From Bread to Build A Look Into Web3 Grants Programs Gloria Kimbwala mod

all right thank you so much nicole i am so excited for you all to be here and to be able to listen to this great panel um i really wanted to be able to pick their brain so we're going to dive into it for a bit just a little bit of background i'm going to start with like high level about grants so if you know a lot of grants like stick with me i promise we'll get to the nitty-gritty and i'll definitely open it up for you all to ask questions later because that's really important to me uh so if we could just start with like um if we could start with annika actually can you tell me a little bit more about get coin grants and like what the heck is quadratic funding sure yes uh good morning everyone great to see you all excited to chat about bitcoin grants uh and what we're doing uh for our grants program so bitcoin if you're not familiar with us we were founded uh in order to fund and build public goods and so we were founded on the thesis that open source software generates billions of dollars a year in economic value but there aren't really viable business models for a lot of developers to maintain open source software and do that as you know either a part-time or a full-time job it's often you know these projects go maintained these folks are not compensated effectively for their work and so bitcoin is trying to change that we started off primarily with public goods in terms of open source software in the ethereum ecosystem but we have moved a little bit beyond that into web free public goods and even public goods that are off chain more broadly so in terms of our structure we're effectively a three-sided marketplace so we have our big matching funders which are like the unit swaps and polygons of the world who put funds towards a matching pool we also have individual contributors like you and i who would contribute to these grants and then finally we have the grantees who are the beneficiaries of this funding in terms of structure we run these grants rounds once a quarter so it's a big event every few months we've got our next one coming up starting on march 9th so definitely encourage you all to participate and get involved with bitcoin grants awesome and calvin i have a question regarding like what are retroactive grants and like how do those come to play in the whole grants ecosystem so if you want to pass mike down hello hello cool um so yeah at optimism we we kind of share a similar thesis uh as git coin and i guess it's our our approach is a little bit different to this problem so we we're using this sort of experimental it's an idea that people have talked about for a long time but but it's sort of experimental at least in the web 3 ecosystem to to use a grants model that is purely retroactive so the thesis is it's really really hard to predict how things are going to go in the future and it's really easy to see how things have gone in the past so if we can have a grants program that's based fully around you know optimism pulls in a ton of money um you know from transaction fees if we have if we can have a grants program that basically takes those transaction fees and looks at you know what are the great things people have been doing already and then just give them the money it's way easier to sort of prop in in our eyes it's way easier to properly reward the sort of behavior that we want because we don't have to predict what people are going to do in the future awesome uh corbin i have a question for you when it comes to grants do these grants have to be like hundreds of thousands of dollars of grants funding or have you seen impact with like micro grants as well yeah absolutely so hi everybody so i'm corbin representing ave grants we distribute a couple million dollars every single quarter to help grow the ave ecosystem we think of ourselves as a capital provider that's also non-profit so you know we're not taking a stake in anything our purpose is to basically make the ave ecosystem stronger and to provide more projects more developers more integrations kind of building on top in terms of some of our lessons learned in the first year was that even if you have a grants program and you're giving out money that doesn't mean you're going to have a lot of people you know beating down your door right so we are experimenting with a lot of different mechanisms to like encourage more and more people to come our way one of them being micro grants so things like micrograms are like less than five thousand dollars if you're you know a kid in college if you're right out of college and you want to build you know the latest coolest video game that has a yield component to it well build that yield component on top of ave right or you're building a cool fintech application that has you know better yield that you can get from your from the tradify world like build that on top of ave and we will very few questions ask you know green light these micro grants because like we want to be as inclusive as possible for the people to get started and we just had a lot of luck of attracting people rather than like people get stressed out by like a large grant application multiple rounds at the end of the day if they're ambitious and they want to build on top of ave we want to make that as frictionless as possible uh the metric we use there is just time that they apply to the time that they have money in their wallet and we're trying to compress that as much as possible all right cool uh josh i know that near has a real initiative of being an inclusive uh protocol and bringing much more funding to people who have traditionally been left out of the space i was wondering if you could think of like how would someone who does have