Thank You for Supporting Web3 for Universities!
I’m starting this round report by saying a big Thank You to every donor, project team, community supporter, and contributor who made the Web3 for Universities round a success.
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Special thanks to the financial backers for this round, Gitcoin, @owocki, Celo Blockchain and B<>rder/ess.
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Special thanks to Let’s Grow Dao for the opportunity for grantees to tell their stories, talk about their projects, and give a spotlight every day to the Web3 For Universities Community round, during GG23.
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Special thanks to every donor who gave $1, $2, and sometimes $10 to projects in the web3 for the Universities Community Round.
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Special thanks to our round advisors, @Oba-One, @MattyCompost, @thinkDecade whose guidance helped shape a fair, meaningful, and impact-focused grants process. Your input on grantee selection, sybil defense, and community curation was invaluable.
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Deep gratitude to the B<>rder/ess team — the heartbeat behind this round.
From coordination to communication, analysis to storytelling, this team worked around the clock to ensure a successful GG23 round: special thanks to Princewill aka Ebube.eth, HelloruthDavid, Godday aka OGdesigns, @soll, John Boanerge and many others.
These supports fueled the dreams of young builders, communities, and creators in African universities, helping them receive financial support, explore, learn, and innovate within the Web3 and Public Goods ecosystems with other projects and individuals.
Donations and Support Highlights
Applications for the round opened in March 17th and ran through till March 30th, we made a sufficient report on the application stage.
- The round officially kicked off donations on April 2nd and closed on April 16th.
- We had a total of 1,927 donors who showed support and belief in the future of blockchain education and innovation in African Universities.
- 50 Projects received donations and matching funds during the round.
- Total Donations: $4,499.35 Donations were made in USDGLO, cUSD, CELO
- Matching Pool: $33,000 in USDGLO
This round ran on Celo with a strong focus on Sybil resistance and community-driven support. Each project had access to a fair and equitable matching opportunity under a capped 10% model. With 50 projects receiving support from 502 unique voters and nearly 2,000 donations, the round reflected both enthusiasm and meaningful engagement from the community.
How the Round Went: The Good, The Challenging, and Lessons Learned
What Went Well:
- Strong community engagement from university tech clubs, student developers, and Web3 education projects.
- Diverse range of projects applying: open-source tools, dev communities, creative education initiatives.
- Inspiring growth stories from many grantees about onboarding new students and building impactful blockchain projects. One such example was Blockchain Lautech’s experience, you can hear their feedback here.
- Cluster Matching Education made grantees go beyond their projects and support other projects in the round, which inspired collaborative support between projects, communities and individuals.
Value For Gitcoin
- New users: 95.8% of the projects that applied were first time grantees on Gitcoin,
- New users: 83.3% stated they would strongly recommend Gitcoin Community Grants to other builders, and 16.7% stated they would recommend Gitcoin.
Value for Grantees
Challenges Faced:
- Donation Recycling Detected:
Some projects engaged in suspicious donation behaviors, recycling funds donated to them through multiple wallets, we found this out when we noticed some projects were having unusually high donations without effectively marketing their project, you could see their socials and find that they had not consistently rallied their community and tweeted about their projects in the round. We followed Gitcoin’s Sybil Analysis guide link to identify and review suspicious activity.
How we stopped this - we announced in the community and let the projects know that we caught them and that COCM discourages activities like these and their matching pool would be reduced as a result.
- Low Marketing from Some Projects:
Some projects did not promote their grants externally, and waited till a few days to donations ended before taking action. Then we noticed some of the donations to those projects had concentrated and suspicious donation patterns.
How we encouraged marketing - We kept sending emails and reminders in the TG group for projects to join the Let’s Grow Live sessions, we also did one-on-one outreach to projects that we noticed were idle during donation periods.
- Attempts at COCM Gaming:
Some projects tried to game the cluster matching mechanism. Here’s what they did – Some projects told their community members to donate above $1 to their project, and then donate less than $1 to other projects.
How COCM stopped this - When we looked at the co-efficient, we noticed that the mechanism made sure that a wallet address that donated less than 1 dollar to other projects and donated $1 or more to the projects they were supporting, also didn’t receive matching for the projects they supported. This is why even though some projects had high number of contributors or amounts donated, they still had reduced matching.
- Donation Closing Date
We made a mistake and ended donations at 00:00 UTC 16th April instead of 23:59 16th April. The intent was to give projects that were in our round enough time to support projects in other rounds, so the last hours can be used to support other rounds.
How we’ll prevent this from happening in GG24 - We’ll set donation end time at 23:59 UTC of the end date.
What We Learned:
- Stronger pre-round onboarding and guidelines for grantees will be essential for future rounds.
- We need to emphasize ethical fundraising practices even more.
- Early and consistent marketing efforts by grantees directly correlate with fairer and more widespread community support.
Feedback from Grantees
ROUND RESULTS
The round results were calculated using a mix of Quadratic Funding and Connection-Oriented Cluster Matching
Round Results
Get more details here 
Round Summary Spreadsheet
Matching Distribution Spreadsheet
Preparing for GG24: What’s Next?
We already started post GG23 activities on Impact Goal setting, reports and impact tracking.
- Helping projects set clearer impact goals (onboarding users, transitioning developers, growing OSS tools).
- Organizing more Web3 education activities and tech meetups to build community momentum.
- Improving project quality by focusing on open-source contributions and community building.
Wen Payouts
Payouts would be made 1 or 2 days after Gitcoin and Owocki send the matching funds.
My Appreciations
This round was about much more than donations — it was about community, synergies, insight, and building the next generation of Web3 contributors and developers from African Universities.
We’re excited for what’s ahead and we deeply appreciate everyone who helped us make Web3 for Universities a success.
Thank you.
The journey continues and we’re preparing for a stronger, bigger, and even more impactful GG24!
Karla Nwaeke (aka KarlaGod)
Round Operator
Web3 For Universities Community Round, Lead Partner B<>rder/ess