Gitcoin Grants Round Funding Proposal GR14

Proposals for Main DAO
#1

Financial Proposal: Gitcoin GR14 Advocacy

Summary

Gitcoin is requesting funding from Aragon Network DAO of 50,000 USDC towards the Gitcoin Grants Round kicking off on June 8th, specifically for the advocacy efforts that Gitcoin is pushing forward.

  • Total of approximately 9 grantees currently. They include Blockchain Association, Coin Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and Internet Archive, European Union Crypto Initiative (EUCI), Canadian Web3 Council, DeFi Education Fund, and Proof of Stake Alliance.
  • Some of the confirmed funding groups include AAVE Grants, Alliance DAO, and Anoma with others committed.

Gitcoin is a community of internet citizens with a shared mission to build and fund public digital goods. We do this through Gitcoin Grants, leveraging quadratic funding. Gitcoin empowers communities of builders to connect and work together to create the future of the open web.

So far, we’ve funded $52 million of open source software. In Defi, 1inch, Uniswap, Zapper, and more went from successful early Gitcoin Grantees to billion dollar projects who are now funders as well. The introduction of infrastructure projects like DAppNode, etherjs, Turbo-Geth, and WalletConnect to raise sustainable amounts of funding for the first time.

Our next grants round, GR14, kicks off on June 8th, 2022.

Team Members

Why fund this?

We believe the right regulation is critical to ensure crypto and web3 benefits as many people as possible. Grantees are organizations that allocate a significant portion of their resources to advocating for a regulatory environment that promotes and supports web3 and/or produces research on web3’s potential for food. Enabling the community to allocate funding for their preferred groups helps get them engaged in crypto advocacy, where their ongoing support will be crucial to success.

With the recent collapse of UST and subsequent calls to action for regulation on things like stablecoins from Janet Yellen, we believe now more than ever that it’s important to ramp up our collective efforts in ensuring that web3 is able to flourish without unfair laws from regulators who don’t understand the technology.

Too many times in the past, technology companies have waited too long and then been massively hurt by regulations. It is the time to come together to fight what is coming. By working together with policymakers, we can shape the best possible regulations to both build trust and spur innovation.

Also, in terms of DAO-to-DAO relations, finding ways to collaborate that help to further foster the ecosystem that we collectively want moving forward is an excellent approach. Aragon has already taken steps in doing this with the direction they took by collaborating with Snapshot in the past, so working with Gitcoin would only further cement the narrative of that ethos of DAO-to-DAO partnerships.

Finally, there will be a variety of marketing opportunities available through supporting GR14 that Aragon could take advantage of.

These could include:

  • Email marketing
  • Twitter Spaces with Gitcoin people and grantees
  • Results on blog posts
  • Daily metric tweets
  • Support on Twitter with engagements and replies
  • Potential press opportunities
  • AMAs
  • Promo for live event
  • End of round top 10s
  • Survey for founders
  • Post round debriefs with grantees and ecosystem partners

Timeline

Gitcoin’s GR14 round is kicking off on June 8th - June 23rd but we are looking to finalize grants submitted by May 25th.

Funding release

Gitcoin requests the release of proposed funding to fund GR14

Address for funds: 0xde21F729137C5Af1b01d73aF1dC21eFfa2B8a0d6

3 Likes
Developing a long-range financial forecast for Aragon
#2

Hi there! Thank you for the proposal.

A few questions and comments:

  1. Timing: It usually takes 1 week in proposal state followed by a 1 week voting period. I don’t believe this proposal will make it in time? @AlexClay @lee0007, or does a post kick-off arrival of funds retroactively support these projects?

  2. Excuse my lack of knowledge: is there a DAO specific related round that exists or a way to narrow funds in a certain direction?

  3. For the marketing opportunities, could you provide a more structured proposal? Is it all, or some of these. What do those next steps look like? I’m sure people may be curious.

Thank you!

  • Anthony
2 Likes
#3

Of course.

  1. That is correct that with the voting period we would not make it in time. The funds don’t actually get distributed till the end of the round, we are just trying to make sure we have a proper tally for the beginning of that round. In extreme cases, we are able to put the funds up in good faith though, so a post kick-off arrival of those funds retroactively to support the projects would be fine.

  2. No worries at all! Currently, there is not a DAO specific round that exists in a more narrow capacity, but is something we’ve been discussing internally amongst the team, as well as with funders we’ve been having conversations with.