a project or is just thinking about starting one how should they approach grants in their business strategy or should they always be seeing for like a larger type of funding person to fund their positions well hi everyone uh josh um lead our funding program at the near foundation uh for our later one year um so it's an interesting question i think from our perspective it's really around sort of identifying projects and engaging them early as as early as possible and so you know there's been a lot of talk around sort of what does it look like to have smaller grants to sort of have incremental progress which is definitely exciting but i think there also has to be an element of partnership and engagement because what we've realized is a lot of projects that come there's an element of education that's necessary in order to have them understand what value can they truly derive from engaging in building on near and and also building within the ecosystem and so for us it's really around spending time having introductions having the ability to really you know give them guidance in terms of what sort of their roadmap should look like and so from there then we are able to sort of structure what the appropriate grant might be and so we found that to be really uh helpful for projects that are coming in that might not necessarily you know be a technically specific project or sort of be sort of something that generally a developer would build and for us it's really uh paid dividends and so that's really kind of how we think about it awesome great um calvin i'm going to go back to you real quick because i know like in the space there's like a lot of people there's a lot of money there's a lot of people who are wanting to grow get that money so how do you deal with fraud within the whole grant ecosystem that's that's a good question i mean um [Music] the retroactivity makes this a lot easier for us because it's much like i said it's way easier to look at a project and say yeah like they you know over the last year they did this this amazing stuff and we can just reward them for that um if we had to go and you know start predicting about what people are going to do in the future and then all of a sudden you know some people come in and they say well we're going to do all these great things in the future and then never do it that becomes a much bigger problem um so at least it's it's definitely less of a challenge if you're doing everything retroactively that's that's not to say it isn't a challenge i you kind of yeah it's difficult you definitely have to start building up this this is this is not something i can easily answer in 30 seconds but you do have to start building up you know a system where you can you know there's standards about how you can get information about people you know that you can create like basically standards about what your project does and how much money you bring in then who you are and all these different things right that are um that just take a very long time to set up and we haven't really started setting these sort of things up in i mean maybe you know individual grants programs have but it'd be nice to have gramps programs work together on uh you know setting up a common application process for lots of different grants so we don't have to keep rebuilding the same thing over and over again we can kind of have a shared understanding of what it means to have a trustworthy project that can receive grants yeah thank you uh and i'm going to come back to you real quick and think of there's all different types of people who are funding these grants there seems to be large funders there seems to be people who only have you know a couple of die in their wallets and also want to contribute to the projects that they believe in what are the roles of the funders in this ecosystem and how do their rewards or what they get out of having this ecosystem change depending on like the size of the funder that they are yeah that's a great question so as i mentioned at get coin we have sort of two types of funders the first being the large matching funders that are writing checks into our matching pool um so this could be you know different types of crypto protocols even web 2 organizations organizations that want to be funding public goods and typically for these funders who are funding you know larger amounts or a percentage of their treasury even there are two objectives they're looking to accomplish the first is just to give back to the ecosystem broadly speaking a lot of these projects have been around for a while have had success and are just very into the ethos of giving back and having kind of public goods pledge be part of what they're about and the ecosystem tends to value that and and really be excited about these projects as a result so there's sort of a pr angle there as well the second piece is around community and ecosystem building so for a lot of these projects as they tried to build out their own communities and ecosystems and you know get more folks involved with their projects a great way to do that is to set up a grants program and to have developers come learn about the project what they're looking for and have these folks get really invested by virtue of building for these these protocols so i would say on kind of the bigger matching funder side that's kind of those are the two main pieces in terms of individual contributors like you and i there are many different reasons i'm sure many of you here have contributed to bitcoin grants over the years and maybe it's because you're a developer and you see a project with a grant for some open source software that you really want to see built that you would like to build on top of so you provide a small a small contribution