ETHKL24 | Ben Biedermann | Why use Airtable to Fund Projects in Web3?

he's a researcher who's uh researching quite a bit on uh grants and grants programs these days and uh look ahead he'll talk about uh these programs how effective they are uh and what are the ideal setups uh for the space hi thank you for having me um so yeah I'll be speaking about why use air table to fund projects in web 3 and disclaim I not from Air table um but you know anyone who has applied for a grant must have come across like this air table form where you just you know you fill in all your information and you just hope for the best so we'll be speaking a little bit about like different ways of applying uh grant funding but also what that means for for grantees um so let's just give it a quick introduction we're going to continue with the state-ofthe-art um and and then we'll actually dive deeper into web3 grants um what it means web 3 versus conventional I just came back from a workshop where we actually had some government entities also speaking or or people speaking on their behalf so we'll dive a little bit into uh the differences and similarities and in the end we're going to talk a little bit about what that and what you can take away as a grantee or grand program operator all right uh are you actually able to see the slides yeah probably there cool um so who of you has submitted a grand application already okay there one two three all right and you probably in the end saw like a screen like thank you for your application um that might have been on air table and you wondered what is next now take a look to your left and to your right chances are that there's someone who set up this program so who wondered how can we engage with grantees um what questions do we need to ask and how do we actually apply this funding so that both granes and the program the ecosystem benefits from it now from speaking with grand program operators we have learned that you know setting these things up are actually hard now for all of you who have repeatedly applied for Grants you you see that these crant programs often change and then there's new program coming up so when we look in the in the quotes that we have here from the web3 or state of web3 Cl report from uh the metov gr Innovation lab um grant program operators reported that they are using air table and that different categories for different grants for different projects over different verticals keep popping up keep changing um so it's really difficult to properly like fund projects that are meaningful for an ecosystem for a community for a project or even a token so where are we overall so programs are recognizing that you know one like monolithic brand structure like like one catch all like Grand program application isn't actually working furthermore when we look at what is after the funding like when we talk about impact so impact means like for example token go up versus outcomes like we have a lot of meaningful projects that are doing good work and that are perhaps even generating cash flow then these two things are conflated so on one hand we have impact that is on ecosystem level so how do we meet our kpis and on the other hand we have these projects that are even that don't hit the kpis of the program potentially are thriving and this is not really clear what is in between and and how do we distinguish them furthermore talking about tracking success so how do we actually measure whether someone meets kpis whether they have outcomes whe these outcomes are meaningful um that's not quite clear and it's difficult to do and then when we look at more let's say participatory Grant programs like optimism or arbitrum then we always see that there is a dow and there are some operators and they are somehow entangled and it's not quite clear who is getting the grants based on on whose decision on and what reasons so there's like a lack of transparency um that hampers efficiency now all of this kind of portrays web three grants at the Crossroad so we can either opt for more transparency for grantee empowerment or we can just stay where we at and kind of you know omit all the transparency like measures that we could take so generally I was just right before this speaking about like like with one of the organizers here about accelerator style programs and like programs are realizing that money alone is not enough like you actually need to go in handson work with these projects so that they can really Thrive um at the same time when we look at what we can learn from conventional crant programs and crant programs have existed for quite some by sometime like 40 5050 years ago like GRS started to pop up we see that they like web fre Grant programs aren't actually that dissimilar to Conventional or government grants and that even if money is not enough we might need to think harder about how we can make this work so overall like web3 grants the little standardization um but they have some promising bottomup approach that just need to be put to work so when we look at government programs they have actually quite a lot of like freedom of reg Freedom of Information regulations that they need to apply to um they they're quite rigid and and bureaucratic in the way to apply so you actually need to have like a lot of maturity as a grantee to be able to apply to that so for example you need to have a um legal entity set up you need to be able to write I don't know three four or five pages of like state-ofthe-art and background and what you're actually trying to achieve and then there's some bureaucrat who's going to make this decision web three brands in this regard are different but also similar because we see these forms on air table becoming longer and longer so that's why like distinguishing between web three grants and conventional grants actually still matters um now when we think about what grants actually mean we can we can determine that you know a grant is a financial donation so it's different different to venture capital funding where like people actually want a stake in your company um and it's meant as a subsidy to to spark Innovation to drive adoption but other than meeting these outcomes and hitting these kpis they don't ask for much back so they don't ask to be part of your company or owning a stake so when we now think about web3 Grand specifically we have often cryptocurrencies involved we have DS involved all of you like who apply to Grants want like this token maybe even up on tge or like right after and DOW are using grants to distribute their funding um or their token sales through grants uh Tao is a good example they launched their grant program before they had a token and then kind of used like the the grand program to to get the token into circulation and generally