Long tail public goods funding

Crypto crowdfunding tools have made it possible to fund "long tail public goods," small and little-known projects, at internet-wide scale, and the authors argue that funding this long tail is a best practice. The article, by @ccerv1 and @owocki, says quadratic funding and similar mechanisms give money and signal to promising efforts, helping them rise toward the short tail of well-known public goods. It cites Gitcoin, which began as a long-tail project in 2017 and now allocates to thousands of long tail projects, and Buidl Guidl, whose founder Austin Griffith said Vitalik discovered him through quadratic matching. It also reports that 68 new rounds appeared in 2023 and that the GG19 web3 community round funded over 300 projects, while the ETH Infrastructure round had fewer than 30.