to make that happen maybe as i mentioned you know we've experimented with grants in areas that are off chain like around climate change so in grants around 12 we ran a large round for climate uh grantees being both web 3 projects as well as off chain projects and so maybe you're just a community member who's passionate about climate and wants to see new innovative solutions in that space so there are a number of different reasons that folks contribute to to grants but i would say for for kind of those two big parties those are kind of the main reasons that we tend to see nice and picky i'm going to come back to you right now and say like within these spaces we all have these grants program is it possible to create an ecosystem where there is then uh a project that can just basically fund their whole life cycle within grants and what would need to be true to make that be the world that we see where we're like celebrating people raising you know 50 million through different grants fundings and versus having to allow people to go through the challenges of traditional funding models that are existing that is a tough one gm everyone on pg ecosystem at algorand foundation um let me start from this uh there's no playbook when it comes for grant especially in crypto we're all kind of like figuring it out as we go um going to your question i guess um grants are mainly as we see it at least are really intended to like jump start a project um and then kind of like founders are supposed to like go with their own legs you know it's like throughout the life cycle of a project uh it really depends what we're funding so like take like community for example we got we give out a lot of grants to community members and those are like mainly like long-term grants so we want to make sure that like our community partners are successful in the long run uh whereas when it comes to application uh we give we generally give up grants for like specific milestones that we can track and measure uh and once those myosins are delivered then we can re-evaluate a grant and you know and actually before we we come off stage you you mention like vcs and like how how do we deal with that um so when it comes to an application or a business uh the way we approach it is like we give out a grant and then you know if founders have like that you know the business drive then we we kind of introduced them to to our vc partners um it also depends when you come to like infrastructure for example that's that's when we give out like large grants that can fund like the whole life cycle so um it really depends also on on the agreement foundation side we also have a a grant program from universities which i think is very important it's what we call algorithm centers of excellence we put out a hundred million algos for 10 years to establish multidisciplinary blockchain centers around the world just because we think that like we need education at scale and you know where where is better place than universities where like engineers get trained to scale and we want like courses to get started like blockchain agnostic courses so they don't need to be just algorithm i mean ethereum is like a fundamental part of this journey so like we encourage professors to teach like the fundamentals so it really depends again as i said there's there's no defined playbook about grants and that's why i was actually like very very excited about this talk because you know we can kind of like brainstorm i guess um so yeah i hope that answers to a certain extent yeah thank you i want to open up the floor and open it up to any of y'all who have questions so if you do have a questions raise your hand and i think nicole if you're here we could pass the mic around awesome for any of those who have questions about grants questions yeah annika could you talk about um how the grants program at get coin relates to public goods and how um we're helping on public goods through the grants program how we fund public goods through the grants program yeah yeah thank you yeah so at bitcoin grants as i mentioned we're effectively a three-sided marketplace between the matching funders the individual contributors and the grantees themselves and what we do at get coin is we use a mechanism called quadratic funding so this is a mechanism that was invented by vitalik buterin glenn weil and zoe hitzig and effectively seeks to distribute grants funds in a very democratic way the best way to understand quadratic funding and see it for yourself is go to wtf is qf.com we have a calculator there we can go and simulate what actually funding a grant would look like and sort of the tldr is if you went in and you plugged in ten dollars of funding let's say in scenario a you did ten contributions of one dollar whereas in scenario b you did one contribution of ten dollars the former is going to get the grant a lot more funding because the idea is that we want to favor the small individual and the individual's voice over the whale um and basically have projects funded that the community at large wants to see funded as opposed to you know one or two large funders so that's how it works and that's how the community is effectively voting with their dollars to determine how these matching full funds get distributed amongst the grantees so we're really excited to be bringing quadratic funding to the market and testing and iterating on it with every grants round that we run in grants around 12 which we ran in december we did six million dollars in funding so three million from our matching funders and three million from the community and we're excited about building and testing quadratic funding a lot more broadly so as as other folks were saying it's very early days this is all experimental