[Proposal] Ratify the Results of Grants Round 15 and Formally Request the Community Multisig Holders to Payout Matching Allocations

đŸŒ± Gitcoin Grants
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We ask our Community Stewards to ratify the GR15 payout amounts as being correct, fair, and abiding to community norms, including the judgments and sanctions made by the Fraud Detection & Defense workstream.

The full list of final results & payout amounts can be found here.

We would like to suggest voting on Snapshot to begin on Wednesday, October 5th in advance of payouts being made on Friday, October 14th.

Options to vote on:

1. Ratify the round results

You ratify the results as reported by the Public Goods Funding & Fraud Detection & Defense workstreams and request the keyholders of the community multisig to payout funds according to the GR15 final payout amounts through the non-custodial GR15 deployment contract.

2. Request further deliberation

You do not ratify the results and request keyholders of the community multi-sig wallet to delay payment until further notice.

TLDR from the GR15 Round [blog post to follow on Monday]:

  • Grants Round 15 (GR15) ran from September 7-22, 2022.
  • Almost $4.4M will be distributed to public goods as part of the round, of which $3.1M came from the combined matching pools and $1.3M was contributed by the community.
  • Strong participation from the community with over 39,700 contributors making over 465,000 contributions to over 1,400 grants.
  • GR15 featured 17 rounds:
    • The main round
    • 12 Ecosystem rounds: Aurora, a16z, Eth Infra (Coinbase, Yearn), ENS, Forta, Loot, Mask, Open Gaming, PlanckerDAO & Scroll, Polygon, Unlock Protocol, ZKTech
    • 4 cause rounds: Climate Solutions, Advocacy – Crypto Regulation, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Decentralized Science (DeSci) [NEW]
  • In GR15, we had the same main pool structure as we have the past three rounds – in GR12, the community chose to pilot a single pool approach with a maximum cap for the main round rather than a category-based setup. The main round funded over 1,000 grants with over $800,000 in funding. While this is a huge contribution to funding public goods, we have reached the scale that requires us to potentially refocus the Gitcoin grants program. The generality of the round and broad eligibility policy criteria made for a challenging review process at this scale. As a result there may be changes to the main round as we rethink how we structure the Gitcoin grants program when we move it to the protocol.
  • In GR15 the main pool was smaller in total funds ($500,000) but it is the first round that we did not use any of the funds from the multisig (last round we pulled the full $1M that funded the main round matching pool from the multisig). This is a huge success around rallying more support for our main round as a whole.

We’re excited for GR16 and beyond as we reconsider how we run our Gitcoin Grants Program in the process of transitioning it successfully to the protocol.

FDD’s Governance Brief for an overview of sybil detection will be out soon, stay tuned.

For questions, comments, or concerns on any of the above, please comment below or join the Gitcoin Discord.

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Hey Janine Thanks for this post and round up! I have a question on this ^^ Historically a large number of funds are paid out from the Grants Matching multisig, because that is where donors deposit funds for the round. Last round was the first round in years in which we did not collect as much money as we paid out. I love the decision to move to $500k to make sure we have a sustainable program given the struggles with fundraising for the main round in GR14. My question is
 are we not collecting the $500k to the grant multisig again? Or is that process changing somehow with the payout this time?

This is really interesting to see. This means with 1400 total funded, and only 1000+ in the main round, we had roughly 400 grants that were not eligible for the main round, but were eligible for side rounds, is that right?

There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter lamenting how Gitcoin is not a great source for open source software development. I wonder if this “one giant main pool” is still the right approach. It puts all projects on equal footing for funding, and likely misses some of Gitcoin’s roots in ensuring we have funds for Open Source Software projects specifically. I would love to see if others feel this experiment has been harmful to the grants program over the last few rounds.

Overall, I am supportive of making the payouts and thanks again for the recap!

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Thank you for the post. The results look fine to me

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What Janine meant by “we did not use any of the funds from the multisig” is that “we did not have to subsidize/top up the matching pool with existing multisig funds”. We are still funding matches via the regular multisig, and the excess funds raised will still go to the regular multisig.

