy advocacy, decentralized public governance, and have donated to nearly a hundred Chinese-language projects. In the 19th round, we even co-sponsored a matching pool with Mask Network and the LSD-fi project Metapool from Latin America.

Although the overall quality of the projects applying on the Gitcoin platform has declined compared to the early days, it is still a platform for discovering early public goods projects and breaking through our familiar circle of friends. Some excellent projects, such as D-Chain Community and z2o-k7e, have continued to apply for funding from GCC after receiving small matching donations, and have received large donations ranging from $20,000 to $50,000. There are also projects like Dapp Learning, WTF Academy, and Block Power that, after receiving matching donations from GCC, have subsequently received rewards from OP RetroPGF. Organizations such as DeSci Asia, a Chinese-language decentralized science organization, were able to be established thanks to GCC's matching donations.

Moreover, through Gitcoin, we have come into contact with some Chinese-language projects in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan that are difficult to reach in daily mainland community activities. Compared to mainland projects, these projects tend to be more inclined towards local culture and politics, such as Feidi Bookstore and DHK Dao, which have given us a lot of new inspiration and connections.

Secondly, GCC's daily independent donations are based on an application system, where any public goods project, activity, or individual involved in buidl can apply for our support through a link. Our permanent working group will conduct initial screening, and interested projects will be presented and voted on at the bi-weekly meeting of the voting committee.

We hope to start from the vision of the project itself, find overlapping areas with the vision of GCC, and work together to build: for example, donating to the D-Chain Community is to reward and support the open source contributions of the domestic developer community; donating to OP Chinese Power is to enhance the participation of Chinese people in the governance of major public chains; donating to Geek Web3 encourages the objective and fair original in-depth content in the Chinese world; donating to the z2o-k7e Co-Learning Community to promote the study and research of zk cutting-edge theory in the Chinese-speaking community; donating to a series of digital nomad social experiments to provide an experimental ground for decentralized governance in the Chinese-speaking community, and to help the construction of a network nation in the Chinese-speaking community and international integration…

Taking the donation to "OP Chinese Power" as an example: the governance of the public chain ecosystem has distinct democratic characteristics of Europe and America, initiating proposals, seeking voting rights, lobbying for support… The Chinese-speaking community often lacks familiarity and even neglects this, but one of GCC's visions is to help more Chinese developers and builders enter the core ecosystem. Therefore, the "OP Chinese Power Community" has become the first member of the GCC "Chinese Power Plan" family.

Currently, we have donated $30,000 to the OP Chinese Power Community to support its daily operations. What we want to do is not only to spread the governance concepts of these public chain ecosystems in the Chinese-speaking community, but more importantly, to promote the entry of Chinese forces into the governance ecosystem of these public chains, achieving goals such as adding representatives from the Chinese community and participating in drafting public chain governance rules, and so on. In the just-concluded third round of RetroPGF, the OP Chinese Power Community has already assisted 6 Chinese projects in successfully obtaining a total of over 180,000 OP in funding.

In addition to Chinese projects, GCC also supports a small number of purely "overseas" projects, such as our sponsorship of Funding the Commons, which was previously under Protocol Labs, and a $50,000 donation to the P2P Foundation in the field of public goods academic research. Its founder, Michel Bauwens, is a senior researcher in the field of peer-to-peer collaborative economy and was also one of the earliest members of Satoshi Nakamoto's communication email group. We are doing our best to represent the Chinese-speaking community and hope to change the impression that the Chinese-speaking community is less involved in the field of public goods to a certain extent.

This reflects another vision of GCC, "connection." The Wamotopia event that took place in Chiang Mai at the end of 2023 was made possible with the support of GCC. Recently, we have supported the mu community, which held a developer event called muchiangmai in Chiang Mai last year, which attracted special attention from Vitalik at the time. They are about to hold a longer and more international developer co-living event in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We also support the Pagoda Gathering, which is about to be launched by the ABCD community at the Four Seas Community in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This event will bring together leaders and young activists from the Ethereum community in Asia for a 7-day seminar to prepare for the upcoming DevCon at the end of the year. We look forward to connecting the Chinese-speaking community with the international community, starting from connecting the mainland with Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, connecting Southeast Asia, connecting Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and finally reaching the international level.

