What Is Gitcoin (GTC)?

To find out even more about this project, check out our deep dive of [Gitcoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-gitcoin-gtc).

## What Is Gitcoin (GTC)?

Gitcoin creates technologies and opportunities that empower communities to fund, build, and protect what matters. 

Through the Gitcoin Grants Program, there has been over $54 million distributed to early-stage builders that champion public goods initiatives in decentralized finance (DeFi), climate, open sourcing, and beyond. 

Core products include Gitcoin Grants Stack, the end-to-end grants management solution, Allo Protocol, an open-source funding protocol, and Gitcoin Passport, an all-encompassing decentralized identity management tool. 

GTC is Gitcoin’s governance token, launched in late May 2021. The token is needed for the creation and funding of the DAO that will govern Gitcoin.


### Who Are the Founders of Gitcoin?

Gitcoin was founded by Keving Owocki and Scott moore. Since then, Gitcoin underwent shift from a monolithic platform to a suite of modular protocols and embraces a spectrum of mechanisms like Quadratic Voting, Direct Grants and Retroactive Public Goods Funding.

#### What Makes Gitcoin Unique?

Gitcoin inspires a world shaped by community-led positive change and has helped create more than $29 billion in global financial impact..

Gitcoin cultivates and nutures the “Quadratic Lands” — a  ecosystem with digital democracy and a strong emphasis on community building. 

#### Related Pages:

Learn more about [EFFORCE](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/efforce/).

See more about [Uniswap](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/uniswap-v2/).

Learn more about [DAOs](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized-autonomous-organizations-dao).

Check out the CoinMarketCap [blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


#### How Many Gitcoin (GTC) Coins Are There in Circulation?

The total supply of GTC is 100,000,000 tokens. 15% is set aside for a retroactive airdrop, 50% is in the Gitcoin DAO and 35% is for existing stakeholders. The retroactive airdrop is for past users of Gitcoin, the DAO allocation is for governance purposes and the existing stakeholders include anyone who has contributed to building Gitcoin in the past or the future (with a vesting schedule of at least two years for Gitcoin team members).

For more information about GTC’s distribution, see [here](https://gitcoin.co/blog/introducing-gtc-gitcoins-governance-token/).


### How Is the Gitcoin Network Secured?

GTC has no economic value, according to the token’s introductory [blog post](https://gitcoin.co/blog/introducing-gtc-gitcoins-governance-token/). Gitcoin is a fork of the COMP/UNI governance system, with a built-in delegation prompt in the retroactive claim process. 


### Where Can You Buy Gitcoin (GTC)?

You can buy Gitcoin on Binance, Coinbase, Kucoin and other exchanges. Check out our market pairs tab for more information.

Gitcoin

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Empowering communities to fund, build, & protect what matters 🌱

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

Turbo

Origin Protocol

Bifrost

Automata Network

MyNeighborAlice

Adventure Gold

Trias Token (New)

Multibit

Mines of Dalarnia

CUDOS

Any Inu

Frax Staked Ether

Landwolf

DGI Game

Pullix

Radworks

Ampleforth Governance Token

Mask Network is a protocol that allows its users to send encrypted messages over Twitter and Facebook. It essentially acts as a bridge between the internet and a decentralized network running on top.

Mask Network was initially launched in July 2019, with its first use case of allowing Facebook and Twitter users to encrypt posts on the social media platforms. It then raised $2 million in a funding round in November 2020, co-led by HashKey and Hash Global, and a further $3 million funding round in February 2021 with participation from Digital Currency Group and Fundamental Labs.

Now, Mask Network offers the ability to fund Gitcoin grant campaigns directly from Twitter, as well as plans to offer peer-to-peer payments and decentralized storage functionality. It is a decentralized portal that also allows users to use DApps like crypto payments, decentralized finance, decentralized storage, e-commerce (digital goods/NFTs) and decentralized organizations (DAO) over the top of existing social networks without migrating, creating what is referred to as a decentralized Applet (DApplet) ecosystem.

Mask Network

Adventure Gold (AGLD) is the native ERC-20 token of the Loot non-fungible token (NFT) project. Loot is a text-based, randomized adventure gear generated and stored on-chain, created by social media network Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann. The project intentionally has no front-end interface, images, statistics or functionality. Instead, it is based on a set of 8,000 text-based NFTs open to how the community wants to interpret it. The NFTs contain texts of gears ranging from the “Holy Greaves of Giants” to the “Grim Shout.” As of Sept. 8, 2021, the floor price of Loot on OpenSea is 8.56 ETH. Numerous derivative projects are being built around Loot and can be found here.

