“Everyone Can Fund”: Pensieve.ecf Perennial Grant Experiment Epoch 1
👉 TL;DR
Launch:
Introducing the Perennial Grant Experiment — a transparent, community-powered way to fund what matters. No gatekeepers. No black boxes. Just open, accountable funding, week after week.
Vision:
We’re rethinking public goods funding — starting with radical transparency and integrity. Every project, payout, and vote in the open. Welcome to the Perennial Grant Experiment 🌿
Participation:
Builders, not brands. Transparency, not talk. Apply now for the Perennial Grant Experiment — $800/week in open funding for public goods. Join us 🌱
👉Long Version
The Pensieve.ecf Perennial Grant Experiment — Epoch 1
A transparent, community-powered way to fund what matters.
We’re tired of black boxes. Of applications that disappear into inboxes, never to be seen again. That’s why we’re starting something different — something we have been planning since 2018’s summer, something much more alive.
The Perennial Grant Experiment is an open, evolving grant campaign run on Pensieve.ecf.network, designed to make funding transparent, accountable, and community-owned from the ground up.
We call it an experiment because it’s not perfect — and that’s the point. Every week, the process grows, adapts, and roots deeper into what real builders, creators, and communities need.
Why This Matters
Public goods deserve sunlight. Too often, early projects — the ones without tokens, hype, or venture backing — are left unfunded and unseen. The Perennial Grant Experiment aims to change that by putting every decision, profile, and payout in the open.
No hidden judges. No closed-door committees. Just an ecosystem that learns together and funds in public.
How It Works
- Campaign pool: $800 USD per week, for 10 weeks
- Awards Distribution for Week 1:
- Top Transparent Project: $400
- Top Accountable Project: $400
- Top 1 in ever rank gets half distributed (200), top 2–5 divide 200 (100, 50, 30, 20)
(The link to check on ranking real-time will be published soon for official launch of the weekly competitions by Monday)
3. Governance tool: Elderwand v0.3 — a mix of transparent metrics, community votes, and live progress tracking.
More items from ECF Blueprints are adding to Project Pages to evaluate its accountability and legitimacy from the aspects of participation, performance, complaints and redress, community acceptance and transparency. We’ve also updated the Itemweights in this version. Each item is now weighted based on how many evaluation metrics it contributes to, the more dimensions it touches, the higher its genesis itemweight.
Meanwhile, we prioritized financial disclosure more heavily in this release. Because publishing financial data requires courage and trust, and financial health is fundamental to any project’s sustainability and accountability to its stakeholders.
Two ranks are now live to assess project accountability:
- Top Transparent: ranked by project’s transparency score that showing its openness to stakeholders.
- Top Accountable: ranks projects based on their overall Accountability Score, which combines transparency with community voting signals.
Example: Ethereum Community Fund ECF.eth
The published items Genesis Itemweight’s sum is 470, while the total of current project’s items Genesis Itemweight is 1280, thus:
Total Staked CP (Contribution Points) to support it is 2155, thus:
👉 more on how Elderwand works
In the future, 3 more metrics (participation, performance, complaints and redress) mentioned in the Elderwand Framework will be updated to give more holistic view of accountability and its web3 resilience.
Note:
- that items in the Elderwand are being developed over time and updated to pensieve.ecf.entwork over the years, so it’s possible that notifications will be issued when new items will be updated each round. They will not be deployed during each week’s contest.
- When new items are added, the transparency requirements are increased in order to get higher/full score in transparency. Check current items required here at this airtable.
We are here to support
Starting from next week, we would have open support calls. Call links will be announced at our Discord and X.
Who Can Apply
Anyone can permissionlessly contribute to pensieve.ecf.network to speak for projects they trust. This time the Perennial Grant Experiment will focus on projects that:
- Have no traded token
- Are pre-investment stage
- Share a Financial Disclosure Item
- Recommended to fill-in the following items: Links & Contacts, Treasury Vault address
The Journey
Week 1 — Projects go live on pensieve.ecf.network. Community votes open. Results will be announced on X. Winners retweet announcement for confirmation.
Week 2 — Winners are verified on penseive by community users and interviewed by Pensieve team. Their stories are shared. (note: during this period, if key project information is challenged and disqualified to win, the project’s winning status will be reviewed)
Week 3 — Funds flow directly via Sablier smart contracts — with the option to stream payouts transparently and collect more funding donations from community.
Then it repeats. Every week, new rounds, new insights, new growth for 8 weeks this time. Like a perennial plant — steady, resilient, regenerative.
Join discord or write to hello@ecf.network for questions and feedbacks.
The Vision
The Perennial Grant Experiment isn’t just about distributing money.
It’s about redistributing trust and rewarding integrity.
We’re building a blueprint for what funding could look like when the process is as open as the people it’s meant to support.
When progress is traceable, decisions are visible, and everyone can challenge, contribute, and grow together. Because the future of public goods funding shouldn’t depend on gatekeepers — it should depend on us.
The Perennial Grant Experiment isn’t about perfecting grantmaking — it’s about unhiding it.
We want every step to be visible: the wins, the misses, the adjustments. We want to show what transparent, regenerative funding can look like when the community holds the light.
Because if we can make this work — if we can prove that open, collective funding can sustain real projects — then we can change how ecosystems take care of their own.
This is how public goods stay alive.
This is how funding becomes perennial.
