Plural Funding

What is PF?

Plural Funding (also known as Quadratic Funding or QF) is a matching-fund mechanism for public goods. Instead of rewarding a few big donors, Plural Funding weighs the number of distinct contributors more than the amount they give. The more unique people who chip in, the bigger the match a project earns.

What problem does it solve?

Funding public goods suffers from both:

• The free-rider problem: people under-contribute because it mostly benefits other people.
• The information problem: funders don’t know which public goods communities truly value.

PF addresses both: small contributions become powerful signals that direct matching pools toward broadly valued goods, aligning private action with public benefit.

How does it work?

Plural Funding works by boosting projects that have lots of different people chipping in, not just a few big donors.

Everyone’s donation is adjusted using a square root formula, which means that many small contributions from different people count more than the same amount given by a single person. These adjusted contributions are added together, squared, and then the difference between that number and the actual donations is covered by a matching fund.

In practice, this means small contributions from many people unlock much larger matches, so the money flows to projects with the broadest community support.

How does this support more democratic outcomes?

• One person, real influence: Every additional unique contributor increases a project’s match more than the same dollars concentrated in one donor.
• Resists capture: “Whales” can’t easily dominate outcomes; many small voices together matter more than a few large ones.

How has it been applied so far?

• Digital public goods:
  • Gitcoin Grants has run 20+ rounds of Plural Funding since 2019, distributing over $60M across 5,000 projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.
  • In late 2022, UNICEF’s Office of Innovation ran a Plural Funding round in which 5,500 unique donors participated, distributing over $100k to members of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
• Local community pilots:
  • The city of Boulder, CO used Plural Funding in the summer of 2020 to allocate $43k in local recovery funds to small businesses.**
  • The Oakland Fund for Public Innovation used Plural Funding to allocate $19k to local nonprofits in 2022.

What kind of organizations, governments or contexts can benefit from the application of this tool?

• Local Governments & Communities: Cities, cooperatives, and other membership-based groups can use PF as a way to democratically allocate public funds to local programs and infrastructure.
• web3 & Decentralized Communities: Crypto communities, pop-up villages, and related groups can use PF to fund open source software development and other local public goods.
• Prosocial Media: Large-scale online networks embracing “prosocial media” ****can use PF to fund media ecosystems in a way that avoids the downsides of advertising and subscriptions and supports content that successfully bridges divides and reduces rather than amplifies polarization.

What are the risks or costs?

• Sybil attacks (fake accounts) & donor collusion: Creates fake “breadth” to milk the match. Mitigations*:* identity verification, contribution caps, post-round audits, and anti-collusion tooling like MACI.
• Fairness concerns: Without safeguards, well-networked groups can outperform underserved ones. Mitigations*:* outreach budgets, per-community sub-rounds, and “cluster matching” defenses.

What resources are required to implement?

• Matching pool: A committed funder (public, philanthropic, corporate, or multi-donor).
• Admin: An operator who manages rules, eligibility, communications, and support.
• Tooling: A digital platform that facilitates registration, payments, and analytics.

How can RxC support the application of this tool in a new context?

RadicalxChange can provide:

• Design support to adapt the process to local goals,
• Facilitation and training for community organizers,
• Evaluation and research to document results.

Are there opportunities for alignment with identify verification, soulbound tokens or other technologies?

Because Plural Funding depends on counting people rather than dollars, identity tools are crucial.

• Identity verification: Lightweight checks (email, phone, government ID) can mitigate Sybil attacks and ensure contributions represent distinct people.
• Privacy-preserving identity: Zero-knowledge proofs and protocols like MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) allow verification without exposing sensitive personal data.
• Soulbound tokens (SBTs): Persistent, non-transferable digital markers of membership, expertise, or community affiliation can help structure sub-rounds or cluster matches (e.g., directing resources equitably across groups).