Adventure Gold was launched on Sept. 2, 2021, and allowed each owner of a Loot NFT to claim 10,000 tokens for free. With the price of AGLD skyrocketing in the initial days of trading, this airdrop was worth as much as $70,000 per NFT. AGLD founder Will Papper claimed he wanted to set a standard for projects building on Loot by providing a currency for the decentralized gaming universe.

ARPA

Stargate Finance (STG) is an omnichain-native asset bridge designed to solve the blockchain trilemma, which says that no blockchain can be decentralized, secure, and fast simultaneously. It does this by simplifying cross-chain DeFi transactions, which lets users transfer and swap their assets between different blockchains, layer-2 networks, and decentralized applications (dApps) almost instantly.

Stargate users can also move their assets between different liquidity pools on various decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and dApps. The protocol supports transfers between eight chains: Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, Metis, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism and Fantom.

The platform offers several other, profit-making features: users can supply liquidity pools, stake assets, and farm tokens. When users stake their assets, they can help govern the Stargate Finance Exchange.

Stargate Finance

Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Balancer(https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-balancer.

The protocol operates a few types of pools:

Private pools give the owner governance over the pool, and make the person the sole contributor of liquidity to the pool. Also, all the parameters are mutable by the owner.

Shared pools are for those who want to become liquidity providers (LPs). The LPs are rewarded with the Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs).

Smart pools are similar to private pools but are controlled by a smart contract. They also reward using BPTs and allow anyone to contribute liquidity to the pool.

Balancer

Kyber Network is a multi-chain hub of liquidity protocols that aggregates liquidity from various sources to provide secure and instant transactions on any decentralized application (DApp). The main goal of Kyber Network is to enable DeFi DApps, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other users easy access to deep liquidity pools that provide the best rates.

KyberSwap.com, its main DEX aggregator and liquidity platform, provides the best swap rates for traders in DeFi compared to individual exchanges. It also enables liquidity providers to maximize earnings via high capital efficiency. KyberSwap sources liquidity from multiple DEXes such as Uniswap, Sushi, Curve, QuickSwap, Pancakeswap, Traderjoe, Pangolin, SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, VVS Finance, Velodrome, GMX, and many others to achieve the best rates for traders on different chains. KyberSwap supports over 13 chains including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Cronos, Arbitrum, Optimism, Velas, Aurora, Oasis, BitTorrent, Ethereum PoW, and soon Solana.

KyberSwap is decentralized and permissionless, not requiring account sign-up or personal information. All transactions on KyberSwap are on-chain, which means transactions do not need a centralized third-party, like a centralized exchange, and they can be easily verified using the Ethereum or other chains’ block explorer.

Projects can build with KyberSwap to access its different features, such as the instant settlement of token swaps, liquidity aggregation for the best rates, liquidity pools, and a customizable business model. Kyber looks to solve the liquidity issue in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry by allowing developers to build products and services without having to worry about liquidity for different needs.

The Kyber Network Crystal (KNC) token is a utility and governance token that is the "glue that connects different stakeholders in Kyber's ecosystem." KNC holders can stake their tokens in the KyberDAO to help govern the platform and vote on important proposals - and earn staking rewards in KNC that come from trading fees. Investors in KNC include #Hashed, Signum Capital, ParaFi Capital, HyperChain Capital.

Kyber Network Crystal v2

Celer is a blockchain interoperability
protocol enabling a one-click user experience accessing tokens, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, governance, and more across multiple chains. Developers can build inter-chain-native Dapps using the Celer Inter-chain Messaging Framework to gain access to efficient liquidity utilization, coherent application logic, and shared states. Users of Celer-enabled dApps will enjoy the benefits of a diverse multi-blockchain ecosystem with the simplicity of a single-transaction UX, all from a single chain.

Celer Network

Enzyme

BarnBridge, founded in 2019, is a protocol for tokenizing risks. It was launched in September 2020. BarnBridge is a sort of decentralized finance (DeFi) lego for creating tradeable tokens that expose a consumer to market volatility. As of March 2021, the platform is still in an early stage of launch.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Quant.

BarnBridge is a project that expands the functionality of DeFi to make it more flexible and efficient. By tokenizing market fluctuations and exposure to risks, it can reduce volatility for conservative investors or increase it for daytraders. BarnBridge enables traditional risk management tools and fixed income instruments on the DeFi market. The main focus is dividing cryptocurrency risks into tranches so market participants, depending on their risk profile, can invest in different products or assets.

