Hey all,
I would like to make a proposal for the gitcoin 1.0 page. Each grant has the " Lifetime funding received" which is a $ amount. I would like to propose to remove it from all grant pages. I would even go so far and ask to remove it with urgency.
My reasons follow below:
- It’s wrong and by a big margin. The calculation is simply off and I have pointed that out multiple times in the past but it was never fixed. There were improvements, then there were bugs again, regressions etc. We used to use the gitcoin API (where this number comes from) in the past in rotki. But since we are an accounting tool and financial accuracy is important for us and our users we had to stop using it and implement our own solution. With gitcoin 1.0 deprecated I understand it will never be fixed but having a wrong number there is harmful.
- It gives the wrong idea since its supposed to be amount at the time received. Many grants were funded through multiple tokens, not only stables. Tokens which have lost their value by 50-90% since the time of funding and as such the amount is off.
- Some grants are live since 2019, so the amount is going to be high~ish compared to other grants. The number does not take into account the duration the grant is active.
And you may ask why is it that bad? Let me tell you how it has harmed grants (including the one I am running – rotki).
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It creates a tax liability. This is the most important problem and why I am writing this here today though I wanted to let it slide. We at rotki are paying taxes as a Germany entity for all our revenue. And donations are also revenue so we owe taxes on them. We also are an accounting application and have our own way of calculating the per year income through grants which is accurate and tested thoroughly since it uses the actual on-chain data. Yet the real amount and the amount shown in the gitcoin page differ by so much that our accountant warned us we may get audited since the amount shown in the official gitcoin page should be correct and is what the tax authorities would look at.
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Some grants were excluded from some ecosystem rounds due to having a high (>$50k) lifetime funding. While each ecosystem is free to manage their own round as they see fit, I believe that the number creates wrong expectations for all the 3 reasons I mentioned above … most important of all that it’s wrong by a very big margin.
I am not sure if this should be a DAO issue or a github issue for GitHub - gitcoinco/web: Grow Open Source but I believe it should be here and discussed by the community as grants 1.0 is still the number 1 product of gitcoin.
Just one of the many issues we had and what lead us removing our integration with the gitcoin API: Gitcoin API tests are failing since API started rounding results · Issue #3434 · rotki/rotki · GitHub