Season 10. Episode 2: Deep Funding: The Future of AI-Powered Public Goods Allocation with Devansh Mehta
Release Date: 10/22/2025
NN Ep:14 - Networked Diasporas: The Case of SeeDAO with Helena Rong
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Helena Rong, Assistant Professor at New York University Shanghai, to explore SeeDAO as a real-world case study of a proto Network Nation. They unpack how SeeDAO evolved from a Web3 startup into a translocal, diasporic community rooted in Daoist philosophy, kinship, and the pursuit of a “good life.” The conversation dives into co-presence, emergence, non-coercive governance, social ledgers, on-chain identity, and how SeeDAO blends digital infrastructure with physical...
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VDAO Ep.7 From Software to Soil: Health, Food & Building Real Resilience with Danilo Da Rosa
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller speaks with Danilo, a software engineer who left city life behind to rebuild his health, relationship with food, and sense of resilience through permaculture, natural building, and community living in Uruguay. Danilo shares how a health crisis pushed him to rethink his lifestyle, why growing food changed everything, and how moving closer to nature reshaped his understanding of resilience. They explore food autonomy, water catchment, natural house building,...
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NN Ep:13 - Intentional Communities & New Jurisdictions with Jessy Kate Schingler
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi is joined by Jessy Kate Schingler, co-founder of the Embassy Network, to explore how intentional communities and new jurisdictions can give Network Nations real-world grounding. Jessy shares lessons from over a decade of building translocal co-living communities, explains why the Embassy Network thought of its spaces as “embassies to the future,” and how identity, culture, and entanglement emerge without formal membership rules. The conversation then turns to jurisdictional...
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NN Ep:12 From politics to protocols to protocol politics with Santiago Siri
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In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi speak with Santiago Siri, founder of Democracy Earth, DemocracyOS, and Proof of Humanity, to explore a central question of the digital age: Can we escape politics with protocols or do protocols simply create new political arenas? Santiago shares his journey from building Argentina’s internet political party Partido de la Red, to creating open-source democratic infrastructure, to running one of the most ambitious on-chain identity and governance experiments in Web3. They discuss identity as the core bottleneck of digital...
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NN Ep:11 Let a Thousand Societies Bloom with Vitalik Buterin
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer are joined by Vitalik Buterin to reflect on one of the most influential experiments in recent community-building history: Zuzalu. Vitalik shares the motivations behind Zuzalu, what actually worked (and what didn’t), and why many pop-up cities risk drifting into “long conferences” instead of becoming real communities. Together they explore kinship vs telos, culture vs mission, permanence vs mobility, governance by forking, and how zones, tribes, and regulatory...
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NN Ep:10 Burning Man: Seeding a Network Nation
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi explore one of the most influential community experiments of the last 40 years: Burning Man. They’re joined by Erika Blair, who leads engagement and network strategy at Burning Man, to unpack how a one-week event in the Nevada desert evolved into a global, year-round network of communities bound not by territory, but by shared principles, rituals, and identity. The conversation dives into the origins of Burning Man, the emergence of the 10 Principles, regional burns around the...
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S.10 Ep.8 Hyperstitions: How Beliefs Become Reality in Networked Systems with Jake Hartnell
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki sits down with Jake Hartnell reality engineer, builder, and the mind behind ENOVA to explore the idea of hyperstitions: beliefs and narratives that become real by spreading through networks. Jake explains how hyperstitions operate as a new coordination primitive, why technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AGI can be seen as successful hyperstitions, and how tools like hyperstition markets blend prediction markets, incentives, and storytelling to drive collective action. They discuss ENOVA, egregores,...
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S.10 Ep.7 Prosperous Software: Rethinking Open Source Funding Through Licensing
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New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki talks with Raymond Cheng software engineer, researcher, and co-founder of Open Source Observer — about the Prosperous Software Movement and why open source licensing needs to evolve. Raymond explains how today’s open source economy underfunds its own foundations, why existing licenses fail to reflect modern financial realities, and how a new class of revenue-sharing licenses could sustainably fund open source dependencies. They explore the history of free software, the limits of voluntary public...
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NN Ep:9 A New Political Landscape in the Digital Age with Nick Srnicek & Sofia Cossar
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Nick Srnicek (author of Platform Capitalism and Silicon Empires) and Sofia Cossar (BlockchainGov) to explore the emerging concept of Network Sovereignty. They unpack how power is shifting from nation-states to digital networks, why platforms now function like political infrastructures, and how algorithms, protocols, and platforms increasingly shape governance, speech, and economic life. The conversation examines platform empires, AI infrastructure, state power, civil society...
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VDAO Ep.6 Everyday Resilience Building Anti-Fragility in Suburbia with Gardner
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller talks with Gardner, a tech founder exploring how local resilience and self-sovereignty can be built without going off-grid. Gardner shares his hands-on journey of transforming a suburban home into a more resilient system from rainwater harvesting and food forests to community reciprocity and mindset shifts. They discuss why resilience doesn’t mean bunkers or isolation, how small actions compound, and why investing in community, not fear, is the real...
info_outlineNew @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌱
Kevin chats with Devansh Mehta about Deep Funding — an AI-powered mechanism combining human judgment and prediction markets to fund open-source projects.
They dive into how it scales evaluations, prevents Sybil attacks, and builds a fair “price feed” for public goods ahead of Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24).
Links:
🌐grants.gitcoin.co
🌐 deepfunding.org
🌐 deep.seer.pm
🌐 greenpill.network
🐦 @owocki @greenpillnet
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 – Intro: Welcome to the Greenpill Podcast – exploring tech, coordination & Protopia
00:45 – Introducing guest Devansh Mehta, AI & Public Goods Lead at the Ethereum Foundation
01:20 – What is Deep Funding and why it matters
02:00 – How Deep Funding scales human evaluations with AI models
02:45 – Overview of the pilot run and what was tested
03:20 – How the mechanism works: human jurors + model builders
04:30 – The White Hat Sybil attack and what it revealed
05:40 – How Deep Funding integrates data science competitions and prediction markets
06:50 – Results of the pilot: weighted funding for 45 open-source repos
07:30 – Creating a credibly neutral funding system with unequal weights
08:40 – Comparing Deep Funding with Protocol Guild and other mechanisms
09:20 – Building a strong community of AI developers and human jurors
10:30 – The role of jurors and models in fair evaluation
11:10 – What’s next: expanding to 90 repos in Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24)
11:50 – Funding pool: $350K from Ethereum Foundation & Gitcoin
12:30 – Challenges of distributing capital efficiently and fairly
13:20 – Moving to GitHub repo-level governance: who controls the funds?
14:40 – Two models of spending: splits contracts vs counterfactual wallets
15:40 – Lessons from past Gitcoin funding rounds
16:20 – Why Deep Funding focuses on units of work, not organizations
17:20 – Avoiding distortions and improving fairness in funding
18:10 – The vision: creating a live price feed for public goods
19:10 – How prediction markets price open-source value
20:30 – Self-correcting market behavior and real-time adjustments
21:20 – Subsidies and liquidity: bootstrapping active participation
22:10 – Balancing liquidity levels to prevent manipulation
23:00 – What’s next for Deep Funding: refining future iterations
23:40 – Shoutout to the model builders and competition winners
24:20 – Where to learn more: deepfunding.org
& deep.seer.pm
25:00 – Closing: the future of AI, governance, and funding what matters