BarnBridge

My Neighbor Alice is a farming-themed play-to-earn builder game built on Chromia. The game bills itself as a place where “players can buy and own virtual islands, collect and build exciting items while also making new friends.” Each player has their own avatar representing them in the game, which they can modify as they please. Players can buy virtual real estate from Alice, the game’s eponymous central figure, or the internal marketplace. All purchased land is represented as an NFT.

My Neighbor Alice aims to introduce blockchain to millions of players and targets a diverse gaming community within the traditional gaming market. Although the game is blockchain-based and integrates DeFi features, it does not require prior knowledge of cryptocurrency and blockchain. My Neighbor Alice takes inspiration from several popular sources. For instance, daily in-game tasks and social aspects are inspired by Animal Crossing, whereas Minecraft serves as a role model for building mechanics. The artwork was inspired by the Swedish children’s book Pettson and Findus.

Badger DAO is an open-source, decentralized automated organization that is dedicated to building products and infrastructure of simplifying the use of Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral across many smart contract platforms.

The platform is a shared space where the developers, known as Badge Builders, have the ability to collaborate and implement Bitcoin as collateral to as many blockchains as possible. A developer can earn a percentage of the fees and BADGER tokens from the developer mining pool for every implementation. The mainnet was launched on December 3, 2020.

A builder can be a single developer, a group of developers, or even a company. There are no fixed obligations to participation requirements, and anyone can create. The pillars of Badger DAO include the Badger Builders, the community-created products, the Dedicated Badger Operations team, the fairly initial distribution of the BADGER tokens for governance and the fact that all of the code is open-sourced.

Badger DAO

NKN (NKN), or New Kind of Network, is a network that focuses on creating a decentralized and open-source network protocol for public blockchain-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to share network bandwidth and internet connectivity. Its main objective is to address the challenges faced by today's internet, such as centralization, scalability issues and security concerns.

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

Aragon

Origin Protocol develops web3 technologies with the intention of bringing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi) to the masses. The protocol’s unique tooling and diverse partnerships help in realizing these goals. Origin Protocol has two flagship products: Origin Story (governed by OGN), and Origin Dollar (governed by OGV).

Origin Story is a white label NFT marketplace solution that works with disrupters in various sectors by leveraging non-fungible tokens. The platform hosts NFT marketplaces and tooling in various industries, including the real estate, profile picture, music, art and entertainment industries.

Some of Origin Story’s partners include Roofstock onChain, Pudgy Penguins, Sappy Seals, Paris Hilton, 3LAU, BT, Inspiration4, and The Doge Pound. Origin Story Marketplaces seek to cast a wide net in various industries being impacted by NFTs, rather than focusing on any one area in particular. Investors may see OGN as the ‘picks and shovels’ approach to investing in NFTs.

Launched in 2017, Livepeer is the first live video streaming network protocol that is fully decentralized. The platform aims to become a viable blockchain-based, economically efficient alternative to centralized broadcasting solutions for all new and existing broadcaster companies.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Livepeer.

As stated in the official Livepeer whitepaper, the live video streaming and broadcasting industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the company is looking to ride this wave and introduce decentralization to the environment. Livepeer aims to streamline the broadcasting process by allowing producers to submit their work on the platform, taking care of reformatting and distributing the content to users and streaming platforms.

Livepeer

Orchid (OXT) is the native token of Orchid, a cryptocurrency-powered virtual private network (VPN).

Launched in December 2019, Orchid describes itself as the world’s first incentivized, peer-to-peer privacy network.

Its aim is to overcome internet freedom limitations by using cryptocurrency payments to allow anyone to purchase bandwidth from any participating provider. This is done using so-called probabilistic nanopayments, which occur using OXT, an ERC-20 standard token on Ethereum.

Regular payments to providers occur off-chain, allowing Orchid to avoid problems with congestion and gas fees on the Ethereum network.

The service is pay-per-use, meaning that users only have to contribute funds when they actually connect, instead of paying monthly or annual fees.

Orchid

Bluzelle is a decentralized storage network for the creator economy.

Bluzelle delivers high security, un-matched availability, and is censorship resistant. Whether you are an artist, musician, scientist, publisher, or developer, Bluzelle protects the intellectual property of all creators. Bluzelle is data storage, file storage, oracles, and more. Its is specific for NFTs and DeFi.

Bluzelle’s core products are all related to data and powered by its Tendermint Blockchain:

Bluzelle DB - a decentralized database for software developers to store information

Bluzelle Oracles - a truly decentralized pricing oracle that provides high speed and high security for Defi applications

Bluzelle Staking - where BLZ holders can currently stake their tokens and earn rewards for providing storage and pricing data.