Proposal for Fiat Donations in Grants Stack

[noahchonlee]

During GG21, the viaPrize team added a way to donate with PayPal to the Open Civics round.

Overall stats:

$3,778.70 in crowdfunding

141 donors

337 total donations

$11.21 average donation

PayPal stats (after PayPal and viaPrize fees and not including transactions sent for test purposes):

$272.60 in crowdfunding

12 donors

13 donations

$62.30 average donations

7.21% of donation volume came from PayPal. Upon review, Umar Khan the head of data for Gitcoin said that the proof of personhood through PayPal is sufficiently strong for sybil resistance. More details here

We believe this number would be much higher if the option were added directly into Grants Stack because this was a new, unfamiliar feature only found on a separate website.

If it were directly in Grants Stack, perhaps the number would be 10-30% immediately (impossible to know until we try it.)

Almost all of the ongoing Allo volume is through Grants Stack at this point with roughly 2M in donations per year. A 10-30% increase would mean 200k-600k more Allo GMV within a year.

Across the long-term, adding fiat capabilities to Grants Stack means that Allo Protocol is accessible to billions more people, increasing the potential user base by 100x.

Not only that, making the platform more accessible means easier partnerships with major corporations and governments. Grants stack would no longer be another crypto platform just for crypto users, it would be a blockchain-based platform that anyone can use.

Maybe in 5 years Allo GMV will be 10x thanks to this capability.

These numbers are conjecture. It is impossible to know until we try. That is why we propose a one-time set up fee + a usage-based deal.

We are likely converting viaPrize into a nonprofit and launching a second company specifically for making web3 platforms more accessible to non-crypto users. We are already lining up clients in our waitlist who are sending us deposits. Visit normie.tech to sign up for a consultation.

We would like to negotiate a contract with Gitcoin to build these features directly into Grants Stack.

The system works by generating a wallet for each fiat user and sending stablecoins from a crypto reserve through the users’ wallet and into the smart contract.

We propose to charge a one-time set-up fee (essential so we have funds in the crypto reserve) and an ongoing percentage fee on fiat donations with a revenue split with Gitcoin. This would add valuable insight into how users would respond to a platform fee which is a potential way Gitcoin could become self-sustaining long-term.

Does the community want this?

Open Civics community has noted fiat capabilities as one of the most demanded capabilities for their rounds. Full retrospective here

During GG21, a majority of community round teams asked for us to set this up for them when they saw what we made with Open Civics. We didn’t have the resources to set up a crypto reserve for all of them.

We already have 4 groups applying for community rounds asking us if we can do this with them for GG22 and also Monty of the Celo rounds.

We believe meeting this community demand directly within Grants Stack in time for GG22 would be the best solution. We expect the Gitcoin team is extremely busy, so we look forward to hearing if that is a feasible time frame or if we should plan for something further into the future. The demand on dev time for Gitcoin would be minimal as we just need to add a button and our system takes care of the rest. Upon review we also found that this feature would be unaffected by the transition to Allo 2.1

To my knowledge, this is the biggest action Gitcoin could take with the potential to massively and quickly increase Allo GMV by opening up Grants Stack to 100x as many people.

And of course, we invite community input on this thread.

It is thanks to the support of this community that our team exists and we want to know what would genuinely be helpful for the ecosystem. Grateful to @umarkhaneth @owocki @MathildaDV @masterhw @omniharmonic @deltajuliet @rohit @Sov @thedevanshmehta for their encouragement in this process as we’ve gradually learned how Allo works over the past year.

If you have thoughts on what fiat donations would mean for Gitcoin, please leave a comment.

[umarkhaneth]

Great to see you making a proposal on the forum @noahchonlee! You and your team are a shipping machine.

From my perspective, the bootstrapped GG21 experiment sufficiently showed there was both demand and usage of fiat payments. It’s great that this set up drives Allo GMV.

@noahchonlee

We propose to charge a one-time set-up fee (essential so we have funds in the crypto reserve) and an ongoing percentage fee on fiat donations with a revenue split with Gitcoin.

I wonder if you have a specific numerical ask here and if this is the type of thing that goes through gitcoin’s governance or another process

[meglister]

Hey @noahchonlee ! Thanks so much for posting this – I’m excited that you guys want to contribute to GS and push fiat donations forward. How we move forward depends on the technical plan here, I think a good next step is to connect w our product/eng team to figure out what the specific proposal is. Then we can figure out go-forward plan and commercial terms.

[metahands]

Echoing the sentiment here, we saw fiat options as a major request in the first Ma Earth grants round, and expect this to continue to be the case.

[noahchonlee]

Hey Umar!
Mathilda had encouraged us to apply for a citizens grant. Do you think thats the best path forward for this?

For pricing we were thinking of charging both a retroactive + usage based model.
Usage based:
5% transaction cut for credit card/paypal (3.5% + $0.35 per transaction goes to paypal, 0.75% to viaPrize team and 0.75% to Gitcoin). This would be ongoing.

