The Grants Metadata Standard by DAOstar.org - Bangkok 2024

[Music] okay so grants um yeah as Adon mentioned uh some of the popular mechanisms in web 2 have been effective uh and grants in web 3 are kind of fragmented um so but grants are one of the uh most popular mechanisms for ecosystem growth uh a lot of protocols in web3 uh use Grant to uh bring in developers to uh bring in innovation in the daps that are built on it uh to bring in creativity of um all sorts of kinds and um grants evolved into different types of funding mechanisms um so the grant Marat standard is di 5 uh of which I will be talking about later but first let me preface this with preface it with how we got to this meta standard um so web3 ecosystem development wi grants has been a thing for a while now and there's a lot of money that goes into it it's um According to some stats we could say nearly half a billion uh we have uh just one protocols some protocols funding it more than 20 20 Mill million and there was arbitrum who did uh the stip uh gr po which did SE which distributed 75 uh million in AB so web 3 ecosystem development has been uh kind of LED mainly by grants uh there's other sorts of mechanisms like which hackathons and bounties and also provide uh but grants have been popular because they are uh non- dilutional in nature wherein when it come when you compare these things with we see seed or Angel investment there there's always some sort of like uh you need to think about equity and all of those things um so grants because of their non- dilutional nature and it it also like uh pushes forward experts in the industry to experiment with the new technology uh which blockchain has been and we have um blockchains like layer one layer 2 and there's then uh dii Primitives and we are rethinking uh the world of Finance with defi Primitives um so grants have been the one of the main mechanisms to build a web3 ecosystem um it also they also bring together uh some other projects and protocols uh to share and work on common goal like public goods fun in the Commons this whole conference has been uh one of the main topics has been public goods so um public digital public goods are one of the uh widely uh collaborative shared goals and uh uh there are so many hackathons right now and FTC hackathon was itself a whole public good hackathon so in door hacks if you go there are open source um and there are some hackathons which are um which are which come together for like gaming and other systems so yes grants also unite um ecosystem with their shared goals and they also enable open-ended research to try and see things experiment with things and where they go um so state of web3 Grants report 2023 uh this was uh released by Grand Innovation Labs where they uh where they had interviews with 30 organizations and some of them were active programs uh some of them were Sunset programs and some of them were quadratic funding and Grant operators um Ave grandstar compound ethereum Foundation mantle Solana and ton uh unisa foundations are the active programs which existed in 2023 uh the state of up3 Grants reports was uh released in 2023 and also in 2024 so this report uh basically looked into the background of these uh protocols or project providing these Grant programs um and what the grant programs is about um what is the mission of the grant programs and um how do they how is their Grant application process like and what do they uh how do they decide on giving the grants out and what are the challenges that they make and also they uh looked into the impact uh measurement of these Grand programs um they did it in 2023 and also 2024 uh you can see some of the uh common programs like mantle um so basically some of the challenges that were faced by uh Grand programs were uh Grand farming if you've heard uh what exactly Grant farming is you might know how um how bad it is for the ecosystem and grants ecosystem um there were other challenges where uh these projects have a huge grand pool and there are so many applicants so uh they face problems with uh you know quality of applications and some of the grant programs actually wanted to keep in track with consistent quality applications um and actually the reason why some of the programs are Sunset was because of grand farming because they shifted their uh mode of funding uh projects to they went back to VC model because Grand farming was so uh bad uh one of the example was uh say like some projects who got funded in one ecosystem um and they didn't complete the milestones and they went to some other ecosystem and asked for uh funds so there's no right now uh there's no part way for all of these Grant programs to work together have a collaborative way to know what's happening in the collective Grant ecosystem because um because of that the it's like this this gives us to like existing challenges like oh quality of applications uh there are some uh times where Grant managers have to create telegram groups with other te uh other Grand managers in order to keep up with what's going on in the other Grand ecosystem um well all of this just happens in discoordinated way uh sometimes uh fragmented and uh just doesn't really help the efficiency and maturity of the grand programs so um the challenges was like when all of these things happen when there's like lack of quality of applications Grand farming things going on uh there's even the grant programs themselves are like not really mature because uh in order to build the web3 ecosystem most uh new projects even adopt this grant programs uh they they they are unable to know how to actually conduct the operations of running a grant programs um and then uh there's some of sometimes this just becomes un unsustainable because now you have to also screen the quality of applications second in the decision- making you also have to uh look for signals look for signals of authenticity and uh and also like gather to together experts in the industry to make a decision um these were some of the challenges common challenges faced by uh most of the grand programs well the ecosystem needs enhanced coordination mechanisms uh and increase in transparency and to streamline all of these operations because uh to help the overall Grant ecosystem to aoid the problems of like Grant farming uh increase the quality of applications to also have more complex uh Grant uh funding mechanisms so um these were the needs of the grant ecosystem that were identified now uh also I mentioned with the grants report there was impact data obviously with all the grand programs they have their own ways of measuring the impact of the grand money that they give out uh but this data has been fragmented some Sometimes some Grand programs focus on tvl uh of the total uh ecosystem some Grand programs focus on Milestones um but the collaboration is between these all different Grand programs is difficult due to uh different data format schemas and varying structures so um the Dow ip5 uh is something a metadata standard uh which enables cross program collaboration um what do I mean is if you had some common fields uh between all of these