On 25th April, 2025, Gitcoin’s (interim) Executive Director, Owocki, took to his X handle to share that Gitcoin will be winding down the Grants Stack technology and the Grants Labs business unit by the end of May 2025.
Over the last 12 months, the Gitcoin brand has become a recognized leader in grants innovation. This feat comes from their ability to deploy nine distinct funding mechanisms, expand their technical capabilities beyond Quadratic Funding, and build trust with some of the biggest ecosystems in web3.
However, the decision to discontinue Grants Stack and Labs is very crucial for the brand’s next steps. The reason for this being the high operating costs of Grant Labs that significantly outpaces its revenue despite the strong traction and ecosystem validation it gets.
The goal of Grants Lab was to scale Gitcoin’s impact by building an infrastructure to help anyone in web3 launch a grants program. Along the way, Gitcoin has supported leading ecosystems like Optimism, Polygon, Sei and Celo to scale their own grants programs.
Owocki goes on to explain that with the current market situation and Gitcoin’s treasury in mind, the team risks continuing in its core mission which is to Fund What Matters.
Going forward, Gitcoin announces that it will be refocusing on its main project, The Gitcoin Grants Program. The team will further improve GG24 round by working on its core mechanisms, and lean into community-led coordination. They will be calling it: Gitcoin, Community Edition.
In Owocki’s words,
“We could have tried to “just keep going” and hope the market turns, but that would be gambling with the future of the entire organization and Gitcoin’s legacy. I’m not willing to risk everything we’ve built at Gitcoin. Sometimes leadership means making the crappy call now so that we’re in a position to thrive later.”
