"fund what matters" has been @gitcoin's mantra since 2023, and the longer i sit with it, the more it reads as a critique of how money moves today. most funding still runs through hierarchies: a foundation board, or a program officer with a stack of applications and a quarterly deadline. a few people at the top decide what matters for everyone below them, and each layer of review slows the money down and shrinks what can get funded to whatever that small group has time to read. networks can do this better. QF was an early example of this with small donors steering a big matching pool. when thousands of people each chip in $5 or $10 to the projects they actually use and care about, you get a signal no committee could produce. and it grows with the number of participants instead of the number of reviewers. but QF is one mechanism of many. retro funding, conviction voting, dependency-graph funding like deep funding, and ai agents allocating on a community's behalf are all early and all promising. some of the best ideas are ancient: rotating savings circles, rotating labour circles, or the mutual aid societies that insured workers before the welfare state. they could run again on new rails. the stakes keep rising, too. ai is making it cheap to build almost anything, so the list of things worth funding is about to get very long, and a grants committee can't read any faster than it could a decade ago. whoever decides where the money goes decides what gets built. i want that to be all of us.