like this cryptoeconomic take on grants is marketed as improving efficiency making grants better making them less ocratic but well is that actually true um because you know where is the economy the crypto economy in air table like you you advertise that you're using crypto to distribute grants but at the same time you know you're you're using a simple web form to collect responses so it's not not all good and shiny but we actually need to make sure that web 3 delivering on what it promises so that's why we developed a mixed method um web 3 Grand maturity model so we are looking at Grand operator self assessment so we actually go we actually went and talked to web3 Grand operators asked them how they're doing um how they are applying like cryptoeconomic principles how they distribute the funds how they engage with grantees and how they evaluate their performance but then we also looked at very quantitative measures such as how the the Outreach over social media translates into granty applications um so how many grantees or potential grantees applied um we also looked at how the grantee number and the funds are distributed and and we established a model where we basically had a higher better logic so higher scores in one of these sub indicators translates into a better score over all so where does it leaves us um we have six different categories that we have scored so we have Focus areas and objectives something like do we actually Define or does the Grand program actually Define what they want to achieve with this program um then we have program structure an organization that means okay who's actually running that so are we Outsourcing that is that done inhouse who's responsible for what and where are we set up which leads me leads me to the third category governance where we looked at where is this Foundation or or company that is Distributing the grand actually is located so what we saw is a lot of Cayman Islands um a lot of like you know um places where people might not look too closely or are kept from looking too closely and we also saw a couple of dows um Distributing funds like for example bitow for mantle is one example we also have optimism and arbitrum evaluated where it Dow somewhat relates to a foundation and the foundation sort of has the last say in or the last word in who's getting that grand and whether they completed kyc and in the fourth category we looked at Effectiveness and impact so is it actually effective how we distribute grants um do they reach the intended impact and outcomes and the last two categories transparency and accountability as well as Community engagement looked more at like what is the pr side of things so do these Grant programs talk to granes talk to their community um give their Community a voice in how like tokens are being allocated so this is essentially stakeholder engagement now the model you just saw this one um of course there is much more detail to it and whoever is interested I'm happy to share more like in a one1 or one to n constellation um after this talk but we like this is an example for the arbitrum programs where we have the short-term incentive program we have the short-term incentive program back fund which is actually a really good example of lacking maturity because so arbitrum went out and said well you know we're just going to fund an experiment for a short term and then some shareholders or token holders said well actually we want to keep playing this experimentation game a little longer so let's just create this back fund um and this back fund was of course approved by the da but but like what that actually means was not that clear we also have the stip bridge which is the backf fund after the back fund sort of and lastly we have the long-term incentive program now when you look at how governance is done at arbitrum you have a scoo decision- making towards like large token holders that that are decentralized exchanges and so on so we we see like decision making predominantly benefiting like large projects rather than small grantees so whenever you apply as a grantee I advise you have a look at the governance and see whether you actually stand a chance to apply so we like the model you saw basically outputs a number between Zer and one um we have like converted that into relative numbers so we have percentages here we have that is a normalized composite so we actually make sure that we're not comparing apples to oranges and we see the the lowest maturity on the stip and STI back fund um grant program with 38.1% sa Bridge is a bit higher at 42 and then LTI PP is at 50% um now what does that actually mean um that is not on the slide but I'll explain to you anyway um we were thinking about like maturity in terms of experimental foundational Developmental and advanced maturity so when you think about numbers between zero and one you can have a very naive approach and say well we're just going to divide it into quartiles so we have 0 to 25% is experimental maturity 25 to 50 is foundational anything above 50% but below 75 is Developmental and then we have advanced maturity now in the case of arbitrum arbitrum did not reach an advanced maturity and maybe this is not even intended because we're not talking about government programs where you know a lot of bureaucracy very lengthy application forms are involved but you know we we are web 3 and we want to experiment and we want to you know figure out what works and what doesn't so a takeaway for both grantees and Grand operators here is that grantees should be very strategic about where to apply how to apply and not just look at this fancy air table that promise you to get 100K for free um because that's not the case but actually dive into the governance look at how different Grant programs allocate their funding what the backstory is to these Grand programs and their existence and now a lesson to Grand operators you know you can use whatever is practical um so be practical use air table you know these cryptoeconomic promises and you know shiny web three things might not be as shiny as you think they are because at the end grantees and projects really just want to be able to rely on something that works but you really should send that rejection email if you do not want to fund the project I know the focus shifts more towards success and we want to allocate as much time as possible to successful projects but making sure that all those who were not successful are also kept in mind ensures that you that you cater to the applicants who are strategic and who are you know actually looking at how you do things and you're doing things in a good way uh with this being said thank you very much for having me today again and yeah speak to you at that was a sign for me to leave the stage thanks