We are excited to share our proposal for the GG21 Community Round. Our goal is to empower builders and community-led projects to foster a vibrant ecosystem of social, creative, and cultural projects through decentralised funding.
NAME OF PROPOSED ROUND
LUKSO Community Grants
SOCIAL HANDLE OF ORGANIZATION
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA
We want to support builders leveraging LUKSO’s innovative smart contract standards (LSPs) and Universal Profiles (UPs) to develop the next generation of dApps and infrastructure protocols, as well as fostering active community projects within the LUKSO ecosystem. Our focus is on encouraging both technical projects that integrate LUKSO’s technology stack and non-technical initiatives that demonstrate strong community involvement, focusing on education.
(1) Technical Projects (dApps, Protocols):
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Integration of Universal Profiles: Projects must utilise the UP Browser Extension, e.g. instead of MetaMask.
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Use of LUKSO Standard Proposals (LSPs): Projects should leverage LSPs instead of their ERC counterparts to qualify.
*Please note that while these technical eligibility criteria may seem limited, we have found them to be sufficient in filtering projects that truly contribute to our ecosystem, as evidenced by past hackathons and the current application wave to our direct grants program, given the complexity of our technology stack and the time builders need to invest in learning about our smart contract standards.
(2) Non-Technical (Community Projects):
- Active Community Involvement: Communities must have a track record of at least 3 months of active and continuous participation within the LUKSO community before the GG21 round. This criterion aims to protect our loyal and hardworking community members while encouraging newcomers to engage with the existing community until the next community funding opportunity.
Additionally, all projects must comply with Gitcoin’s core rules (incl. no fraudulent activity, quid pro quo, hate speech, or other activities out of alignment with Gitcoin’s essential intents).
ROUND HISTORY
This will be our first Gitcoin Grants Round, serving as a decentralised complement to the currently ongoing closing of our foundation’s first grant wave.
However, we have been active in the “Gitcoin-Verse” through our hackathons. BuildUP! 1 took place on Gitcoin’s legacy hackathon platform in 2022, and BuildUP! 2 was held on buidlbox in November 2023. For BuildUP! 1, we launched a quadratic matching pool, allowing our community to vote for their favourite hackathon submissions via RadicalxChange. Both hackathons had around 500 participants.
TEAM RUNNING THIS ROUND
Grants: Clara
- Leading the LUKSO Grants Program and other ecosystem funding initiatives, Clara has been a member of LUKSO’s growth team for 2.5 years.
- Twitter, LinkedIn
Growth: Jonathan
- For 3 years, Jonathan has led LUKSO’s growth team, driving ecosystem expansion through partnerships, funding, awareness, and business development.
- Twitter, LinkedIn
Tech: Hugo
- Hugo, with nearly 4 years of experience leading LUKSO’s tech team, now focuses on supporting and onboarding new projects within the LUKSO ecosystem.
- Twitter, LinkedIn
Hugo, Jonathan and Clara are already working closely together on the LUKSO Grants Program. Additionally, we have a motivated team of DevRel team members, community managers, communications team members and developers who will contribute as needed. They bring valuable experience from supporting our direct grants rounds and hackathons.
ALIGNMENT WITH GITCOIN’S MISSION AND ESSENTIAL INTENTS
The “LUKSO Community Grants” GG21 round aligns with Gitcoin’s vision of community-led positive change by supporting both technical and community-driven projects within the LUKSO ecosystem. By utilising quadratic funding, we aim to create a decentralised funding mechanism that empowers our community to propose and support impactful projects. This mirrors Gitcoin’s commitment to cultivating a vibrant, engaged community and ensuring the economic health and vitality of the ecosystem.
On a higher level, the LUKSO ecosystem is social and reputation-based by default, led by our core product Universal Profiles. These smart contract accounts unlock account abstraction from the start, enabling a user-friendly and feature-rich ecosystem built on social, creative, and cultural use cases. This alignment with Gitcoin’s “community-first” approach is likely one of the reasons why our previous collaborations within the “Gitcoin-Verse” have always been extremely positive.