uh Grant programs the way they that they measure the impact or the way they report uh their um analysis on how the grant program went uh you you are able to create a common metadata schema which will enable more like Grant tools so um and one of the problem was operational inefficiencies uh so tracking and managing applications and Reporting was uh in different ways some programs did it annually some programs did it quarterly some programs did it at every Grand uh pool round uh and overall uh because because of inefficiencies of Grant programs um you couldn't really analyze how effective or mature uh the grant giving mechanisms were um so Dow ap5 uh is um technical metadata standard uh well first uh for first step for the da5 is like to create a metadata Lake and second is uh the metadata schema standard so all the challenges and problems that I talked about uh right now uh if we if the our approach of solving it is to create a metadata Lake where uh we collaborate with different Grant system organizations and uh they provide us the grant data and we put them in a data Lake and we make it available for uh analysts and just just the community to to work on it and second is the metadata schema standard where we identified roles in the uh Grant ecosystem there are Grant uh systems which are uh which are entities who provide grants uh second there are Grant managers which are entities who collaborate with Grant systems to provide grants uh and then there are uh projects project uh projects who apply buy for Grants so the metadata schema standard uh is a Json schema standard where we asked to publish uh the information of the grand pool that they are uh running applications that have been applied for that grand pool uh and for projects and for projects there'd be um and for projects that be uh what is the project about description and um how much funds are they asking and what are they asking for so uh this is the da5 uh the metadata Lake and metadata schema standard um we have created the Grand metadata lake with collaboration with uh open source Observer uh we right now in Grand metadata Lake we have Stellar Foundation octant uh optimism arbitrum foundation and out drops uh Grant data available for you right now um and the whole uh vision of the di5 is um it enables like data aggregation now with like as you can see here we already have five um Grant systems providing their Grant met data you could run an analysis on how uh optimism performed in compared to aitam Foundation in maybe based on like uh one Common Ground mechanism this is an example I I don't uh so this is an example and you could compare the whole um um effectiveness of a program based on what the goal was um so when you get when you have a pool of uh grandm datal Lake you can you can also enable history of the projects so one of the main uh thing uh with grand uh farming was we Wen unable to see um which Grand systems funded uh which projects previously so with metad Leake you can have a history of uh Project funding uh and you can uh prevent things like Grand farming and also collaborat collaborate with other Grand systems on a particular shared Vision uh maybe like a public good maybe uh you both want uh a same Grand tool to be prepared so you can collaborate on that um so with data Lake you can create data Trails between different Grant data sets um like creation of history of a project grant funding and then you can stack different grant funding mechanisms um now say you have uh data of uh uh a few different pools um based on based on that you can create complex retroactive funding mechanisms second uh then moreover you can compare and analyze the effectiveness of uh Grant system mechanisms say quadratic funding was used with two different Grant uh systems um and you can just um do some stats and Reporting and Analysis the reason we created metadata schema was we saw that we had some common sharing Fields uh in all of the the uh Grant data that was provided to us uh when you are able to when you're able to create a metadata schema uh encompassing all the common fields that are in the that are used by these gr systems you can create interoperable gr tools so we did the funding the commons hackathon and um that time uh there are some of the projects that submitted uh built on the grant uh metadata Lake and schema uh one of it was uh GR scan um we'll share the links on on it later uh where in gr scan you can just uh go and type the project name and you can view which which Grant system funded this like maybe it was Stellar maybe it was optimism and uh you can know the history of the grant funding for a project um metadata schema improves the grant transparency and Reporting um we believe transparency uh drives accountability forward um if if you want uh if you want the grant ecosystem to have more mature accountable and transparent uh Grant systems uh we encourage you to bring forward and contribute to uh the data Lake and also adopt the metadata schema um well I want to mention I'm I'm going to be skiing skipping over this slide because there's no time um I want to mention uh some of the um the Grand St stacking mechanism that I mentioned uh which which is enabled by um the data Lake uh this one um is the source of it is onchain capital allocation by Kevin Aoki um so as you can see in this diagram uh there's retr pgf fund and then that that retr pgf program funds a few projects and then you can do uh CV and then quadratic funding and this this whole thing grants uh mechanism staking like you can do complex uh retroactive funding mechanisms built upon this uh then uh with data L you can visualize how things are going uh between technocratic and Democratic uh funding mechanisms um and uh the amount of funding and create like a design space visualizations um then there's uh Grand maturity index uh uh which is published by Ben and FES so Grand maturity index uh was created to measure the effectiveness U and maturity of a grant program so this applies for individual Grant systems um and once you apply Grant maturity index uh for each individual Grant systems in the data leg you are able to measure how mature uh the grant system is uh you can do it for optimism you can do it for arbitrum you can compare at the end after applying the grand maturity index you'll get a percentage uh or you can even even get a framework of uh framework of parameters that you can use to compare between two different uh Grant systems um the formula uh I believe will be released uh later and you can contact the authors in order to know more about it um so the Dow ap5 Road map basically right now is to gather more data sets of from various Grand funding mechanisms Align data utilities um and uh so we recognize that Grant systems have different ways of storing the data so we'll be enabling air table ex extension Excel uh Python scripts uh which exports the data to Json LD and support the ground tools um yes uh thank you for listening to me uh I hope I was able to convey everything that we doing and if you have any questions come and talk to me I I'll try and answer everything you have all right