[Proposal] GR14 Round Structure & Grants Eligibility Update

📜 Proposals
37

QF grants with no rules and a completely off-hands unmoderated approach will never work.

In such a case any project, no matter how big or well funded can take part and apply.

Assuming byzantine behavior and non-honest participants the QF round then devolves to a battle between the marketing departments of big organizations.

Which organization can better use their well funded marketing team to organize social media campaigns to get the most people to vote for them and drain the matching pot in their favor?

In the meantime, the projects that really need the funding, 2-3 devs banding together to build a public good get nothing.

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38

I agree, we will always need grant curation and yes, it’s great to get the community involved(as you stated above), that’s why we will be using Ethelo to begin the shift to permissionless reviews :slight_smile:
We will still have trusted reviewers in that permissionless system that handle the main round and if other ecosystems/causes want to use this system, they will be able to do it. Each round could have it’s own rules and people that will be paid to curate(review) according to those rules.

We will see how Grant Investigations perform at the end GR14 and how many fraudulent/malice/non-eligible grant applications we will find.
Lately we also figured out that we need to investigate grants from round to round to ensure that they are not just “milking the cow” and actually building something. This

I agree…this is what I am actually worried about. That’s why we handle every case with equal importance. A “small” project today can be the next “Uniswap” or even “GItcoin” :slight_smile:

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39

Yes. This was the basis for the decision with BrightID and we made that decision based on feedback from 138 Gitcoin users who overwhelmingly wanted us to fund public goods over worrying about exact policy.

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40

I agree. This is my reasoning for funding the “Trust Building” squad in option 2 on our (FDD) budget proposal. We need to provide communities with a software tool that decentralizes their content moderation (grant eligibility).

The other argument is that we should ship Grants 2.0 and let communities delegate the authority.

Either way, a marketplace will be formed for better solutions to the problem, but unfortunately the one that is not delegated authority would be a public good infrastructure that no one entity would invest in building.

I believe that if we don’t invest in it now, to ship it with grants 2.0 protocol, then it will not be built.

Yes, and if there is delegated authority to moderate content, then it is easy to corrupt. But if we shipped a tool for the communities to express their inter-subjective consensus, we would empower better results aligned with our overall mission.

Communities will choose different “funding stacks” with grants 2.0. These stacks will be composed of 4 modular components:

  1. Funding mechanisms (Voting weight distribution) - QF, Pairwise QF, MACI, SACI, 1p1V, Pluralist Pairwise QF, QF w/ $1 Tax, etc

  2. Grant discoverability curation (Who gets the best spot on the shelf) - Staking on grants (TCR), JokeDAO/nounsdao curation method, Pluralist signalling

  3. Grant eligibility curation (Content moderation) - Delegated authority, Oracles, Inter-subjective consensus, tbd new models…

  4. Sybil-Resistance Services (How do we know each voter is legitimate?) - Algorithmic (dPoPP reader or current ML), rules based (constraints based on dPoPP stamps or other reputation/holdings), Deep Learning, staking on other users, mechanism design tied into the funding mechanism, etc

When these stacks compete to see which allocates public goods funding in a way that is best for the community, the evolutionary pressue is on matching pools to select a funding stack that works for the users/participants/donors.

The idea would be that we can allow the public goods funding rails to compete with each other rather than the capital itself.

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41

Hey everyone. Glad to see this thoughtful and constructive discussion of these important topics.

I personally feel strongly that projects should not be disqualified for having a token or NFT. Frankly this is the core infrastructure of web3 it seems misguided to eliminate projects from potential funding for wanting to build things that use cryptoeconomic building blocks. I’m focused specifically on ReFi projects and other projects in the cause rounds who are trying to use these tools to make the world a better place. I believe we should be encouraging the use of crypto as a key part of their projects infrastructure. Isn’t that what we want? Why would we discourage using cryptoeconomics and composability to coordinate and fund solutions?

I tried to explain this debate to a friend who isn’t in crypto and they couldn’t wrap their head around it… “wait the people in crypto don’t want to fund projects that are using tokens and NFTs”.