ANTICIPATED SIZE OF THE MATCHING POOL
The matching pool is anticipated to be $50,000 in LYX, funded by the Foundation for the New Creative Economies.
Funding address: Please find the publicly disclosed Genesis Address for the Foundation for the New Creative Economies in this Medium Article under “The Genesis Addresses”.
ADVISORS FOR THIS ROUND
Our team has been in close contact with Sov from the Gitcoin team, who has been immensely helpful in patiently answering all our questions. Thank you so much!
Internally, we have a motivated team of DevRel team members, community managers, communications team members and developers who will contribute as needed. They bring valuable experience from supporting our direct grants rounds and hackathons.
FUNDING MECHANISM
We aim to complement our centralised grants program with periodic quadratic funding rounds on Gitcoin, establishing a decentralised counterpart called “LUKSO Community Grants.” This initiative seeks to create a reliable funding mechanism driven by community proposals and contributions. Given our community’s strong engagement in building on LUKSO and advocating for ecosystem projects, we are confident in the success of this funding approach.
COMMUNITY SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
Our community is highly active and continuously engaged in driving both the education and adoption of LUKSO’s technology stack within the EVM builder community. On Twitter, we have 64k organic followers, and our Discord server hosts 18.5k members. CommonGround, a web3 alternative to Discord, hosts its most active ecosystem server with LUKSO. During the BuildUP! 1 hackathon in 2022, nearly 200 individual community members participated in the quadratic voting community awards, with participation NFTs still on our testnet and set to be migrated soon.
For the GG21 LUKSO Community Grants, we will closely track engagement and feedback on our social media channels. After such initiatives, our team also seeks out the feedback and personal conversations with our most active community members for additional insights.
TYPE OF PROJECTS TO FUND
Overall, we look forward to supporting projects that contribute to LUKSO’s vision of creating a vibrant ecosystem of social, creative, and cultural use-cases, advancing the future of an EVM-based decentralised social web.
We want to support builders leveraging LUKSO’s innovative smart contract standards (LSPs) and Universal Profiles (UPs) to develop the next generation of feature-rich dApps and infrastructure protocols, as well as fostering active community projects within the LUKSO ecosystem. Our focus is on encouraging both technical projects that integrate LUKSO’s technology stack and non-technical initiatives that demonstrate strong community involvement, particularly in education.
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF ELIGIBLE GRANTEES
Based on application numbers for Wave 1 of the LUKSO Grants Program and previous hackathons, we can reasonably estimate that 50+ eligible projects will apply, although it is challenging to predict how many projects will exceed a certain percentage of the matching pool. After consulting with Sov, we will set the matching pool limit to 10%.
IMPACT ASSESSMENT PLAN
For the GG21 LUKSO Community Grants, we will closely track engagement on Twitter, the number of submitted versus eligible projects, the number of contributors, and financial contributions (total, average, median, etc.). We will also analyse the distribution of matched funds to evaluate the signalled preferences by our community and identify potential biases in our ecosystem. Tracking these metrics both across Gitcoin grant rounds and contrasting them with the funding decisions of our centralised program will provide our team with meaningful insights and feedback.
Our team is currently working on integrating both on- and off-chain analysis tools. These integrations aim to track the impact of grantee projects within our ecosystem and to provide these analysis tools to the projects themselves, enabling them to gain valuable insights into their user base. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d like more information.
POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Not applicable. We will not allow projects that are solely led by LUKSO team members to qualify for GG21, which is the same internal policy we hold for the LUKSO Grants Program application waves.
THANK YOU!
We appreciate you taking the time to review and consider our proposal for the GG21 Community Round. We would love to continue to work closely with the Gitcoin team to meaningfully kick off our quadratic funding rounds. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
