TL;DR:
The aim of this post is to assess the community and grant council’s interest in financing the development of a platform called Impact Oracle, that brings real world impact (RWIs) & real world assets (RWAs) from the emerging markets, to the Gitcoin ecosystem by leveraging battle tested gitcoin mechanisms like Allo and Passport which currently is underutilised in the emerging markets.
Introduction:
Our goal is to create a solution that:
- enhances collective impact sensemaking,
- improves discovery & recommendation for funders,
- improves matchmaking between funders and impact creators,
- provides diverse capital allocation mechanisms for deployment,
- and finally reducing the administrative overheads for impact creators so they spend more time creating impact and less time fundraising or shilling.
Our proposed solution includes leveraging Gitcoin’s tools, the Allo Protocol and Passport. We are also exploring potential integration with community-developed products such as GrantScope, OS Observer, and Hypercerts to name a few.
A key consideration is the adoption of the platform in emerging markets and how the Impact Oracle can bring more RWIs and RWAs to the Gitcoin ecosystem. Now we will dive deeper into the problem statement.
The problem space:
End to end impact tracking is broken. It affects sensemaking, it affects matchmaking and makes the experience terrible both for funders and impact creators.
1. Matchmaking Challenges in Impact Financing:
- Many funders/donors struggle to find projects that align with their specific values and interests.
- The overwhelming number of choices leads to indecision and sub-optimal funding decisions.
2. Inefficiencies in Sensemaking:
- Funders face difficulties in understanding and interpreting impact data due to poor data visualization and lack of intuitive user interfaces.
- This results in a disconnect between funders’ values and the projects they end up supporting.
3. Burden on Impact Creators:
- A significant portion of impact creators’ time is diverted to marketing and securing funds.
- The high demand for non-core activities hampers the actual creation and effectiveness of impact projects.
- Credible impact creation gets lost in the noise because they lack signal amplifying mechanisms.
These above mentioned problems create multiple bottlenecks that is preventing the meme impact=profits from playing out to its full potential.
Solution Space:
We hypothesise that by developing a platform that brings a web of trust through impact attestation, improved sensemaking via high context impact data visualization and enhancements in funder to impact creator matchmaking using capital allocation values, we can significantly reduce the bottlenecks that are slowing down impact financing.
1. Intelligent Matchmaking System:
- Development of a recommendation engine that aligns funders with projects, bounties and grants matching their preferences. Improved discovery + Personalized Recommendation.
- Utilise capital allocation value (CAV) and data analytics to curate personalised options for funders where they fund impact outcomes instead of individual projects or bounties.
- Intelligent capital allocation mechanisms linked to the funder and impact creators position in the web of trust powered by impact attestation.
2. Enhanced Sensemaking Tools:
- A powerful engine capable of digesting multiple sources of impact data to model efficient funding strategies that match the funders CAV preferences.
- Creation of user-friendly interfaces and visualisation tools to simplify the understanding of impact data.
- Provide funders with clear, concise, and engaging presentations of potential projects and their impact.
3. Support Systems for Impact Creators:
- Improvements to impact attestation and decentralised impact evaluation mechanisms.
- Develop a framework (reputation+incentives) that reduces the marketing and fundraising burdens on impact creators.
- Integration mechanism that enables linking to tools that assist in data collection for grant applications, impact certification and diverse incentivization mechanisms for social and financial capital.
4. Gitcoin & Ecosystem wide Collaboration:
- Leveraging Allo Protocol:Utilizing Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol, to democratize fund allocation, ensuring efficient and fair distribution of resources.
- Gitcoin Passport Integration: Incorporating the Gitcoin Passport system to verify and authenticate all participants, ensuring trust and legitimacy.
- Exploring an interplay with the likes of Grantscope, OS Observer, Hypercerts to name a few.
Key Insights:
As a bunch of builders, we at Atlantis are obsessed with the idea of building what matters, instead of what is clout-worthy. This ideology has forced us, as a group, to journey into the trenches… face unpleasant realities and explore the edges of web3 adoption.
Our joint mission last year with MCV was on using Web3 for solving water problems. That too in rural India, this mission presented so many extreme edge cases and we would like to report back to the community that there is hope.
In our pilot in rural India we were able to create a web3 network of 3000+ locals, who put together a peer to peer water network which improved their water data, water access, supply resilience with increase in harvesting and recycling. This network even opened up a channel to exchange surplus clean water that was regeneratively produced, something never done before. But everything wasn’t rosy, there was a lot of humbling learning. From where to place a “connect to wallet” button within the app to high gas fees, there were a lot of challenges that gave us a lot of insights into how dapps should look and feel for it to have mass adoption in emerging markets.
Our Motivation:
Building on the learnings from the MCV Pilot, we have been further exploring more usesases around RWIs. We’ve initiated projects across India’s Western Ghats and are exploring expansions into countries like Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. We are no longer just hopeful but indeed seeing the first signs of things working. Web3 can transform how humans operate on planet Earth, not just in the metaverse. It can also become the backbone for RWIs & RWAs. And the Gitcoin ethos ``Funding what matters” can turbocharge this hope.
It was this ideology (funding what matters) that brought me personally to the Gitcoin Ecosystem. As an entrepreneur who set out to build solutions to water shortage in 2018, I ended up at the deep end of the climate crisis. I looked around for funds to further our mission often only to be rejected as a tree hugger. Today Gitcoin is the reason Atlantis could grow, and had the opportunity to further its mission of regenerating the planet.
The meme Impact=Profit (
=:moneybag:) has the potential to create paradigm shifts that move human systems from a degenerative spiral to a future of regenerative progress and Gitcoin has built lego blocks that can make this a reality and the team at Atlantis has the drive and imagination to take these solutions to more folks in the emerging markets.
But we feel for this meme to bloom, our ecosystem needs to transcend beyond digital systems into real world systems. There have been positive signals and learnings from programs like Climate and Web3 education yet there remains a vast ocean of untapped opportunities in RWIs and RWAs that could benefit from battle tested mechanisms like QF and Sybil Resistance in a more accessible, engaging and cost effective wrapper.
Benefits for Gitcoin if we explore the possibilities further in this direction:
Today, Gitcoin has built lego blocks that are under utilized in the emerging markets. Impact Oracle can bring novel use cases to Passport, GTC and Allo. We want to see more GTC stacked Passports involved in creating real world impact, and producing data on-chain to corroborate their impact. Some high level benefits we have already identified:
- Increase in Allo GMV.
- More use cases for Passport and GTC, triggering community engagement.
- Onboarding new users into the Gitcoin Ecosystem from emerging markets.
What is next?
- We are seeking feedback to this thesis, to better understand the community’s interest.
- We will be back with a detailed proposal covering technical specs, alignment with Gitcoin’s essential intent, funding required, implementation strategy, milestones and a clear timeline.
This is our pre proposal. We will incorporate feedback and post a GCP submission by Wednesday next week.
Conclusion:
Our eventual mission is to bridge the gap between digital and real-world systems, we’re optimistic about the possibilities that lie ahead with Impact Oracle. Our vision for the product aligns closely with Gitcoin’s mission, and we believe this collaboration can lead to creating new attractors for impact financing. We look forward to all of your valuable feedback.
Thank you for reading 