Hey Gitcoin crew 
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:
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
It’s looking Amazing 
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.