Retroactive:
We are willing to bet on our belief in how this will increase Allo GMV.
We suggest we are paid the equivalent of the Allo GMV processed through us after 1 year. We expect the number to increase exponentially afterward, but this would be the one time retroactive cost.

We would need an upfront transfer to keep our crypto reserves stocked.
For now we manually refill it by turning the fiat into stablecoin. Do you have any data on whats the most thats been donated within one weekend? We would want to stock the reserves with that amount minimum.

Then after 1 year (and at least after 4 GGs end, in case there’s a delay) we would be sent: Allo GMV from fiat minus the upfront transfer

We also are testing bank transfers which may invite much larger one time transactions. If theres a single large donation (such as the 400k donation to Gitcoin in 2021) instead of using reserves our team can manually handle such cases within a few day delay.

[noahchonlee]

Thank you for the connect to Kat! We have a call Friday

[noahchonlee]

Update, we have more community rounds asking us to add this integration, we don’t have the resources for it so would have to pick just a couple and say no to the rest if we don’t do this with Gitcoin

[MontyMerlin]

Love this proposal!

Would be really great to see this implemented in time for GG22. I know the BioFi Pathfinders round would really appreciate this as a lot of their potential donors may be non-Web3 native.

Would be awesome to see this functionality integrated directly into Grants Stack, if not would love to set up a ViaPrize page for GG22 for the rounds on Celo! :))

[mars]

@noahchonlee

Update, we have more community rounds asking us to add this integration, we don’t have the resources for it so would have to pick just a couple and say no to the rest if we don’t do this with Gitcoin

Update from my side as well.

The Planetary Council round got rejected: it means less rounds for you, more time for me. I can totally help you with reviewing / evaluating / scoring your round Youth in Need as a juror / evaluator.

I also left the comment on the GitHub issue that you’ve created: Fiat Donations in Grants Stack · Issue #3658 · gitcoinco/grants-stack · GitHub

Longer term I would like to suggest / discuss / propose (not sure what’s the best place / form / factor) some additional features in the Grant Stack, areas adjacent to accepting PayPal / credit cards…

I see this as on-topic / related / worthy discussion. Starting from donor CRM and ability to follow up with people via email / socials. This is inspired by the current Climate Coordination Network Jokerace: it would be so handy to follow up with existing donors. This feature is / seems incredibly useful in terms of adoption / scaling / GMV (gross marketplace value)

[noahchonlee]

That’s an intriguing idea. Maybe we could have a little checkbox when people check out during donation saying “send me email updates from the projects I’m donating to.” If fiat, we already are getting their email. If crypto donation, maybe if they click the checkbox then a text field appears where they can add their email. Maybe this could even be linked to Karma Gap so when a project adds an update to their project it is automatically sent out in an email to all donors who checkmarked the box. Also chatted with Mahesh about making Karma Gap gasless. If we made karma gap and gitcoin gasless and include web2 login then anyone could easily participate in these systems and have easy email communication in the ecosystem. I think a great first step even before getting complex impact tracking is just having a way to email someone you gave money to so you can ask, “hey, what’s going on?”

[noahchonlee]

Probly not most important data point but my 2nd most liked tweet (after the tweet about ppl funding the youth in need round) is the suggestion to add fiat to Gitcoin

Other update, called with Sov who said DAO vote could be way to move forward with this, gave lotsa helpful advice

And awesome call with Kat and Ed and we clarified technical side, and theyre are asking Meg best approach for funding it, and they suggested I put together a clear product requirements doc with showing the user flow so I’ll work on that (tl;dr it’s super simple and just click pay with Paypal for donors, for project managers they’d just have to send us a CSV which we send back to them with the whitelisted wallet addresses)

[mmurthy]

@noahchonlee

Maybe this could even be linked to Karma Gap so when a project adds an update to their project it is automatically sent out in an email to all donors who checkmarked the box.

We already have this and many funders are receiving updates from projects they funded every month!

Easy to subscribe, just enter your wallet address, we fetch all the projects you funded and will subscribe you to those project updates.

Karma GAP - Gitcoin community grants

[noahchonlee]

Brilliant!!
Ill see if i can include instructions for donors to do that in the youth in need round description

[noahchonlee]

As recommended by Kat I’m writing up here details on the user flow

Donor user flow:

Click “donate with Paypal” in their grant stack cart. Do the usual PayPal checkout. That’s it.
Video here of how we did it in the viaPrize website: https://photos.app.goo.gl/UbqyYnGS78jQmhJb7

Project manager user flow:
At the end of the round, We send the CSV back with the list of whitelisted wallets. That’s it for the project manager.

Note on the CSV:
If the round manager or Gitcoin prefers, instead of doing this for them, we could show them the Paypal data and they could edit the CSV themselves. We might be able to automate this in the future as well. For now it’s pretty easy to manually whitelist the wallets with a checkmark associated with verified Paypal accounts.