Money 2.0 Stuff: Funding base layer public blockchains is hard

Two major developments this week hit on concerns vexing cryptocurrency designers since the beginning: what are sustainable ways to fund public blockchains? The conversation was advanced in part by ERC 1789, a proposal from Gitcoin co-founder Kevin Owocki to fund Ethereum development directly through inflation funding. It was also helped along with a generous offer by Square CEO and Bitcoin fan Jack Dorsey to fund a few Bitcoin contributors and engineers by way of "Square Crypto", a new entity focused on non-business cryptocurrency efforts.

The problem of maintaining the commons isn't new. It's been explored over the years with various proposals emerging from Fred Ehrsam's idea of DARPA grant-like funding, on-chain funding models such as Decred's and Zcash's, to profit-seeking private companies like Consensys and Blockstream and independent entities like MolochDAO.