On past rounds, I believe the truth is somewhere in between what each of you said - this is definitely not the first round we did not have to subsidize, but GR14 was also not the only round as of late we did subsidize. Ie. I’m pretty sure for GR12/13 we did have to add an extra $100-200k to the pool from existing funds due to various situations where donations did not come in or we wanted to top up rounds. But GR14 was the largest case with ~$500k+ subsidized. And then there were certainly many rounds GR10 and earlier where we raised extra that stayed in the multisig.

Some of those 400 were indeed in side rounds and not the main round. But this also includes many grants that were not eligible for matching at all, found to be sybils/fraud/impersonations, violated other policies and removed mid round, etc. Take a look at row 1033 onward

Agree with you here - excited to rethink and experiment with the Gitcoin Program and what the main round evolves into as we transition to the new protocol soon.

Anyway, I am supportive of these results and moving forward with payouts as planned when the time comes!

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Thanks for the breakdown here everyone! I am supportive of these results.

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Thanks for the great overview, and thx for the extra Qs here @kyle & insights @connor :pray:

Supportive of this payout.

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Great recap and overall another round of hard work distributing capital to worthy projects. I’m supportive of the results.

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Here is the GR15 Fraud Report for anyone who would like to see it! Additionally, I am supportive of the final results.

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Appreciate the recap! Also kudos to the entire team for the hard work that went into making this round happen, and for the thoughtfulness going into shaping what GR16 might look like.

I’m supportive of the payout as well.

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First off, kudos to you all for these outcomes and all of the hard work in making this GR15 be a success.

I do echo Kyle’s sentiment on missing some of Gitcoin’s roots and funding Open Source Software, and appreciate the open conversations on if/how we can better support this.

With that being said I am in support of making the payouts! Much appreciate the recap and transparency of the outcomes here!

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Thank you for this very insightful recap. Congrats for all those involved in all this hard work & dedication. Am in full support of the final results.

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This is amazing work - and its great to see how the conclusion of GR15 comes to a close.

I find this summary file to be very helpful to reconcile grant application performance and average payout per grant by Ecosystem round.

Also in the summary file, under the “GR15 Round by Round_Final” there are notes indicating “pending KYC” for the a16z subround. Will Gitcoin have to trigger a second payment to the a16z recipients once the “Pending KYC + Sanction Reviews” is complete?

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It would help to amend the top of this post with the link to the snapshot when the vote goes live.

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The results looks great. This round the DAO has been coordinated almost to the max(comparing with other rounds). There were hard times that required working in “high frequency”, but all turned out fine. Congratulations everyone!

On another note, I dream of a day in which we will see the more municipalities, institutions, entities and even the EU experimenting with the Gitcoin protocol and hosting rounds :slight_smile: :smiley:

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Thanks a lot for all the GitcoinDAO members hard working!
Thank Public goods, FDD, MMM, etc workstreams!

I have voted “yes” on snapshot for support!

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Massive thank you to all the GitcoinDAO stewards who have worked so hard to make this possible! :clap:

I recognize what a massive coordination challenge this is. From partnerships securing match funding to validating grant applications in huge volumes—this is a major gift.

We’re looking for ways to support the Gitcoin ecosystem moving forward to give back and continue to build momentum for generations to come.

Keep up the great work frens! :hugs:

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Hi Shawn, thanks for the response. We are hoping to reconcile all KYC and sanction reviews before payouts this Thursday. If anyone in their round does not do the KYC and sanction request. We will withhold their payments until they do and are approved.

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@J9leger congratulations to you and the team. This snapshot passed with ~100% approval rate. Metrics:
524 unique votes
3.8M GTC tokens cast.
And thank you to all the commenters & voters who took the time to participate in Gitcoin Governance.
https://snapshot.org/#/gitcoindao.eth/proposal/0x41c47d0531dc252c1ae2e4caf256fa7c5f0c09bd71f4c02f543b111d3cf788ab