Keep It Simple, Stupid
How We Rebuilt Match Funding to Actually Make Sense
Back to Basics
Season 5 is here. 400+ projects submitted. 2 million votes cast. 132 projects curated from the frontier of art, science, tech, and culture. Last season, creators raised $860,000. This season, I think we’ll break $1 million.
Why am I bullish on Season 5? Because we finally nailed match funding. After years of experimenting with fancy-pants math, we landed on something dead simple: instant 1:1 match funding.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Hot Tub Breakthrough
After Season 4, I took a beat. My friend Scott Murphy—who won Season 3 with Resonate—drove up to Portland. We’d just wrapped a wild finale: over $300,000 raised in the final 24 hours. We needed to decompress.
In my cheap inflatable hot tub, Scott said something that stuck:
“Match funding works. But no one gets it. I just want to say: every dollar you give unlocks a dollar. If it’s more complicated than that, we lose.”
He was right.
What We Tried (and Why It Didn’t Work)
We’d spent years chasing fairness through over-engineered formulas. First with quadratic funding. Inspired by Vitalik’s essays and Kevin Owocki's Gitcoin, we wanted to reward broad community support over big money. In theory, it’s brilliant. In practice? Not so much.
Quadratic funding has two problems:
Sybil attacks — fake accounts can still game the system. So platforms need to prove the identity of each user. But KYC sucks. It adds friction. People bounce.
Confusing UX — no one knows how much match funding they’ve actually unlocked. The number goes up and down until the end of the season. Fans feel misled. Creators feel cheated.
We started experimenting.
My best friend and big-brain mathematician, Eric Katerman, and I wrote a paper on something we called Fluid Quadratic Funding—a streaming version of QF designed to give real-time visibility into match funding. We also tried Logarithmic Match Funding, where small projects got a bigger boost per dollar than big ones. We ran simulations, tested hybrid formulas, tweaked exponents.
But every variation had the same problems:
Too complex.
Too confusing.
Too hard to explain.
We kept building smarter systems. But what creators needed was something simpler.
The Obvious Answer
Back in the hot tub, Scott pitched an old idea I’d shot down a dozen times:
“What about 1:1 match funding?”
At first, I pushed back. It favors big creators with rich fans. But then it clicked.
The magic of Artizen isn’t the math. It’s the network of community-run funds.
We now have 32 of them, each supporting different kinds of creators.
If a project gets curated by multiple funds, it can stack match funding.
That means hustle gets rewarded.
Submit to more funds → unlock more match → raise more money.
Emerging creators without big audiences or wealthy donors can still win—if they hustle. It’s not mathematically perfect, but it’s fair in a way that matters: it levels the playing field without adding friction.
The New Rules
Here’s how match funding now works on Artizen:
Each fund splits its money equally across curated projects.
That becomes each project’s available match funding.
$1 in Artifact sales = $1 unlocked from each fund backing the project.
And once a project maxes out its match funding? The real competition begins:
Sell the most Artifacts in a fund → win that fund’s prize.
Raise the most across the season → win the Artizen Grand Prize.
Keep It Simple, Keep It Fair
Instant 1:1 match funding works. Creators know what they’re playing for. Fans get to see their impact immediately.
No Sybil attacks.
No KYC.
No guessing.
It’s easy to explain.
Easy to trust.
We’ll keep improving. Keep listening. But for the first time, it feels like we’ve got a model worth scaling.
Now go find a project you love. Buy an Artifact.
And help rewrite the future of funding—one dollar at a time.
I like it. Bravo!!!