  3. In terms of market opportunities, all of those are absolutely available. It will simply be figuring out who at Aragon we’d be working with to act on those items, but we will strongly encourage the community/leadership to get involved on those potential items.

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the responses! Tagging: @fartunov Ecosystem Lead at Aragon Project.

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#5

Funding if approved would be payable and I would encourage @theazeemkhan to edit this section for clarity as this proposal was submitted after the deadline

The Aragon Network Charter also requires that financial proposal provides

Aragon Goverannce Proposal Process S 5 (f) i
3. Description of why the author believes it will help to increase the number of Active
Aragon DAOs

While this is perhaps indicated with the outline of marketing opportunities, as per @Anthony.Leuts request some numbers around marketing reach and audience size could help substantiate this as a growth marketing opportunity.

Personally would love to hear more on ecosystem collaboration, trust and innovation as potential drivers of the active number of DAO on the Network

1 Like
#6

Hi @theazeemkhan, nice proposal, thank you for posting.

As per @Anthony.Leuts request, could you expand on the marketing aspect of this proposal, and perhaps let us know who on your team is leading the marketing initiative.

Also, could you expand on how these funds are going to be used if approved and how long do you expect this initiative to last?

Thanks,

Fintan.

3 Likes
#7

Thanks for the tag. I coordinated with @theazeemkhan around the proposal before it went to the forum. It’s a worthy initiative in my view and as the proposal progresses we’ll set up direct communication between GitCoin’s team and @jessicasmith & the rest of Aragon’s comms team to spread the word along with the @fmurphy lead Growth guild

2 Likes
#8

Thanks so much @fartunov. Please let me know what more I can do and can activate the team to do in the meantime.

1 Like
#9

Absolutely, @fmurphy

So, the marketing aspects are very much as outlined. I’d say that some of the benefits are a bit less quantitative than they are qualitative at the moment from. We’re expanding our efforts to do some of the more qualitative things still.

Some of the outlined things like mentions in blog posts, access to being on twitter spaces, other social media pushes, and what I mentioned above already.

So, the funds are going to be going towards regulatory advocacy. We use quadratic funding to create a pool of capital that is then given to a list of grantees. Happy to go into how that process works but we don’t actually direct the funds ourselves, nor do we keep any portion of them.

Would be happy to get the list of current grantees together if that would help. Currently, I believe there are nine organizations that we’re working with like Blockchain Association, Coin Center, and so on who are the ones ensuring web3 is able to thrive. And given the current climate, that’s even more important with NY having passed an anti-mining bill just this morning.

Hope this was helpful and will look to see if I can add more to elaborate.

#10

this seems relatively redundant to work being done by teams already, and poorly timed given that we should probably focus on marketing in 2-3 months when we have a product…

1 Like
#11

Vote is live:
https://voice.aragon.org/processes/#/21b2ea5345d2e0c941dd44ff4c43fc4683088b846ddb3234d1690b0000000014

#12

Tend to agree with @alibama I don’t see this was a well-timed request while Aragon are still in the process of determining product-market fit and I have witnessed the IndexCoop Vote turnaround and that Gitcoin DAO has itself cracked down on funding this season.

The vote is already live but I’d still like to hear from @theazeemkhan in response to my questions about how this proposal supports the growth of the active # DAO on the Aragon Network being it is a point of Governance legitimacy that has seen proposals veto’d in the past - which @fartunov would be well aware of - yet my query has been skipped over in the responses here to date

#14

Proposal has passed:
https://voice.aragon.org/processes/#/21b2ea5345d2e0c941dd44ff4c43fc4683088b846ddb3234d1690b0000000014

@Ricktik6 can we get the payment set-up for GitCoin team as GR is coming to a close. @theazeemkhan I will be looping in @jessicasmith in the group chat to get comms aligned

@theazeemkhan if you can address @lee0007’s questions it would be great. I personally believe achieving regulatory clarity has an exponentially higher potential for increasing the number of DAOs globally than for example any conceivable educational effort on the benefits of DAOs or web3

1 Like
#15

Congratulations for passing this proposal @theazeemkhan

The 50k USDC transaction towards “0xde21F729137C5Af1b01d73aF1dC21eFfa2B8a0d6”
has been set-up and can be executed at the end of next week @fartunov

1 Like