Its founder Owocki clearly stated there are no plans to issue new tokens.

Written by: Maher, Foresight News

On October 2, Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki published the "October 2026 Restart Update" in the governance forum, officially naming the long-awaited "Gitcoin Restart": Techne, which means "craft, knowledge of making" in Greek.

According to the plan, the new project will officially launch in mid-December, although he noted that the biggest potential delay would not be the code but rather the legal documents.

Since the end of September, the price of its token GTC has been climbing, rising from around $0.1 to a peak of $0.249 after October, with an increase of nearly 150%. However, according to data from Vokong, this may simply be a chip game under circulation rather than a return of value.

New Brand Cut from Gitcoin

The core information revealed in this monthly report is substantial. Firstly, the new brand will be separate from Gitcoin. Techne will have its own independent account and brand system, no longer narrating within the framework of Gitcoin. Owocki's reasoning is straightforward: the audience lacks awareness of quadratic funding (QF) and there is no educational necessity. However, he does not deny that Techne stands on the trust and connections accumulated by Gitcoin over the past nine years.

The first batch of pilot projects has already landed, with the first pilot Beacon being a local event discovery application that has been listed on the App Store. However, according to community disclosures from the founder, only 10 out of 15 invited participants showed up for the first offline test of Beacon at the end of September, ultimately resulting in only 8 active testers and 5 new connections, showing dismal data performance. The second pilot Buoy inherits the legacy of QF. The originally planned launch of Buoy in November focuses on "local currency,” which serves as a new home for quadratic funding (QF). Owocki's judgment is that QF works best in scenarios where the community is small enough and people truly know the project parties—"this is the meaning of local."

The core business lines and strategic goals have been significantly reduced. The SDK and local AGI tools have been postponed to 2027 because "there aren't enough personnel to do it this year"; the QF funding platform will no longer exist independently, reduced to a feature of Buoy. The magazine, podcast, and membership content lines will be retained, with the first episode of the podcast and the print magazine planned for release between December and January of next year.

On the financing side, the team has appointed a fundraising leader, with a six-month goal of proving Techne has the capability for large-scale fundraising, planning to operate under a nonprofit framework, and Gitcoin may provide an initial donation.

It is worth mentioning that on October 2, Owocki explicitly replied, "There are no plans for a new token issue."

On the surface, the plan not to issue new tokens seems to have given the market a shot in the arm, with many retail investors interpreting it as good news. However, this may just be the most sophisticated sleight of hand. From the moment Techne was conceived as an independent brand, and planned to adopt a nonprofit entity structure, it had completed a total separation from the business logic and value capture of the GTC token.

More brutally, the Gitcoin treasury will likely still provide an initial donation to this new entity. This means that the treasury assets accumulated by GTC holders in real currency are being compliantly transferred to a brand new, externalized entity. Regardless of how grand the stories Techne tells in the nonprofit sector may be or how successful it might become, it may never benefit the GTC that lacks empowerment.

Once at Its Peak

To understand the significance of this shift, one must look back at the nine years Gitcoin has traveled.

In 2017, Owocki created a bounty platform in his basement and secured investment from ConsenSys; in 2019, he launched quadratic funding, which has since gone through several iterations, distributing over 60 million dollars through Grants, with Uniswap, Yearn, and Optimism among the funded parties. In 2021, it separated from ConsenSys to establish Gitcoin DAO.

Gitcoin soon airdropped tokens, with its token price soaring from around $5 to a peak of $29, and its market cap reaching several hundred million dollars.

However, after the spotlight came a long decline. In February 2024, Gitcoin cut back, eliminating heavy assets like public goods layer 2 networks, shifting towards a more capitalized operation. In April 2025, the Labs software development department was closed due to a lack of visible profit paths. In May 2025, the Grants Stack and Allo protocols were successively shut down.

Mechanically, the tide is also receding. In GG23 (early 2025), the QF donation amount was $95,278, while in GG24 (October 2025, transitioning to the "Gitcoin 3.0" multi-mechanism model), QF donations fell to $36,657—although external joint funding reached $632,500, indicating that the "field allocator" model can leverage new capital, the core donation momentum has clearly weakened.

Financial reserves are also under significant pressure. Records from the transition team meetings show that at the start of the restart, the treasury had approximately 16 to 17 million dollars left.

The token fared even worse, with the GTC price down about 99% from its historical peak in November 2021.

The issues extend beyond finances. In the July monthly report, the team conducted a rare "red team exercise," wherein they internally reviewed and identified three major fatal pain points: the retention gap from V1 to V2 (users drop off after solving urgent issues), the information decay cycle (information becomes ineffective after the sixth week, with users returning to Reddit and LLM), and obsession with mechanism—"creating mechanisms for their crypto audience instead of products for users."

This self-analysis is, to some extent, a microcosm of the financing narrative for Crypto public goods.

The real data of recent years has ruthlessly proven that purely on-chain public goods donations are an unclosable pseudo-demand.

Gitcoin’s past prosperity heavily relied on the expectations of airdrops and the vampire-like participation of airdrop hunters. Once the tide recedes, the real donation ecology cannot be sustained. Stripped of speculative interests, the native public goods narrative in Crypto cannot support a massive valuation.

Aftermath

Looking at the present, the bet for Techne can be condensed into one sentence: Can software pull people back from online to offline, back to their neighborhoods?

Some have stated that this is less of a strategic upgrade to keep up with the times, and more of a cover for its complete collapse in Web3 product capability.

This path has clear risks. Currently, there are only single-digit effective samples from the pilot, and the cold start survey has already failed once; the legal work in progress has been listed by Owocki himself as the greatest delay risk; and the goal of launching in mid-December 2026 may be pushed back at any time. Meanwhile, the core allocation mechanism of QF, which served as Gitcoin's hallmark, has been downgraded from an independent platform to a function of a local currency pilot, indicating that the team's ambition for the mechanism has temporarily yielded to delivery discipline.

However, from another angle, this restart may also represent a rare "de-Crypto" attempt in Gitcoin's history—no longer telling the story of coordinating infrastructure within the Ethereum ecosystem but speaking to an ordinary audience who has never heard of QF about "how to maintain your job, judgment, and neighborhood relationships in the AI era."

From the bounty board in the basement in 2017 to building software to "renegotiate the relationship between people and technology" today, Gitcoin's nine years resemble a parabola, and also a cycle.

Whether Techne can maintain ordinary people's neighborhood relationships in the so-called AI era is yet to be seen, but for GTC holders, this train named rebirth is likely to encounter a bumpy ride ahead.