um really excited to see where grants and quadratic funding more broadly go in the future uh hi guys um i have questions for example uh i have like a very big web to zero platform and i want to migrate it to web30 version i know how to do it how to recognize it uh and my question is if like i approach any blockchain or any company occurs uh with like millions of users uh what kind of grant i can ask or do you like you want to buy equity or like for example i'm like no that's another question that's it yeah i'm happy to take that on so i think um again as i mentioned before uh from our perspective it's really around a conversation and understanding what your goals are in terms of integrating and building um on our platform uh from from that standpoint and so if you are an organization that perhaps has you know already has equity funding and instructure and you have sort of milestones or expectations or goals we want to be able to have those inform what the right funding model is for that particular project so it might be a large grant with structured milestones around actually integrating those users onto the platform and making sure those are hit and sort of staging them out it might be around sort of having uh development goals engaging with members of the core team to make sure that your program and your your product is uh integrated accordingly um and so really it will depend on sort of the goals and sort of the dynamics of your existing business and then making sure that we're setting you up for success i actually have a question i'm very interested in how y'all's projects are able to like maintain the principles of decentralization like especially with just all of this grant money going around how do we maintain decentralization as a principle that we follow both as like structuring these grants programs but also in deploying the grants yeah so i think decentralization is something that all of our projects have to take very very seriously and consider um i think you know we we work in the the dow space and so primarily like dals are figuring out the structures that work for themselves and the newest kind of the latest greatest is having like different types of working groups that focus and go deep on expertise in a particular area and for us that's capital allocation to grow the ecosystem right so that is our superpower and that's what we kind of do in terms of decentralization um we have like i think it's either quarterly or or semi-annually we turn over a lot of the the grants committee and so we've had a lot of luck with having new people that are vocal on the forum or past grant recipients that have benefited from the program already inviting them to actually then join this working group and be on the grants committee so we kind of have like a continual amount of new energy new blood new ideas that kind of continue to make us you know super competitive in this space i think you have to have kind of like an open door policy if you're building anything on top of you know decentralized principles yeah i'd like to add to that as well um yeah we find primary open source software to begin with so like we we just don't find like like people that are not willing to open source their product um and also we uh often times we like ask external reviewers so we can have like a broader um you know pool of reviewers and that's you know how we avoid just being centralized in terms of like how we review grants so yeah definitely open source software is the main one here because if you're if you're not willing to open source your software then what are we doing here again um so optimism is taking a slightly different approach to this and we basically don't want our like well not really i i don't even want to think about it as grants it's more like just the the system makes money and the system pays the people who keep the lights on um but that we don't really want to think of this as like a small group of people who are who run the entire grants program um i think from the get-go the you know looking at the last uh sort of retro pgf round i mean retroactive public goods funding that's what we call retro pgf round we you know we had a whole bunch of what we at that point we call them badge holders and the general idea is to have a large group of people from the outset who are do who are distributing these grants just like taking into account the fact that people do have very domain specific knowledge it seems unrealistic to us to have a small group of people responsible for distributing grants to everybody at the very least you need you know a large a large group of participants with domain specific knowledge that are sort of compiling information about the different projects that you can give grants to explaining you know here's what this project is doing and here's why they deserve a grant and blah blah blah and then you know sending it off to a group of people who can then review it and and you know ascend also switch out the group of people who are reviewing these things so that you you sort of fund it you know it's not just the first time we did it we had a lot of like technical blockchain people and the the results of the funding very much mirrored the group of people who are making those decisions so it's clear that you know maybe it's something like having you know in different rounds having different focuses and then putting people you know in that position the people who are actually deciding where the money goes are people who who have expertise in those those areas or you know or you make it big enough that there's people with expertise in very many different areas who are all sort of controlling how each one of these grants rounds work diversity are you saying then that diversity