Coin Center is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization focused on cryptocurrency policy, civil liberties, and financial privacy. Based in Washington, D.C., the organization works at the intersection of technology, law, and public policy to defend the rights of individuals to build and use open cryptocurrency networks.
Coin Center's work includes policy research, congressional testimony, public education, and litigation challenging laws and regulatory actions that threaten privacy, free expression, or the open development of decentralized systems.
Background
Cryptocurrency policy advocacy is a classic public good: the benefits of defending digital rights, challenging unconstitutional surveillance laws, and educating policymakers accrue to the entire ecosystem, not just to specific projects or token holders. Yet funding for this work has historically depended on a small number of large corporate sponsors and individual donors — a model that creates concentration risk and potential conflicts of interest for an organization whose credibility depends on independence.
Coin Center was founded in 2014 as a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency and decentralized computing. Its mission centers on defending the rights of individuals to build and use open cryptocurrency networks — the right to write and publish code, to assemble into peer-to-peer networks, and to do so privately. The organization operates through research, education, congressional testimony, media engagement, and increasingly, litigation.
By 2020, as regulatory scrutiny of cryptocurrency intensified — including debates over the U.S. infrastructure bill's crypto provisions, the SEC's expanding enforcement posture, and OFAC's Tornado Cash sanctions — Coin Center's work became more urgent and more expensive. Joining Gitcoin Grants offered a way to diversify funding through a mechanism that directly measured community support for their advocacy.
The Mechanism / Program
Coin Center participated in Gitcoin Grants quadratic funding rounds beginning in 2020, applying as a grantee in the advocacy and public goods categories. During each round's two-week contribution window, community members donated to Coin Center alongside hundreds of other projects. The quadratic funding formula then distributed matching pool funds proportionally, amplifying projects with broad community support over those with fewer, larger donors.
This structure aligned well with Coin Center's funding profile. As a nonprofit serving the entire crypto ecosystem, Coin Center's support base was naturally broad — thousands of individual users who benefited from its advocacy but had no structured way to contribute small amounts with meaningful impact. Quadratic funding converted those small contributions into significant matching allocations, transforming diffuse community support into substantial operational funding.
Gitcoin Passport was used for Sybil resistance in later rounds, gating eligibility through identity verification scores to ensure that contribution patterns reflected genuine community preference rather than manufactured support.
Outcomes
Over its participation in Gitcoin Grants from 2020 through 2023, Coin Center raised over $1 million from more than 11,000 community contributions and matching funds. In Grants Round 12 (December 2021), Coin Center raised over $400,000 as part of the inaugural Advocacy cause round, making it one of the top-funded grantees in Gitcoin history and the highest-funded advocacy organization in that round.
The funding supported a period of intensified legal and policy activity. Key initiatives during and after the Gitcoin funding period include:
- Filing a federal lawsuit against the Treasury Department and OFAC over the Tornado Cash sanctions (October 2022), arguing that sanctioning immutable open-source smart contracts exceeded statutory authority. The Treasury ultimately dropped the sanctions in March 2025.
- Filing a constitutional challenge to Section 6050I of the Tax Code (June 2022), which would require individuals receiving $10,000 or more in crypto to report counterparty personal information to the IRS without a warrant. Coin Center won a Sixth Circuit appeal in August 2024 on standing and ripeness grounds, with the case remanded for merits litigation.
- Congressional testimony and policy research on cryptocurrency regulation, broker reporting rules, and digital privacy rights.
The scale of community participation — over 11,000 individual contributors — provided Coin Center with a credible, quantifiable signal of ecosystem-wide support that complemented its traditional funding sources.
Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Diffuse and invisible impact
Policy advocacy work produces benefits that are difficult to attribute and often only become visible during crises. Contributors may not recognize the value of regulatory defense until a specific threat materializes, making it harder to sustain funding between high-profile events.
Solution: Coin Center's consistent participation across multiple Gitcoin rounds helped build recurring community awareness. High-profile litigation — particularly the Tornado Cash lawsuit — created visible, legible impact that reinforced the connection between community funding and concrete outcomes.
Challenge: Popularity dynamics in quadratic funding
Advocacy organizations with established reputations and media presence may attract disproportionate funding relative to lesser-known but equally important policy efforts, reflecting a general limitation of donation-based signal mechanisms.
Solution: Gitcoin's introduction of cause-specific rounds (such as the Advocacy round in GR12) helped concentrate donor attention on a defined category, improving the signal quality for policy-focused grantees and reducing competition with unrelated project types.
Challenge: Funding volatility across rounds
Quadratic funding outcomes vary significantly between rounds based on matching pool size, donor participation, and competing grantees. This creates unpredictable revenue for organizations that depend on consistent operational budgets.
Solution: Coin Center treated Gitcoin funding as a supplement to its traditional donor base rather than a primary revenue source. The community signal generated through Gitcoin participation also served as a credibility asset when engaging with larger institutional supporters.
Lessons Learned
- Quadratic funding can sustain ecosystem-level public goods beyond software. Coin Center's success demonstrated that QF is not limited to funding code — it can effectively support policy advocacy, litigation, and institutional defense work that benefits an entire ecosystem but lacks direct revenue models.
- Cause-specific rounds improve signal quality for non-technical work. The introduction of the Advocacy cause round in GR12 concentrated donor attention and produced clearer community signal for policy organizations, rather than forcing them to compete for matching alongside developer tools and protocol infrastructure.
- Community funding generates credibility beyond capital. The 11,000+ individual contributions provided Coin Center with a quantifiable measure of community support that strengthened its legitimacy with policymakers, media, and traditional donors — a benefit that extends well beyond the dollar amounts raised.
- Broad-based funding reduces conflicts of interest for advocacy organizations. By diversifying revenue away from concentrated corporate sponsorship toward thousands of small community contributions, quadratic funding helps preserve the independence that policy advocacy organizations depend on for credibility.
- Recurring round participation builds durable community relationships. Coin Center's multi-year presence across Gitcoin rounds created an ongoing touchpoint with the broader crypto community, maintaining visibility and support even during periods without headline litigation.
Conclusion
Coin Center's experience on Gitcoin Grants demonstrates that quadratic funding can address a persistent gap in public goods funding: sustaining institutional advocacy and litigation that protects an entire ecosystem's rights and freedoms. The case illustrates how QF's amplification of broad community support translates directly into operational capacity for policy work that no individual project or donor would fund alone. For DAOs, protocols, and communities designing funding programs, Coin Center's trajectory suggests that cause-specific QF rounds can effectively surface and sustain non-technical public goods that are essential to ecosystem health.