01-31, 13:55–14:05 (Europe/Zurich), Beacon Stage
Current mechanisms for funding public goods in the Web3 ecosystem face a fundamental scaling challenge: as the number of projects grows, the cognitive overhead for funders becomes increasingly burdensome. This talk introduces Deep Funding (deepfunding.org), a mechanism recently invented by Vitalik Buterin that leverages AI, market dynamics, and expert human judgment to efficiently allocate resources across complex dependency networks.
David Dao is the Chief Scientist of GainForest.Earth, a decentralized science non-profit dedicated to tackling the climate and biodiversity crisis with emergent technologies, and Co-Founder of Eval.Science, an autonomous research collective working on novel mechanisms for science funding. Previously, David won the XPRIZE Rainforest Impact Prize by co-leading an interdisciplinary team of 60 researchers into the Amazon rainforest, mapping 100 ha using AI in co-design with Indigenous communities. He is also the co-inventor of data valuation with Shapley values. David earned his doctorate degree in computer science from ETH Zurich, and was a postdoctoral scholar in environmental science.