Quadratic Funding is an innovative crowd-funding mechanism that empowers participants to vote for projects in a grant allocation by donating to the projects themselves. The total amount of contributions received by a project determines the proportion of the matching pool of grant funding that the project receives. In this way, an ecosystem’s community and wider stakeholder base are involved in the governance and grant allocation process, while projects obtain extra funding from donations in addition to the grant pool itself.

Progressive tax is a mechanism used by DoraHacks QF to enhance the equitable allocation of grant resources, whereby multiple votes for the same project require an exponentially larger amount of donations. As a result, while the most popular projects still receive the most funding, their allocation of the prize pool is not orders of magnitude larger than other projects in the grant program.

Anti-sybil attack processes are in place to ensure only real participants affect the vote outcomes, with a grace period applied after each vote count to give projects a chance to appeal any potentially mistaken accusations of sybil/bot interference.

QF is a key tool for grant allocation, stimulating not only ecosystem growth and project development, but also community participation and engagement.