BanklessDAO: Quadratic Matching Round Pilot

Grants/Funding
1

Project Champion: jengajojo
Squad: alexalombardo, azeem, heynate, puncar, Tetranome🏴, Icedcool🏴, sandeepdas,DidierKrux.eth🏴
Purpose: public good
Authors; jengajojo
Funds requested: 1,100,000 BANK

PROJECT TEASER

This post suggests piloting a gated BanklessDAO quadratic matching round in S7 with the intentions of testing the process, evaluating the results and presenting the analysis to the DAO for next steps in decentralised project funding.

SUMMARY

Project Description

Since inception, banklessdao has relied on a grants committee to service funding requests. While a grants committee elected by token holders delegates funding responsibility, it does not assure that projects with product market-fit are funded. Additionally, grants committee members are seldom investment experts, but mostly consist of ‘trusted’ members in the community

Past/preparatory activities

As highlighted by the GSE cohort 1 result as well as the Projects Funding Framework Upgrade posts, the community is eager to test out new ways in which banklessDAO can be governed in a more effective and decentralised way.

As many projects in the web3 ecosystem are adopting quadratic matching as a way to reward and incentivize community driven projects, Gitcoin DAO has launched their Grants Stack to allow DAOs to independently run their own matching rounds.

Specifications:

WTF is quadratic funding?

Quadratic Funding is the mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community. Learn more here

What is Gitcoin Grants Stack?

Gitcoin Grants Stack is a comprehensive solution covering the core capabilities provided by the Grants Program. These new tools make it easier to launch, manage and grow a successful grants program.

With the launch of Gitcoin Grants Stack, anyone will be able to launch and manage their own programs the same way as Gitcoin managers their own Gitcoin Grants Round.

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What are the benefits of Gitcoin Grants Stack?

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In the context of BanklessDAO, we will be able to generate a strong signal on which of our projects have an early product market fit. This way, we will be less reliant on a centralised grants committee to make decisions for long term projects and give more power to the global bankless community to make funding decisions.

Who can participate?

Grant Receivers:

The BanklessDAO QM round will be held in S7. Projects which have previously received funding from BanklessDAO and have been building for more than 2 seasons will be eligible to participate in this matching round. This means, departments, guilds, short term projects and other unfunded groups will be ineligible to participate in this round.

Donors:

Anyone with a passport score of at least 21 is eligible. Learn more about passport here

Who can moderate?

For the scope of this first experiment it is essential for us as a DAO to learn from the experience and tweak it as necessary before, during and after the round in order to get the optimal results. We suggest that for the first iteration one or two members from governance and one or two members from grants committee be selected within these groups to run the pilot on behalf of the DAO.

Expected results:

  • Test Gitcoin Grants Stack UI/UX
  • Test BanklessDAO projects for early PMF
  • Attract external capital to Banklessdao projects
  • Attract media exposure for running one of the first pilots’

Financial Implications:

Project Breakdown:

1,000,000 as matching bonus for projects

Compensation Breakdown:

If successful, the project squad will run a 100,000 BANK coordinape to compensate everyone involved.

Next steps:

The project begins 1 week after the grant is approved

Week n - 1: Project is approved by the Grants Committee
Week n: Matching round with application template announced
Week n+1: Deadline for project to submit applications
Week n+2: Matching Round
Week n+3: Analysis and results
Week n+4: Report and next steps

Poll

  • Yes, approve this proposal
  • No, reject this proposal

0 voters

8 Likes
2

I love this prop, it’s just amazing. Also we can style or try to use the prop mechanism than nouns have. But Gitcoin looks amazing for me, sybill resitance. I just have one quiestion, about the KYC-Like mechanism that it has. Do we have any trouble, since BrightID one of the tools that Gitcoins needs, has sensitive data.

3 Likes
3

We can customize the sybil resistance attributes to what we want, so there is no trouble. I have been participating in past few Gitcoin rounds without BrightID.

2 Likes
4

This is a great opportunity for bDAO projects to get more exposure to DAO-external users. I think slowly moving a majority of project funding to a quadratic funding method gives new and existing projects more product/market fit feedback than the existing process.

More publicity, more funding, more sustainable business modelling.
This proposal brings the waters we should be exploring right to our back yard. :diving_mask:

6 Likes
5

Great experiment!

What currency can donors donate in? Will BANK be included as a donation currency?

And this is truly a « donation » correct? Does this only make sense for public good projects or do you think it’s also appropriate for for-profit projects? Personally I would rather « invest » in a for-profit project then donate.

3 Likes
6

GC watch out. QF coming for you job. Good experiment. looking forward to this.

5 Likes
7

Yes, it will be possible to donate with BANK and yes it’s a donation just like the gitcoin grant rounds. In my opinion this can be used for all types of projects, public or otherwise. But yes, the ability to « invest » in for-profit projects is an interesting take

1 Like
8

let’s try it out, this experiment looks promising

2 Likes
9

@Jengajojo I do like the idea of this. Thank you. can you help me understand the passport score please? I also am not sure if Project Funding Framework Upgrade [Vibe Check] was eagerly awaited by the community.