In addition to donations to public goods projects, our goal this year is to support more individuals involved in building public goods. Ethereum hackathons have been held in major cities around the world, and the travel expenses for frequent participation in such events are a significant burden for developers, especially for students still in school.

Starting from DevConnect in Istanbul at the end of 2023, we have been organizing ticket sponsorship events for key Ethereum ecosystem hackathons to help Chinese developers take the "last step" out of the country, and we have achieved very good results. At DevConnect, we sponsored and supported 10 builders, and 4 of them achieved success in the hackathon in Istanbul, including winning the main unit of ETH Global and becoming finalists at Zusocial Hackerhouse and Starknet Hacker House. We have also continued this activity at ETH Denver and ETH Global London, and we will continue to do so in the future.

In addition, we are considering launching a permanent application channel or award channel for builders, such as open source developers, human researchers, and creators, rather than just limiting it to ticket sponsorship for each hackathon event. Those interested in investing in this area are also welcome to contact me.

Wuyue: Who are the members of GCC? Would you be willing to introduce the team members and organizational structure?

Hazel: In addition to the host, the core members of GCC also include several Operators, including Yuxin based in North America, and Xiaoyu and Jason based in mainland China. Our backgrounds are very diverse. I used to be a reporter in the financial technology section of a certain financial media outlet in China, and later worked in marketing and operations for developers at a major company in the cryptocurrency industry. Yuxin is currently a data scientist at a major company in North America, and is also a KOL with hundreds of thousands of followers on Zhihu and WeChat public accounts. He is currently expanding to Xiaohongshu and Twitter, and is also delving into some visual design work across disciplines. Xiaoyu is a typical "slash" youth, with nearly eight years of freelance career spanning media, programming, design, and operations. In addition to GCC, he currently leads several Web3 collaborative learning projects under the 706 Youth Community. Jason is a serial entrepreneur who founded a personal quantitative fund after dropping out of his third year of college, and is now the founder of a "Web3+AI" project.

In addition to the working group, GCC has a 9-member voting committee, whose initial members include Nicholas Hu, the main donor of the GCC Fund, Bruce Xu, co-founder of LXDAO focused on supporting public goods, Twone and Lauran, core contributors to the crypto-humanities community Uncommons, and York, a core contributor to Plancker. They are also among the earliest founding members of GCC. Later, former host Constantine, Zhixiong Pan, founder of Chainfeeds, Seek, founder of DappLink Layer3, and Vivian Chen, founder of the Taiwanese Civic Tech Community da0, joined the committee.

The core of an organization is its people. You just asked why GCC can be "refreshing," and I think this is inseparable from the temperament of GCC members. Diversity, cross-disciplinary, idealistic, and imaginative backgrounds have set the tone for GCC.

In a restless industry environment, it is very rare for a group of people to come together hoping to do something that is not short-term profit-driven, or even long-term profit-driven. Of course, our working group members and voting committee members will rotate regularly. Those interested in joining GCC as an Operator can fill out our application form, and those interested in becoming a committee member can contact me directly. My contact information will also be attached below this interview.

Wuyue: You mentioned that GCC is a fund with the core purpose of donating to public goods, so in your view, what are the characteristics of "public goods"? What are some typical public goods? And why is Geek Web3 considered a public good?

Hazel: This is actually a question we have been debating, but as we have donated to more and more projects, the answer has become clearer.

At the end of last year, we collaborated with LXDAO and Uncommons to release a public goods report (click the link to download, PS: the link cannot be opened on WeChat, you can view the file on the GCC official website), which attempted to explore the topic from a theoretical and case perspective for the first time.

Generally speaking, when it comes to public goods, we often talk about non-rivalry and non-excludability, which are the basics. However, in real life, apart from air and water, pure public goods that perfectly meet these two criteria are rare. Therefore, on the basis of meeting these two criteria, we have introduced a very important characteristic, namely positive externality. Positive externality goes beyond the simple increase in token price. With the support of encryption technology and the joint efforts of participants, people can create products that are non-depleting, non-zero-sum, altruistic, and ultimately beneficial to everyone.