There is a big difference in my opinion between a token sale and the use of a token for say carbon credits or as a mechanism for governance. Yes these tokens have value but that is a good thing in these situations. Does it automatically mean these projects no longer need funding? Maybe if they did a token sale and raised millions of dollars that is a different story but in that case we are really talking about how much funding a project has already which is less of an issue of having a token and more an issue of a variety of external factors that effect the size of their treasury.

It feels to me like the token rule idea is a hold over from the ICO days. I’m all for taking steps to ensure projects are not scams, and focusing the majority of our support to projects that need it but simply cutting out anyone who is using tokens cuts out a big chunk of our community in DAOs and ReFi projects.

I think an appeal is one possible solution as has been suggested. Another approach would be to carve out some exceptions to that rule like for example not excluding ReFi projects for using tokens for climate solutions. “Appeal” feels a bit punitive, perhaps we need to be more nuanced about how these decisions are made especially in ecosystem and cause rounds. Refi projects are very up front about what they are building and why, they shouldn’t have to appeal as if they are asking for forgiveness for something they are doing wrong. They should apply for funding and we should have the capacity to make nuanced decisions based on use cases.

I am acutely aware of the operational constraints we are already working within and the implications of a more nuanced process. Thus I think its important we are clear about what we consider appropriate and what we don’t so that team members can focus on implementing those rules and don’t need to go through multiple rounds of initial review and then appeals.

If this is indeed going to be ReFi Summer we should think carefully about the implications of this decision.

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42

It actually seems like the two points of view here are not that different:

Option 1: No token policy stays, but projects that want to can apply for an exception and can be approved after a review (case by case basis)

Option 2: Token policy is updated with some general guidelines and thresholds, but projects still are applying anyway when opening a grant and are always subject to review and approval (case by case basis)

I don’t think anyone is really trying to change the policy to “all projects with tokens are allowed no matter what”, but maybe that wasn’t explicitly clear in the initial proposal. I also don’t think anyone is really arguing for a “no token projects allowed no matter what” either.

It doesn’t look like we’ll come to a resolution to make a change before GR14, and that’s ok. But IMO these two options are essentially the same thing in practice. So I suppose the question is, which one is more work for the DAO, and which one is fairer for grants.

I’d argue even if we went for option 1, we’d still want to provide some guidance and criteria about what types of projects/tokens are likely eligible for an exception (so we don’t get as many applications to review that are obvious declines, and so our reasoning is public/decisions are justifiable and applied equally). This makes it even closer to option 2, essentially the same thing.

I think in the long term it will be less work for the DAO and fairer to grantees if we provide general guidelines for what kinds of token projects could be approved, and provide some examples, even if the metrics are not strict values.

So before making a decision here, I think the details to nail down are 1. What is the review/appeal process (I don’t think a BrightID situation with a big forum debate and governance vote is scalable, FDD will likely have to make decisions, all the more reason to set public guidelines), and 2. What those rough guidelines should be (market cap? treasury? funding/runway? type or mechanism of token? etc)

Again, doubt this can happen before GR14, but just wanted to state that I really think most people in this thread are in agreement that certain types of projects with tokens should be allowed, but simply disagree on the best policy to communicate and enforce that.

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43

Yes.

As stated above exactly because of this I think we should not change the rule at all now, but instead properly define what token projects are okay.

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44

Well said. Totally agree. I think we are all saying similar things here.

+1

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45

This conversation has evolved since this post, but I feel the need to clarify the following exchange:

Regarding the vision for Grants 2, it is not our vision to change the way Gitcoin runs its rounds.

It is our vision to enable grant programs outside of Gitcoin to come to their own policy decisions with their communities and to tailor their programs to their needs. These will and should differ from the set of choices the Gitcoin community has made to run our grant rounds.

Let’s not conflate the choices we make for the running of our rounds at Gitcoin, with the choices other communities may make when using the Grants 2 protocol.

The community decided policies for Gitcoin grants will still hold when Gitcoin runs its rounds on top of Grants 2. :handshake:

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46

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful dialogue here - eligibility is definitely a nuanced topic, and it is great to see so many people engaging so passionately.

The proposal is now up on Snapshot for voting.

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47

Thank you for the clarification. I forgot to specify that the main round will not align. It’s also a very good idea to let the communities decide.

