Introducing Grant Ships & DAO Masons: Accelerating GG23

Hey Gitcoin crew :wave:

Since last October, we’ve been working closely with the Gitcoin team (hey Mathilda!) to build a custom implementation of Grant Ships for GG23. I wanted to briefly introduce ourselves and what we’ve built so far, how it’s being used, and share what’s coming next.

I’m Matt (aka UI369) from DAO Masons, the team behind Grant Ships. My collaborator Jord leads design and development, and together we’ve been building governance infrastructure for DAOs—with Grant Ships as our flagship tool. We also work with a designer, Sun, who brought the look and feel for the Grant Ships Gitcoin implementation - you can check it out at gg23.grantships.fun

DAO Masons is a small builder guild committed to “helping DAOs win”. We love designing useful governance mechanisms and are always looking for ways to help DAOs operate more smoothly. We’ve been calling it “Governance Compression” lately - we take complex governance processes and design elegant pathways with clean UX, backed by smart contracts.

Last year, Mathilda approached us and asked us if we’d set up a Grant Ships implementation for GG23. We said yes, so as many of you are aware, the Community Rounds application process was managed by Grant Ships this time around.

Here’s a bit about Grant Ships and how it works, happy to answer any questions and hear your feedback on what we’re doing here.

What is Grant Ships?

This tweet sums up the basic idea:

Screenshot 2025-03-28 at 1.03.27 PM

To do this we gamify the process a bit with leaderboards, scores and rankings and a game loop designed to repeat and reward top performers and patterns over time.

It’s a spectator game - we make everything as transparent and decentralized as possible - we store the data onchain, use Hats NFTs for permissioning and hold token votes to determine top performers.

The main idea is to create clear feedback loops running on community-driven signal.

What have we built together so far?
Over the last few months, we’ve launched a custom version of Grant Ships to onboard and assess community round applicants for GG23. This included:

A clean, streamlined application flow w/public comment

Rubric-based voting for judges

NFT-based permissions (via Hats) for judges using Hats Protocol

A public-facing leaderboard of applicants

And soon: a GTC-holder voting tool, powered by AI-assisted voting, to let the Gitcoin community rate and rank the Community Rounds.

You can check it out live here: gg23.grantships.com

What’s next?
The goal is to turn community feedback into signal that shapes future rounds — tightening the feedback loop and giving GTC more utility in the process.

We’re still talking with the Gitcoin team about options for GG24 and GG25 and we’d like to hear from you about what you’d like to see. Grant Ships shines when it has time to iterate and “evolve” the programs inside of it into more of what the community wants.

We’re excited to be here and to share what we’ve been building with all of you. Huge thanks to the Gitcoin team for trusting us to bring this to life.

We’ll be sharing a retrospective with all the details later, but for now—we just wanted to say hey, introduce ourselves, and let you know what’s up.

Feel free to drop any questions or feedback in the thread—I’m around and would love to connect.

  • Matt (UI369)

Grant Ships on X
DAO Masons on X
GG23 Grant Ships
Grant Ships rule book

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Good work :clap: It’s looking Amazing :trophy: :hearts:

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Hey everyone, I walked through the high level of the GG23/Grant Ships implementation in this recent tweet and figured I’d drop by to share with you: https://x.com/grantships/status/1909348110813593995

The gist is that we elected the Top 6 Ships (Community Rounds) and they’re live now doing their thing. Here are the top 6 listed out with links to their programs.

Top 6 Ships:
Regen Coordination ImpactQF
GoodDollar GoodBuilders Kickoff Round
Token Engineering the Superchain Retro Round
Regen Rio de janeiro
Gitcoin Grants Garden
Web3 for Universities

When GG23 concludes, we’ll be hosting an AI-assisted GTC vote. There will likely be a minimum amount of GTC needed to participate, maybe 100 or 500? That’s TBD by Gitcoin. But voters will determine which Ships did it best. Top ships will get boosts as they move into GG24.

Once we get that iterative evolution cycle going, that’s when Grant Ships really shines. So stay tuned, and be ready to vote when the time comes. Thanks all.


:moneybag: And… I’ll also take this opportunity to shill our GG23 project. As you may know, we have been unpaid up to this point and are in discussions with the Gitcoin team about a GCP proposal and other options to cover our expenses.

Part of our strategy to fund this build for Gitcoin is the hope that we’ll get a healthy amount of community support and matching funds this GG23.

It would mean a lot to us if you could drop Grant Ships and Chews Protocol (tooling we use to build our votes) in your shopping cart and send us your support in whichever form you choose, but also in the form of a donation :slight_smile:

Grant Ships: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/867/90
Chews Protocol: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/863/72

Thanks everyone! May all your projects ship! :rocket:

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