of thought diversity of people actually makes for better grants rounds oh absolutely not even a question all right cool and i know like from a fraud perspective diversity of thought and diversity of people make for better fraud detection as well correct yeah okay cool like um uh my other question that i had wait is there any other questions from the audience before i ask a question yeah i'm to you or not thank you i love the point about diversity of thought leading to better grant rounds and i'd be curious to hear how you think about that at optimism in context of the fact that we want to do these retroactive grants and maybe the people who have access to the opportunities to build in this space maybe there's like a disconnect between that people and then we also you know have that ethos of wanting to have as much diversity and inclusivity as possible i don't know if i was lucid with that question but um is this like the base are you asking about the retroactivity aspect of it sure yeah um wow this is a deep question there's i could talk about this for a very long time um [Music] so there's i well i'll start by saying probably the most important piece of this is it that a really good grants program needs to be consistent and reliable right if it's if if it's predictable then my barrier to entry decreases because i can basically just start getting involved and be very very confident that i can be paid and so that's that's number one i think for for at least for optimism's retroactive public goods funding the entire model is based on this idea that it must be consistent you must have an idea that if i start working on something um you know that's going to if i just i start an open source project right i go on github i start something i just start working on it if i feel like you know there's close to a 99 chance that i start working on this and then you know the retroactive public goods is going to fund me um and i don't even have to you know i might not even have to apply for it i just do it and somebody else sees that i'm doing it and i tell somebody about it there's yeah so the more reliable we can make it the more people will feel like they can actually feasibly get this the money that they need yeah i think another big element to it is transparency right so understanding who was funded what they built what impact did it provide for the ecosystem and this way of education for folks that are coming in because i do think again as i mentioned before these grants programs at their core have an element of education to them because you're basically going out to folks in the ecosystem or who aren't necessarily in the ecosystem and wanting to engage them to give them access to build and so i think for those types of programs definitely having the ability to show this is what came out of it here's what the expectations were here's what was built here's the diversity of things that we're building i think that's really powerful as well just one final note on this i would say the transparency aspect is really important i i went through a grant process once where the grant was denied and there was no explanation you know and that i mean if you don't know why you know if you don't know why the thing was denied i don't know how you can possibly change the proposal or change anything right and and so you really need a process where people know exactly what steps they need to take and they will get the money that they need and if you can do that you can achieve a lot right you can people who who need that money can get that money because they know exactly what they need to do sorry i'm loud i'll be loud all day long um my question is there's people who have problems in both the web 2 space and the web 3 space so what i'm hearing is like some of our solutions are specifically geared towards web 2 spaces but if collectively we had like you know a lot of transparency they could have a micro grants or start with public goods and build the needs for their spaces and continue to grow into the web three spaces but my question then is like what is the process of onboarding new people who are outside of the web 3 spaces and giving them access to the funding that's within this web 3 ecosystems yeah so um so i'm going to have a pretty opinionated take here uh i think one of the reasons people have had bad experiences with grants people have very different types of funding models whether it's quadratic funding retroactive micro grants is because nobody has a standardized process yet right we probably all rolled our grants process from the ground out up like shout out to airtable and like google sheets and all you know web 2 tools that are still doing the dirty work behind the scenes so um free alpha for the day is whoever's building like the web 3 shopify for grants giving right between signing up going through a transparent grant process uh you know getting getting a funding amount and then even tracking afterwards from a metrics perspective like build that we need that like yesterday uh because all of us are kind of doing our processes hand like you know ad hoc in terms of web 2 folks i frankly think that it's some of the best and easiest low hanging fruit talent to bring into the web 3 space i hear of another you know fang pm or developer that's like pivoting to web 3 or dals or crypto social like every single week i think maybe we all come together and do like a web 3 incentivization fund announcing today no to basically pull all these talented web 2 folks and bring them into the space the last thing i'll say is one of our biggest learnings in our first year of operation was it's not always build it and they will come so we've played around with things like requests for proposals a lot of outreach