We have received some applications where the project itself is free and unlicensed, and the applicants believe that this qualifies as a public good. However, if it does not create positive externality, but instead attracts more people into a negative-sum game, it is not the target we want to donate to.

Commercial companies pursue profit, but we hope that the pursuit of commercialization for public goods will have a minimal impact on the public nature of the goods. Vitalik once proposed an interesting framework for thinking about this—the income-evil curve. We spent a lot of space discussing it in our public goods report.

In short, this curve describes how much harm a product's creators need to cause to its potential users and the broader community in order to generate a certain level of income. For example, a public good like Wikipedia can generate income through advertising, but this may harm its user experience and neutrality. Therefore, we need to weigh the benefits of monetization against the potential harm to determine the best fundraising strategy.

Wuyue: I am very interested in the topic of whether public goods can be commercialized. Some people have previously believed that any organization that accepts money is prone to corruption because it will be influenced by the money provider. How do Hazel and Faust each view commercialization? Is commercialization in conflict with public goods themselves?

Hazel: We are not against the commercialization of public goods, but we hope that the impact of commercialization on the public nature of the goods will be minimized. Vitalik once proposed an interesting framework for thinking about this—the income-evil curve. We spent a lot of space discussing it in our public goods report.

GCC hopes to donate to projects with a steeper income-evil curve, meaning that if they engage in deeper commercialization, it would cause significant harm to the public nature of the goods, and therefore, they need the support of donation funds. However, there is no clear boundary of whether it can or cannot be done. In fact, because GCC cannot indefinitely provide financial support to a project, we hope that the projects we support in the early stages can find other sources of funding in the future, whether through applying for other grants, receiving user tips or donations, or engaging in mild commercialization that does not harm the public nature of the goods to sustain daily operations.

Faust: In fact, commercialization and whether it is a public good are not directly related. First of all, non-commercialization is not necessarily a public good. For example, spreading extremist ideas based on the preferences of certain organizations or individuals, and disseminating information with negative externalities to society or a particular industry, such as the German news media controlled by Goebbels during Hitler's rule, are clearly not public goods. Similarly, websites that specialize in disseminating violent and bloody videos are typical non-public goods.

Secondly, commercialization can also be a public good, such as CCTV and certain popular science programs on Bilibili, which are media with a dissemination attribute that charge advertising or PR fees, but this does not prevent them from being the baseline of public goods.

The so-called commercialization ultimately depends on who you are dealing with, who you are helping to achieve their goals, and whether these goals violate morality or public order. In the Web3 circle, which is full of scams and unreliable people and events, "birds of a feather flock together" is the best way to judge what type of person you are.

For a so-called media organization, as long as it demonstrates rigor overall and uses facts and logic as its core communication points, what it is doing is simply expounding the truth. Some people believe that media becomes corrupt after commercialization, but I don't think so. Making money does not equal corruption, and not making money does not equal not being corrupt. Strongly linking making money and corruption is just a way of "projecting what you want to do onto others." All listed companies in the world have revenue, does that mean they are all corrupt? Obviously not, it depends on whether they can bring positive externalities to society.

In fact, the world is cruel. For an organization or company that wants to make a difference and have an impact, without sufficient funds and a stable cash flow, it simply cannot sustain a large enough scale and has a 99% chance of not surviving for long. So we started commercializing at the right time to prepare for future team expansion.

However, after commercialization, what we do for the project party is often to transform their obscure, complex, and difficult-to-understand technical solutions or product design ideas into forms that most people can better understand, which is beneficial to the general public. Ultimately, what we want to do more is to "dispel the mystery," that is, to make things that were originally obscure and difficult to understand more popular and more acceptable to people, which is extremely important because most of the time, it is because most people find it difficult to understand professional technical terms that it is easy for those "technical MLM leaders" to deceive and manipulate, which is not conducive to the overall interests of the industry.

