[Proposal] Gitcoin builds GitcoinDAO; GTC Incentive Proposal

Gitcoin builds GitcoinDAO; GTC Incentive Proposal

Background

The Seasons Proposal discussed allocating GTC to the recipients of grants in the ‘Gitcoin Builds Gitcoin’ category. This proposal looks to ratify this one-time allocation for GR10.

We’re posting this proposal in parallel to the Seasons proposal based on forum feedback & community discussion. This proposal is a one-off incentive to help dogfood grants which support the GitcoinDAO.

We anticipate that this proposal will serve as a first step towards further allocation of treasury funds towards important causes across the Gitcoin ecosystem.

Motivation

The “Gitcoin builds Gitcoin” grants category was initially proposed to help bootstrap infrastructure and tooling that will support the GitcoinDAO. At the same time, Gitcoin DAO treasury holds a large amount of GTC meant to be used to develop Gitcoin. This proposal looks to utilize a portion of this allocation and distribute it to any grants that qualify within ‘Gitcoin Builds Gitcoin’.

As examples, Grants like Treasury Strategy for Gitcoin and Memes, Merch, Marketing are included in this category. The overall goal of this program is to provide funding for teams, projects and ideas that make GitcoinDAO easier to use, more accessible, and more decentralized.

Specification

Allocate a one-time grant of 20,000 GTC to the ‘Gitcoin builds Gitcoin’ GR10 category.

Note, this allocation could also be 10,000 GTC (which would be closer to the total amount of GR10 Matching to the ‘Gitcoin Builds Gitcoin’ ($50k matching and ~10k in contributions))

  • These funds will be allocated from the Community Treasury.
  • The funding will be allocated to grants in the ‘Gitcoin builds Gitcoin’ category pro-rata using the same quadratic formula as matching pool funds.
  • Looking forward to future grants rounds, this funding will encourage the community to create grants for the Gitcoin builds Gitcoin category, resulting in more active development of both core and periphiral infrastructure for the GitcoinDAO.

TL;DR

Allocate 10k or 20k GTC from the Community Treasury to the ‘Gitcoin builds Gitcoin’ GR10 category in order to accelerate development of tooling and infrasturcture for the GitcoinDAO.

22 Likes

I see there is already a 50K round to fund GitcoinDAO focused projects. Why the need for an extra 10/20 GTC, especially since you propose the GTC is allocated pro-rata using the same quadratic formula as matching pool funds.

It is also worth noting that the GitcoinDAO round did not begin at the same time as the general gr10 grants round. Projects that posted earlier had an advantage and some that posted late seem way underfunded, specifically the Anti Fraud Workstream.

If this proposal proceeds to voting, then we will have a situation where the stewards, who seem to be the main recipients of this side round, will be voting on whether or not to allocate GTC to themselves/their projects.

8 Likes

Alright, this is great. I think dog-fooding this rewards process is ideal.

I’d vote for sticking with 20k GTC as we want the owners of these grants to have more governance power in the system, since they are the ones actually stepping up to do the work.

This would furthermore drive up the interest for becoming a Steward, and force the existing stewards to come up with a better screening process for adopting new stewards.

Lastly I think you probably want the stewards to have more of the GTC distro over other group’s at this time, as they are the ones least likely to sell the tokens onto the market, because we know the ultimate long term value of the Gitcoin protocol and we can impact it’s success.

If the community of GTC holders is against this idea then they are free to remove delegation from those who support rewards and vote for someone who is willing to do everything out of the goodness of their hearts :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: but to me that doesn’t make economical sense and doesn’t align incentives towards long term contributions and doesn’t encourage the stewards to keep driving value into the ecosystem that benefits the entire token holder community.

These are just my thoughts, and I’d be happy to hear from others on this. Thanks for posting this @James you’re collaboration here is top notch :handshake:🏼

7 Likes

It’s cool by me. GTC for those projects will help other future grant seekers take this path which will help sustain GTC in the open market.

4 Likes

I do not agree with the notion that the self appointed stewards “care more about the DAO than the rest of us” and thus should be given more governance tokens.

  1. They already have around 80% of the voting rights via delegation, so granting them more governance power makes no sense.

  2. The argument that they care more and have no profit motive is also mute. Just today it was revealed that a steward has been cheating the grants system by offering tokens in exchange for contributions, which is against the rules. His 3 grants have received a combined $91,968 so far. (This doesn’t include this round’s matching)

5 Likes

Hey @truthtalker not sure what specifically you are talking about regarding grants, but I don’t think this is the place to throw around accusations. If you have something constructive to add to the conversation then by all means please add it.

As far as “the rest of us” VS “the stewards” the Steward program is totally open for anyone to participate in, we don’t currently have a better way of coordianting the people who want to contribute to the GitcoinDAO on a more full-time basis. So as they say, don’t fight em, join em, :partying_face:

As far your first comment, caring about the DAO doesn’t make the wheels of progress move, actions do, and IMO those actions need to be rewarded in some way so that there is a proportional flow of value between the network and it’s participants.

1 Like

I think dog-fooding have played their part we are community members should look into how to move forward. I’m in support of allocating 20k gtc.

2 Likes

With GR10 complete, we wanted to get this proposal up on snapshot for community vote; Snapshot

The Snaphot also includes a sheet that breaksdown these GTC allocations.

1 Like

I think an option 3 could have been great? Allocate the funds, using the same Quadratics mechanism, but split the pot in half, Before Gr10 and After Gr10.

In my opinion I think 20k GTC is a lot of GTC…

Option 2 is great also, I just think this could be discussed a bit further before the re-distribution.

2 Likes

I totally agree, but it is better to distribute it evenly, because judging from the current grantees, many projects receive small grants and large projects receive large grants.

I hope the grant allocation pays more attention to small projects

It has been noted above that this proposal will unevenly distribute tokens to the the Stewards groups that first applied due to the quadratic aspect. This is completely unacceptable. There is no possible reason for uneven distribution.

The funds should be fairly distributed according to the ratio of number of stewards per group. Just ignore the quadratic step. At this point we don’t even know what amount of a discrepancy we are agreeing on.

I don’t understand what other posters have been mentioning about funding stewards. After reading the proposal and the snapshots this is to allocate extra GTC to the grants that belonged in the Building Gitcoin category. These are grants that are made in order to improve gitcoin, so it makes sense to have some extra incentives for that work.

Can’t be sure on the actual amount but this is for the gitcoin treasury people to decide, if they can afford it. Would have been nice to have a bit more options on the amount I guess.

But overall the idea is good and I am incilned to vote for it. We would need to make sure very carefully though which grants get approved to be on the improving gitcoin category. As with these extra incentives grants will want to switch to be part of this category.

1 Like

I actually came up with a question. Looking at the screenshot at the snapshot I see 15 grants.

In the actual grant category (Grants | Gitcoin) I see 14 grants.

Why is one missing? I am not sure which one is it but sounds like its’ the 2nd one in the list the “Incubating Governauts”.

What am I missing?

did you ever find an answer for this?

@lefterisjp looks like this was just an error with the interface, they should be visible now!

2 Likes

Thank you. This helps me cast my vote then.

My only feedback is as stated above to have the amount also decidable.

Additionally we need to have some form of strict requirements for the “Gitcoin DAO” grants as the presence of extra incentives will make many people want to categorize their grants in this category.

1 Like

I agree that the amount is determined by the financial staff of gitcoin, and the division needs to be reasonable and there is no pressure.