Great question. We didn’t really know ahead of time that we’d end up w/ something like 5-7 “legos” that we think can be used by gitcoin and other users of the grants protocol in the future.
Now that we do know that - the hard ROI is basically the costs of developing them ourselves vs the community developing them. At first blush given our spending and pace of of Lego development the hard ROI is positive. That said - to really achieve those benefits we would have to show we have spent less internally. That’s not the case afaik today - it’s more that we will not need to spend as much going forward because now we know the community can develop useful algorithms.
The soft ROI is inherently hard to measure. It includes any second order benefits of the community such as resisting centralization at the data layer, improving the confidence of grant protocol teams to embrace the protocol, and accelerating the identification and development of useful tools and data sets.