In addition, the Web3 circle has always been very restless, full of absurd and distorted values, and lies and fallacies are everywhere. But fortunately, my partners and I are not so eager for quick success and instant benefits, and we can remain calm in this restless and noisy environment, which is the temperament preference that our team possesses. At least personally, I don't want to be like those who are always keen on trading. Firstly, simply doing trading, even if you make money, will not bring any positive externalities to the industry; secondly, relying on trading and speculation is by no means a legitimate way to make a living. People should still take the right path and do something meaningful.

In summary, I believe that whether or not to commercialize is not a reasonable indicator for criticizing a media organization or even public goods. It all depends on how you control this scale and how you, as the executor, avoid moral corruption. Ultimately, everything has a limit, and things will turn around when they reach an extreme.

Wuyue: Both of you have expressed your organization's values and visions, which are quite thought-provoking. Finally, I have an open-ended topic: What do you want to say to everyone about the long-term vision and future plans of your respective organizations?

Hazel Hu: One of our long-term visions is to have more funds enter this field. Although the current size of GCC's funds is sufficient to support development for one or two years, as GCC's reputation grows, the number of projects we want to donate to will double. It is not sustainable to rely solely on the support of existing donors. If individuals or organizations are interested in the directions mentioned in the interview today, please feel free to contact me at any time.

In the end, we can turn this kind of occasional, individual behavior into a "trend." People will no longer see public goods as "money-throwing" or "charity" without returns, but as something that everyone can contribute to and benefit from, creating a long-term positive cycle: donors can receive reasonable reputational rewards, public goods contributors can receive material incentives, and ultimately everyone can benefit from the construction of improved public goods.

Another long-term vision is to find a more efficient mechanism for selecting and incubating public goods. Currently, GCC uses a mechanism of community recommendation mining, committee selection, and host/operator execution, without fully adopting a DAO or company form, in order to strike a balance between efficiency and democracy. However, this way of handling donation applications is still not efficient enough. It is very difficult to scientifically and efficiently evaluate the positive externalities of a public good or its development potential. As mentioned earlier, if there are no public goods on the market that meet our ideal, we may also set specific theme grants to attract builders to grow together, which will test whether GCC has the ability to discover potential projects and individuals.

The third long-term vision is for GCC to grow together with Chinese-speaking public goods and builders and move towards the international stage. GCC has already established very friendly contacts with some international organizations, and our non-profit positioning is also very helpful for us to communicate with some international communities and individuals with a strong public orientation. Next, we hope to grow together with Chinese builders and move towards the international stage, allowing for more exchanges and collisions to take place here. This will be a very long-term endeavor.

Faust: Speaking of us, in fact, the outside world's positioning of us is often very vague, usually characterized as a typical media or community, and they don't really know what we want to do. But in reality, we are a company with a primary interest and purpose in technical research and industry research, and it can even be said that we are a social activity organization related to technology. The so-called "media" and "community" are just a means of disseminating content.

We believe that there are not many organizations or platforms in the Chinese-speaking region that "focus on" technical research and also have a strong influence, and a large amount of valuable content is buried in various information floods related to trading and investment guides linked to speculation, which is a huge loss for the entire Web3 industry.

In the future, we will explore more valuable topics and conduct in-depth discussions on more technical knowledge or industry knowledge, using our strength to help more people improve their cognition and help this circle continue to raise its average level.

We believe that Web3 should not be dominated solely by trading and wealth creation; technology and related social science knowledge are equally important. We hope to bring positive externalities to this industry and society, making this circle more capable of bringing positive value to society. We do not want this circle to be filled with "zero-sum games" everywhere (winners in financial markets often make money at the expense of losers).

We believe that, with our efforts, we can gather a group of young people who truly have a passion for Web3 and blockchain, to a greater or lesser extent. Although this cannot change the "tone" of Web3 being dominated by wealth creation and filled with speculation and manipulation, it can still make some small contributions. I believe that as long as you do what you want to do, there is no need for regrets. At least this is much stronger than many people who never take practical action and only talk. The important thing is often not the result, but the process.

Contact GCC