Potlock Review 2026: Open Funding Stack for Public Goods

Potlock is an open funding stack for crypto projects and public goods. Founders, non-profits and contributors can raise money for almost anything in a range of supported assets, while treasuries and foundations can run funding rounds and campaigns.

The homepage shows about 250 projects and 2018 unique supporters, though it does not give a total amount raised. Past rounds include AI Public Goods, Open Source Software, NEAR Retroactive Builders, Creatives Round, Africa Public Goods and NEAR Marketing DAO, with pots from roughly $3,000 to $45,000 in value.

In 2026 the project added support for more chains, including Bitcoin, Polygon, XRP, Sui, Arbitrum and Monad, using NEAR Intents. The company behind it is described as Potluck Labs, Inc., a private company.

Potlock lets projects publish profiles and campaigns, and lets people donate directly to them. Funders such as foundations or DAOs can create pots, which are funding rounds with a pool of money that is distributed to approved projects. Some rounds use quadratic funding, which weights the number of supporters over the size of single donations.

Originally focused on NEAR, Potlock now accepts donations from other networks by using NEAR Intents. According to its blog, a donor can send a token such as BTC, SOL, SUI or ARB directly to a campaign without manually bridging or wrapping assets.

The platform also hosts related tools: reply.cash for local payments, GrantPicks for head-to-head funding contests on Stellar, and curate.fun for social content automation. Some earlier products, including AI-PGF and nada.bot, are marked deprecated.

Potlock does not publish a fee schedule on its homepage. It is not stated whether the platform takes a cut of donations or how matching pools are funded beyond the pot sizes shown for each round.

Donors should expect network costs on the chain they use, plus any swap costs when funds move across chains through NEAR Intents. These would be visible in the app before confirming a donation. The project describes cross-chain donations as fast and affordable but gives no figures.

Potlock is a non-custodial style funding platform in the sense that donations are made from the donor's own wallet, but the homepage does not detail custody for campaign funds or pot payouts. Users should read each campaign page and understand how funds are released.

The only audit information is a Veridise assessment of the GrantPicks protocol, run over eight person-weeks between January and February 2025. The homepage does not describe audits for the other contracts. Cross-chain donations rely on NEAR Intents, so smart-contract and routing risk applies. Donors should send only what they can afford to lose and verify the campaign before donating.

Potlock suits open-source developers, public goods projects, non-profits and ecosystem teams looking to raise money or apply for grants. It also fits DAOs and foundations that want to run a funding round, and donors who want to support projects using tokens from many chains.