like like was mentioned earlier as well to like pull these talented folks into the ecosystem right they don't have the next great web 3 idea right off the bat they're reading about it you know after their after work day ends right but like we have all these you know beautiful amazing ideas like we can just quickly write it up and invite the ridiculously talented web 2 people to have an easy on-ramp into our space yeah and i can add to that i think you know we think about grants in a web 2 context and you think you know traditional charities and traditional organizations and long application processes as corbin was talking about earlier you know it takes weeks if not months often to apply for a grant and very often you may not get a response as to why you were why you were declined and so i think in web 3 we have a huge opportunity to redefine you know what what grants are how they're structured and simplicity for users i think we're very very early days we all know that crypto ux uh you know leaves a lot to be desired generally speaking but i think just kind of the first principles approach from which you know all of these organizations are thinking about grants funding non-dilutive capital and and how that plays into you know a startup or an open source project's you know trajectory over time um i think is going to unlock a lot of opportunities and for what it's worth i would say i'm not a grants maxi i'm a huge grants proponent i think they will play a massive role in the funding ecosystem for web3 but i see them as one additional tool in addition to the existing funding mechanisms not necessarily the be-all and end-all for every project because every project ultimately has very different funding needs i think one thing to note here too is that well i'll speak specifically for myself we're representing one organization in the broader ecosystem so clearly that by design is not a diverse view regardless of that there's a committee or otherwise and so one thing that we're thinking about is what does it look like to take pools of capital uh and support and to provide them to other projects in the ecosystem to launch their own philosophy around grants and so basically from that standpoint you're really having a different view of hey these are what this is what is important to us as an organization and development of the ecosystem and how to scale and i think one thing corbyn mentioned that's really powerful is that for a lot of folks that are transitioning from web 2 or thinking about it this is really sort of a place for them to actually gain access uh in support and resources to actually experiment um and i think ultimately a lot of folks don't realize that's a that's available and so that's where i think as you noted having some type of joint effort across web 3 to really kind of give some education and support around that i think is pretty powerful because if you're you know sitting in a job that you're not enjoying and you can get you know 50k to actually support some work that you're doing in building that for sure is going to give you excitement and motivation and we hear it all the time in projects that we're talking about just on the diversity front and going back to eli's question from earlier i think early stage funding is where grants will play a pivotal role in leveling the playing field if you think about traditional venture structures and you know startups for the earliest stages for most startups there's sort of two paths one is bootstrap which basically means you have the capital or means to access the capital yourself two is like a friends and family round which often is reserved for folks with existing networks existing systems of privilege that they are born into um i see grants as an alternative to that that whereby the community can say you know this is a project that should be funded that should get early stage capital and perhaps someone who doesn't have access to those existing venture networks can come in start getting funding in a much more simple hopefully fast and democratic way um so for me kind of the alternative to seed capital is huge here okay if i can add just a little bit to that i think also a key thing is empowering like key members of the community people that actually have demonstrated can deliver and are actually serious about it um so that they can grieve grants because they're kind of like building their community and like i'm a big fan of like near's guild model and that's i think kind of like that's how it you know it plays out um i want to point out like on one of the you know the biggest dangers in like the grand ecosystem especially like from from a layer one perspective is like grand shoppers people that like go you know ask for grants from like different l ones and it's like okay so like you're you're not really serious just like you're you're you wanna get a bunch of money just like deploying all these these different chains so i don't know if we guys can come together like figure it out because there's definitely no way to understand that but um so yeah definitely like be serious about what you're doing um definitely like you know go explore different layer ones different layer tools as well but like you know don't be a grand shopper because it's ultimately not gonna work and it's not gonna build a good reputation for yourself that's just like a suggestion well if we think about having a hackathon to like kind of build on these solutions i know a person we can talk to so that would be me uh thank you all for joining this conversation if you do have questions just reach out to them on twitter find us we'll be here at the conference thank you so much to my panelists and my distinguished guest thank you so much for talking about this