10

Hey @Sprinklesforwinners glad that you like this idea. The Passport protocol allows communities to select verification inputs called stamps. Stamps are provided by a variety of web2 and web3 identity authenticators including Google, Facebook, BrightID, ENS, and Proof of Humanity. Stamps given out by particular communities are a functionality that is under development. They do not store any personally identifiable information, only the verifiable credential issued by the identity authenticator.

Passport aggregates stamps and assigns each stamp a different weight according to the needs of a particular community. This weight is used to calculate the cost of forgery of an identity, a score which reflects the credibility of a potential participant’s online identity. For example, a community for developers could assign a greater weight to a Github stamp, resulting in higher scores for those who have Github stamps. In the vanilla version of this pilot we’ll use the default settings on this, but in the future the DAO can customise which inputs it wants to use for verification.

More info here: Major Concepts - Gitcoin Passport

I used the QF poll in that post as a signal for this pilot:

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11

Hi @Jengajojo @Icedcool
I have a few more questions about this proposal.
I will actually start by pointing out

  1. BanklessDAO doesn’t compensate. Is this a different structure than the rewards system currently in place?
  1. I am curious how you chose these projects to qualify for funding? I would think that if a project has been funded by the DAO for at least 2 seasons, but still require funding, it’s time to give a different project a chance.
  2. Also wondering why you would want to disqualify new projects from possibly receiving funds.
    Our current framework says anyone can apply for a grant. I do believe that you would need a bDIP to change that, as it was ratified here

4.The token holders vote for the Grants committee members, trusting that whether they are an expert in that area or not, they will make the best choice. @Jengajojo, I am not okay with giving away the token holders choice and voice here.

  1. I would like to learn more about the UI/UX that the DAO members would be testing for Gitcoin.

I won’t get into this any further now @Tetranome

1 Like
12

why is the eligibility for projects that “have been building for more than 2 seasons” to make it democratic shouldn’t you just allow previously funded projects to participate? I mean, if they received GC funding, it is assumed that such projects are legitimate. Length doesn’t really result in effectiveness or impact

13

The rationale here is that projects which are funded only once tend to be one off projects, but projects which have received funds several times tend to be long term projects.

Since the expected results are

The suggestion is for these rounds to act as a replacement for the current seasonal funding process. But would love to hear your thoughts on how one off projects could be funded in this way. Personally I think prop house is a better way to fund one off projects

14

Can you help us understand why? There is no other comp structure atm

The rationale is to generate signal from projects which have been building for a long time about their potential product-market fit. Since this is a pilot project, we do not need to change governance parameters since we are not changing the way existing governance works. The idea is to generate data which can feed into potentially modifying grants allocation in the future.

I understand. The limits here which I identify are the talent pool itself. Just this season we weren’t even able to fill all GC seats and except S7, most rounds did not have a large selection of qualified candidates for holders to choose from. In any case, since this is a project which aims to generate data, no token holder rights are being violated.

For UI/UX, we will release a feedback form to members after the round [Poap and everything]. The Grants stack team and use this to develop their product further and if we choose to use Grants stack going forward as a DAO this feedback can be used to customize the experience for our members

15

Yes but what if they are not - seems to be limiting to ongoing projects that haven’t met the two-season requirements - but would rather not continuously go to grants committees for funding. What if projects have been going on for a long time but haven’t shown real results atmo to “attract external capital” ? I they have been funded for more than two seasons shouldn’t they buy now have a clear product-market fit?

16

It is indeed limiting and since this is not a full-fledged governance change only a trial round, making a clear framework makes sense. I don’t mind keeping this round open for all, but then the PMF signal that we want to receive maybe very low and then comes the question of what about projects which were never funded by the GC but are building on their own etc…

This depends on the project itself. Many startups take several months or even years to sufficiently pivot enough to find PMF.

17

Realy interesting approach. Provided the GC gives its go ahead am realy looking forward to the outcome of this test run.

A question concerning one of your statements: “…,grants committee members are seldom investment experts,…”. How will this quadratic funding approach ensure higher investment expertise?

18

Thank you. It’s usually difficult to make judgements on success at a very early stage, even professionals are able to identify a low number of promising startups. The benefits of funding something retroactively are that there is less room for speculation on the results since they are already delivered. Adding to this is the strong signal from the end users.

Users who donate in these rounds have a strong sense of community towards the project/s which they are donate to, hence allowing matching capital to flow to those who have verifiably produced value and thus have some sort of PMF

19

Hi Jengajojo has this reached quorum and approval and will proceed?

Also, I assume this pilot runs over and above the existing project funding process, and that the existing process will continue, unaffected by the amounts received through the pilot?

Thank you

20

That’s correct, this is complimentary to the existing process and will not alter it. The process has passed GC review but we are waiting for Gitcoin to finish developing the entire UI which is expected to ship next month after the beta round

2 Likes