Many political economies drift toward extraction, entropy, and burnout. We are a nonprofit that builds the opposite: virtuous cycles in code, community, and capital that compound — a flywheel that lifts everything it touches.
Colored strokes are the disciplines we bring. Black balls are the 8 forms of capital those disciplines lift. Tap to stir the storm; hover to read what's traveling up.
Each one is a self-reinforcing loop — a flywheel where every rotation makes the next rotation easier.
The largest, longest-running experiment in matched crowdfunding for public goods. Neighbors give small amounts → a matching pool amplifies the projects with the broadest support → the work gets built → more people show up to fund the next round. $69M+ moved to the commons across 230+ rounds, with the crowd — not a grant committee — deciding where it goes.
UNICEF’s Office of Innovation put up the matching pool and picked ten Digital Public Goods Alliance projects — vaccine supply tracking, emergency cash transfers, classroom software. 15,500 people then decided how the pool got split across them in twelve days, and the crowd’s own donations came in larger than the pool itself. A UN agency, running our mechanism.
April 2020. Five downtown Boulder shops were ordered closed and had no lifeline. We pointed the same matching mechanism at Main Street: locals chipped in what they could, a $25k community pool matched them, and the businesses with the most neighbors behind them got the most help. The first time matched crowdfunding was run for a real-world local economy.
When the invasion started in March 2022, we stood up a relief round in days — direct aid, medical supplies, and evacuation logistics, funded by tens of thousands of small donors instead of one institution. $1M+ reached the ground inside a two-week window.
Carbon markets pay landholders to protect ecosystems, but the paperwork only ever penciled out for big estates. Shamba, out of Nairobi, uses satellite monitoring to make that verification cheap enough for a two-acre farm. Four funding rounds and 1,500+ backers took them from idea to deployed. Founder Kennedy Nganga: “We couldn’t have done it without Gitcoin.”
Milestone-based grantmaking against the UN Sustainable Development Goals, co-run with the Ethereum Foundation, Celo Public Goods, and Ma Earth. 51 teams applied, 19 were funded across 16 of the 17 SDGs — financial inclusion, clean energy, impact reporting — each releasing money only as verified milestones landed.
A funding round built for climate work too early or too unglamorous for institutional grants — monitoring, soil, local restoration, open climate data. 4,217 people voted with their dollars; funders multiplied the result. The crowd found the projects the committees would have missed.
Research funding decided by researchers and the public rather than a single panel. 2,309 donors backed 82+ open science projects; matching partners — including Springer Nature and Protocol Labs — took the pool past half a million. A working alternative to the grant-committee bottleneck.
A partnership with Open Source Collective to take matched crowdfunding to the maintainers who hold up everyday software. Donations ran in dollars through Open Collective’s normal checkout — no wallet, no jargon — and a $75k pool multiplied every small gift. 554 people funded 55 projects in 15 days.
The flywheel applied to the funder itself. $1M of treasury deposited, matched to a $2M base, invested so that only the yield — about $32k a quarter — flows into grant matching. The principal never moves and stays withdrawable at any time, so each round is paid for by returns rather than by shrinking the balance. Grants that don’t run out.
A worldwide network of engineering leaders who break bread together. Builders eat → trade hard-won advice → help each other hire and ship → bring the next CTO to the table. Free since 2014.
We work with founders, foundations, and civic institutions who have a virtuous loop hiding inside their org chart — and need the software, mechanism design, and narrative to turn it on.
Three lenses we hold at once. Each one teaches us something the others can't.
Through Ethereum,we understand hardness.
Credible neutrality, verifiable commitments, and systems that hold under adversarial pressure.
Through AI,we understand intelligence.
How loops learn, what machines can do for people, and where human judgment still has to sit.
Through our track record,we understand momentum.
A decade of flywheels built — we know what spins, what stalls, and how to get the next rotation cheaper than the last.
And one value function we hold across all three: syntropic, not extropian. New capacity comes from integration, not throughput. The AI transition succeeds when it produces emergent local capacity — not when it produces more aggregate compute.
Upward spirals increase agency, trust, resilience, and shared capacity.
We work in the lineage of syntropy — Fuller, Bateson, Szent-Györgyi, Schmachtenberger. When parts come together well, the whole produces capacity the parts alone never had. Cells breathe; molecules don't. Brains think; neurons don't. A civilization flourishes when its integration is right — not when its throughput is highest.
Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin, where he helped pioneer quadratic funding for public goods and shipped more than $69M in matching grants to open source builders. He's the author of GreenPill, a book about regenerative cryptoeconomics, and host of the podcast of the same name.
He's been writing code for 20+ years, shipping open source for 15, and designing coordination mechanisms for the last 8. Through the last 6 years, his work has been stewarded by Upward Spiral (formerly West Software Services Inc) , a nonprofit studio that has built upward spirals, product, and community with startups, foundations, and civic institutions.
If you see a flywheel hiding inside your org, product, or ecosystem — and you need software, mechanism design, and narrative to turn it on — let's talk.
hi@upwardspiral.io →A short reel of talks and moments that shaped how we think about spirals.