You/we could inform them and brief the round owners on how we suggest they should run their round and what are the biggest issues/vulnerabilities and no-no’s :smiley: (that we encountered)

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48

There has been a lot of debate here, I want to mention I really appreciate the discussion. It’s opened my eyes to a number of use cases I hadn’t considered, and the broader implications of us denying a grant.

I still feel that those with a token should apply, get denied, and then appeal. I know this creates friction for us, but to me it send the “right” message that token launches (which fund a project) are a big deal, and exclude you for funding from the community match pool.

Like it was pointed out, we want to offer more granularity to those ecosystems who are okay with having a token, but we dont have that ability yet. so… for GR14, I would say we keep the rules the same and then evaluate once we have Grants 2.0 ready.

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49

Agree here and should those allegations be true it is 100% not conducive to levelling out the playing field in terms of access to resource

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50

A protocol should always be un-opinionated and specific communities should come with their own rules. A best practices can be shared based on Gitcoin experience but again, each community will be able to take what they need and leave the rest

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51

Can we apply a matrix here as I am trying to do in the governance flow so that an easily digestible and usable format is in place for people to be able to self determine eligibility? Almost a “are you aligned enough to ride” dynamic where we have a set of attributes that must be met for an eligibility score?

Very much pulling from the engagement score we’re been working on with Steward Cards and creating a pattern of self evaluation and accountability vs pages of text…

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52

There is a side-effect to making the eligibility change. A likely big increase in approved grants.

I think this will have beneficial PR optics in a time of decreasing momentum and bear markets. In season 13 we had our first decrease in numbers…this doesn’t paint a nice picture. How much better would it look if we were able to announce big increases to approved grant numbers?

This might help extend our Overton window…

Also, I want to re-state my view that

If a project is a true public good it really doesn’t matter whether they have NFTs or other tokens.

If only we could quickly hold community polls about the projects of questionable public good benefit we could ignore the entire token/nft debate. If a project is deemed a true public good or public-good-benefit by the majority of our community the fundraising methods become irrelevant (unless illegal or unethical). The more fundraising such a project achieves the more benefits accrue to public goods. Even if by an NFT sale.

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53

We will always be here for consultancy. I was talking from a POV in which it would be a waist of resources to not share with them what we believe is of crucial importance for their success. :slight_smile:

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54

@David_Dyor - we discussed the last round the eligibility for multiple grants proposals from one DAO/organization, so I just wanted to check if multiple-proposal from one community is still not an option.

to recap on the specific topic:

  • Bankless has 23 000 members, and they are working in self-organized groups, called guilds and projects.
  • Some of the projects may/may not be a public good (Bankless Academy, Bounty Board, DAO dash, Ultrasound merch, and many more)
  • As of now, a few tried to apply but have been declined based on the one DAO one proposal rule

My question is if this rule still applies for GR14 or not

And my second question is, does this rule apply only for the main matching round or overall.

55

It surprises me sometimes how far we’ve gotten away from the original intent of the Quadratic Funding paper. The ‘curator’, at least in my reading of that paper, was supposed to be the community itself.

I feel that what’s happened is that “GitCoinDAO” the organization has taken over “Curation” task and as a direct result any hope of the community building that skillset themselves will disappear. The obvious, logical conclusion of the path we’re on is human-in-the-loop, centralized KYC.

The discussion should not be about whether or not a centralized workstream should allow or disallow projects to participate with or without tokens. It should be about how we can enable, teach, train, and foster an environment where the community builds the skillset themselves.

Having said that – we shouldn’t allow projects that are already funded with tokens to receive matching funds.

56

Right now the vast majority of projects that have tokens also receive some funding benefit from them (e.g. holding in treasury, selling to investors, etc) upon launch or sometime in the future when tokens become transferable. In these cases, I don’t think it makes sense for them to get matching funds on Gitcoin so we can prioritize public goods that don’t have a clear funding mechanism.

I lean towards the process of token projects that aren’t using them for funding (e.g. team/treasury didn’t retain any tokens, etc) can apply for an exception. I also believe we can adjust the eligibility later on if we’re seeing way more tokens unrelated to funding.

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