The Grant Program
Funding public goods in token engineering was the TEC’s outward-facing purpose, and the point at which its mission met the wider field. Over its life the TEC moved from ad-hoc, proposal-by-proposal funding to a structured, recurring grants program run through quadratic funding. This page traces that evolution and records what the TEC actually funded.
From individual proposals to a program
In the TEC’s early operating period (2021–2022), funding flowed mainly through Conviction Voting on individual proposals submitted to the community pool. There was no “program” as such — contributors and projects proposed work, and token holders signalled support over time until a proposal reached its funding threshold. Funded work in this era fell into two broad buckets:
- Internal operations — the working groups funded their own stewardship, e.g. Steward WG, Transparency WG, Communitas WG, Sampo WG, and the later Coordination Team operating budgets. See Working Groups.
- Individual public-goods grants — one-off requests such as the Creative Writers grant, modeling and tooling work, translation efforts, and retroactive funding for community expenses.
By 2023, sustainability pressures pushed the TEC to formalize this into a repeatable pipeline, framed in a broader “Proposals Roadmap for TEC/TEA Sustainability.”
The TE Grants Program (quadratic funding)
The centrepiece was the Token Engineering (TE) Grants Program, a series of Quadratic Funding (QF) rounds run in partnership with Gitcoin on its Allo Protocol, with matching funds drawn from the TEC’s Common Pool. QF let many small community donations determine how a larger matching pool was distributed, directing money toward the projects the community most broadly valued.
A signature TEC innovation was the TE Matching Boost — this was the first round of its kind to reward donors who qualified on field-specific criteria (holding ≥ 10 $TEC and/or a Token Engineering Academy certificate), giving their contributions extra matching weight to better align funding with people invested in the field.
The program ran through the following rounds:
- Small Grants Pilot — an initial experiment that preceded the full program.
- Round 1 (Apr–May 2023) — a 6.2k raised from donors, funded from the Common Pool plus a 1 ETH ENS small grant.
- Round 2 (Aug 2023) — a $25k matching pool; 14 projects, ~1,800 donors. Recipients included the Bonding Curve Research Group (BCRG), cadCAD, Commons Stack, EVMcrispr, Index Wallets, DataBites, SymVal, TurtleShell, a Python token-engineering library effort, the “Programmable Quantitative Token Model,” “TE Career Builder for Womxn in Web3,” and a retroactive thank-you to Token Engineering Barcamp (EthCC Paris) volunteers.
- Round 3 (Nov 2023) — a $50k matching pool, notably funded by external sponsors (Ocean and Arbitrum) rather than the Common Pool; 20 projects. Recipients included Commons Stack, BCRG, cadCAD, Metagov, Mechanism Institute, EVMcrispr, Breadchain Cooperative, Index Wallets, cadEVM, PlaceCred, the EIP-7265 Alliance, SymVal, LunCo, TurtleShell, and Public Nouns Operations.
- Round 4 (Apr–May 2024, Gitcoin GG20) — a TEC`. Top allocations went to Commons Stack (10,229 $TEC), the cadCAD Foundation (7,635), Trusted Seed (7,392), BCRG (7,202), Super DCA (6,697), Crypto Commons Association (5,952), and Kairos Research (5,086), alongside Streaming Quadratic Funding, Network of Trust, DeFinomics Labs, Token Engineering Dialogues, Metrics Garden Labs, and others.
Token Engineering the Superchain (2024)
After the OP Migration, the TEC aligned its grants work directly with the Optimism ecosystem through Token Engineering the Superchain, which was a dual-phase 2024 grant initiative. This was also the first Tunable Quadratic Funding (TQF) round on Gitcoin Grants 21 to fund high-potential projects advancing token engineering across Optimism and the broader Superchain, followed by a planned Retroactive Funding round rewarding grantees on demonstrated milestones and impact. This was the clearest expression of the migration’s strategic logic, to put the TEC’s public-goods funding where the Superchain’s retroactive-funding culture lived.
What the record shows
A few patterns stand out across the rounds. A core set of token-engineering public goods such as Commons Stack, the Bonding Curve Research Group, cadCAD, EVMcrispr, Index Wallets, SymVal, TurtleShell, recurred as grantees, reflecting the tight, mutually-supporting field the TEC sat within. Funding sources evolved from the TEC’s own Common Pool toward external sponsors and Gitcoin/Optimism matching, part of the sustainability strategy. And the program consistently paired funding with experimentation on funding itself which included the TE Matching Boost, tunable QF, and retroactive rounds which were mechanism-design contributions in their own right.
Late in the TEC’s life, a Grant Program Analysis & Framework proposal reflected on this history and tried to distil what had worked, as part of the wind-down conversation.
Full per-project payout tables for each round are preserved in the “Results of TE Grants Round N” forum threads in the archive’s source data; personal names in those records are redacted per the Archival Policy, but project names are retained.
Related: OP Migration · Research · Economics and Token Design · Governance · Timeline