SIP Cohort 2 Opportunity 5: New modules on Gitcoin Grants Protocol

General
1

Gitcoin Grants 1.0 was a monolithic + centralized Quadratic Funding tool.

Gitcoin Grants 2.0 is a modular suite of decentralized protocols that can do Quadratic Funding, but can also be forked + use other methods of capital allocation.

  1. Gitcoin Passport - for creating sybil resistence
  2. Grants registry - for storing information about grants.
  3. Round Manager (QF) - for managing QF rounds

TLDR - Gitcoin Grants 1.0 was a knife. Gitcoin Grants 2.0 will be a swiss army knife.

This is important because different communities may have different ways they want to fund their shared needs.

  1. Gitcoins flagship program uses Quadratic Funding (really good at democratic capital allocation)
  2. Optimism uses retroactive public goods funding (really good at allocating capital to projects experts think are important)
  3. Other projects might want to do Conviction Voting, Assurance Contracts, or more (good for other reasons.

This SIP intiative will be in charge of forking Gitcoin Grants Protocol + testing out innovative new coordination mechanisms to traverse the design space of funding mechanisms for web3.

For more on this design space checkout Coordination Mechanisms with Griff Green | Green Pill #65 and this list of funding mechanisms.

We will need to prioritize these mechanisms and start running experiments with our frens in various web3 DAOs :slight_smile:

Infographic of this design space:

get it on the gitcoin store at Coordination Mechanisms Poster – gitcoin

coordination-mechanisms-01-2
coordination-mechanisms-01-21920×2880 464 KB

(Get high res version here)

2

One easy thing to do going forward might be to deploy a new grants protocol for supermodular.xyz to manage supermodules.

how meta! a grants protocol installation to manage the funding of grants protocol modules!

3

a few more ideas:

  1. make it easy to contribute to gitcoin grants via twitter as the primary ux
  2. a hot or not style collaberative filtering way of doing grants
  3. a tool that recommends grants to me based off what my frens have funded (amybe using lens protocol data as the social network data)
  4. any other way that helps navigate different grants in an innovative way.
  5. revive this conviction voting tool
4

Oh, hello :smiley:

Been thinking about that lately, the only ways I see to revive it in its current scope is to either integrate the ranking in the new grant explorer, or to fork it / create another one from scratch.

The logic can be used or modified for other purposes too obviously. Happy to hack or brainstorm on this one!

5

Some of these mechanisms from Glen Weyl’s new paper could be a fit to build on top of the Grants Protocol.

6

In terms of new coordination mechanisms, some of the experiments which might turn out to be very fruitful might be:

  1. the combination of a grants registry + round manager opens up so many possibilities one obvious one might that we create ux to allow anyone to set up their own grants round in a permissionless manner provided of course they have a matching source etc which would result in the powers of coordination in the hands of the web3 community

  2. based on the above we can also have different funding categories along with QF grants which I see have good potential are retroactive funding, crowdfunding (where for instance Juicebox DAO is a pioneer as it helped raise funds for many projects and social causes, DAO’s so we can probably think about a collaborated solution), etc. These additional options might result in an ideal flexible solution supporting different funding mechanisms alongside QF.

  3. another idea that can be explored probably is multichain support where in addition to mainnet & zksync we can also enable grants protocol on rollups like optimism, arbitrium which would help and gain accessibility to a wide range of users

Overall this discussion seems pretty exciting!