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Lotto PGF

Lotto PGF

TL;DR:

Lotto PGF uses a lottery-style system to allocate funds to public goods projects or contributors. Instead of competing for limited slots or votes, anyone who meets the basic criteria is entered into a pool—and winners are chosen at random.


This mechanism:

  • Encourages participation without high application overhead
  • Reduces bias and favoritism
  • Spreads small chances of funding across many participants
  • Makes public goods funding more playful, accessible, and low-stakes


Lotto PGF works especially well in:

  • Early-stage or grassroots ecosystems
  • Microgrant programs
  • Communities wanting to fund more people with fewer politics


It can also complement other mechanisms like Quadratic Funding or Direct Grants by introducing an element of randomness, especially for lower-stakes disbursements.


Some implementations may weight the odds based on past contributions, community endorsements, or identity attestations—but the core idea remains: funding as a public goods lottery.

Best For

  • Microgrants or low-stakes public goods rounds
  • Increasing access to funding
  • Reducing administrative burden in early-stage funding
  • Communities experimenting with novel allocation models

Good At

  1. Creating low-barrier access to funds
  2. Making funding fun, fair, and inclusive
  3. Minimizing review and governance complexity
  4. Incentivizing broader participation

Dependencies / Requirements

  • A pool of eligible participants or proposals
  • Transparent, provable randomness mechanism
  • Rules around entry criteria, funding size, and frequency
  • Optional: sybil resistance or weighting logic

Not Good At

  • High-stakes or large-scale funding
  • Situations requiring precise, strategic allocation
  • Environments with very limited capital and high risk
  • Projects needing evaluation or accountability

Who Should Use It?

  • Grassroots orgs or DAOs experimenting with funding inclusion
  • Public goods ecosystems wanting to support a wider contributor base
  • Communities looking to lower funding anxiety and admin burden
  • Coordinators who value surprise and delight in their funding UX

Example Use Cases

  • A DAO runs a monthly Lotto PGF round where 5 contributors are randomly selected to receive $500
  • A local community uses Lotto PGF to fund mutual aid or community garden projects
  • A protocol creates a “thank you lottery” for ecosystem contributors, with eligibility based on past participation