Every serious blockchain ecosystem has a mechanism for funding public goods. Polkadot’s treasury is funded by the protocol. Decred’s funds operations through stakeholder votes. Ethereum has Gitcoin. Cosmos funds public goods directly. Solana has community-run grant programs. Tezos has the Ecosystem DAO.
The difference is that the Ecosystem DAO is currently funded by the Tezos Foundation, not the protocol. That’s fine. What we should be asking for is simple: keep that funding going, and explore protocol-level funding as a supplement.
Anyone holding $XTZ can vote on how the Ecosystem DAO allocates its grants. The governance works. The infrastructure exists. When Adaptive Issuance broke precise reward calculations for all bakers, Tez Capital filed a proposal, got it funded in weeks, and shipped “Tezos Protocol Rewards” to fix the problem. That is the model functioning exactly as designed.
Without decentralized funding, Tezos cannot call itself decentralized honestly. The risk isn’t that we have a bad system. The risk is that we let it atrophy while other ecosystems pour resources into the same problem. Protocol-level funding is the endgame. Foundation funding is how we get there without disruption.
Without decentralized funding, Tezos feels like a hobby with a treasury. The infrastructure is there. The governance works. The voting exists. But when the actual work of building, maintaining, and growing the ecosystem depends on a single organization’s discretionary budget, you’re not running a decentralized network. You’re running a project with a committee. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies. There’s nothing wrong with projects. But if Tezos wants to be what it claims to be, a chain that runs on stakeholder consensus, that adapts through on-chain governance, that doesn’t need to ask permission to evolve, then the funding model has to match the ambition. Right now it doesn’t.
Trilitech appears to be trying to centralize all tooling under themselves and use AI to keep everything updated. It is against the principles of decentralization that would make sure the system thrives long term. Centralizing everything under a single organization is never a good idea in crypto. Not because the people involved are bad. Because systems built to depend on a single point of control eventually find that single point. The Ecosystem DAO exists precisely to prevent this. It funds multiple teams to build the same infrastructure in different ways, creating redundancy, competition, and resilience. One organization with an AI bot does a decentralized ecosystem not make.
Keep the Ecosystem DAO alive. Expand it over time. Ask the Foundation to keep funding it, and start the conversation about protocol-level contributions. That is how Tezos catches up.
No one reading this is allowed to ever make fun of another multisig or protocol hack until Tezos funding is decentralized. Well, you can make fun of it and point out its issues but don’t be bringing Tezos as a solution because it ain’t! We need to walk the walk to be taken seriously by people who know what they’re talking about.
None of us can honestly evangelize a contradiction. Help remove this contradiction.
