I fully support season 4, but I think it’s important for us to be more self-critical before going for a snapshot vote. This post mentions the highlights of the previous seasons, but it doesn’t address the shortcomings. I think it’s important for us to identify areas where we can improve before we allocate a larger budget. I’ve seen the folks at Optimism do a thorough and honest review of their last season, calling out all the ways it was failing, and using that as an opportunity to make their current season better. I think it’s important for us to do the same. In short, I don’t believe there were no shortcomings in the previous 3 seasons of ADG that we can learn from.
2 Likes
This sounds like an elaborate proposal to fund raave parties. What exactly was the tangible impact of previous grants program?
Number of long-term contributors to Aave that were initially funded with grants
Despite spending millions of $$s, why is this metric not growing? What are we doing different this time? We can’t expect things to magically change by just repeating what we did in the past.
Thanks for the questions @fabiengiraldi and @letsraave.
What was the tangible impact of previous grants program?
One third of Aave’s current active service providers started out contributing to the Aave ecosystem through AGD. Llama and Chaos Labs both received grants before becoming full-time contributors (see AIP 104 and 113) alongside other full-time contributors: bgdlabs, Gauntlet, Certora and Sigma Prime.
AGD has provided 168 different grants as of mid-November mainly to fund ‘Applications and integrations’, ‘Community (marketing and educational)’ and ‘Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem’ (see a full breakdown in the first image from the top post). Looking at the status of all grants distributed:
- 51.8% of projects are currently live or the work is complete
- 38.1% of grants are in-progress
Notably when calculated based on dollars distributed opposed to the number of projects, the combined figures increase to 91% with:
- 58.5% live or complete
- 32.5% in-progress
Going forward our aim is to increase the combined total to 95% or higher. On top of providing the ecosystem with a direct benefit to Aave, these grantees also form a pipeline of individuals and teams to become long term contributors to Aave and direct contributors to Aave DAO.
To summarize some of AGD’s tangible impact since inception:
- Received 1336 applications and approved 187 different grants
- Awarded $124,000 across 39 different prizes at ten hackathons
- Pushed forward initiatives outside of grants funding including setting up the Aave Guardians, facilitating bug bounty payments and advocating to receive OP rewards
See below for where we can improve on tracking the impact from grantees.
I think it’s important for us to identify areas where we can improve before we allocate a larger budget.
Below are some areas AGD has fallen short in the past, how we have decided to tackle them and other plans we have for improvement. I’ll also highlight that we are proposing a 33% reduction in budget compared to our previous proposal, not an increase.
To focus first on rAAVEs, although we do see them as a strong tool for community growth and creating Aave’s culture as outlined in our proposal, they are a luxury to host and should be done sparingly. This proposal includes one rAAVE that is co-hosted with Aave Co, accounting for less than 5% of the total proposed budget. Moving forward we believe roughly one rAAVE every 6 months is an appropriate cadence.
Grantee completion rate. Although we set specific milestones with grantees and in some cases tranche out payments based on completion of milestones, there are some grantees that have failed to deliver on their agreed upon milestones with high quality results. This August we hired an analyst to act as the main touch point between AGD and the growing number of grantees to support milestone completion and high quality results. As noted above, when calculated on a dollar basis, 91% of grantees are currently either live, completed or in progress. Moving forward we want to increase this number to 95% or higher.
Tracking impact from grantees. We want to do a better job of aggregating the impact of all grantees, especially in regards to tracking ‘Growth in Aave pools driven by applications funded via grants (e.g. increased TVL, borrow activity, and unique addresses due to apps funded by grants).’ While we have tracked this individually for some grants, we have yet to capture a full and up to date picture of the activity all grantees have generated. Tracking the status of each grant awarded (noted above) was the first step and over the coming months we will work to collect, aggregate and share more metrics around the activity generated with the community.
Grantee value-add. We can do more to support grantees with marketing, connections to auditors and other areas beyond providing capital.
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In terms of marketing we have grown an audience of Aave fans and users across different socials to help amplify grantees to a relevant audience including through our newsletter, community calls and dedicated Twitter Spaces. Lately there has been more demand to feature grantees in front of the Aave community so we are going to revamp the community calls to include a longer format spotlight on more grantees.
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Currently with regards to auditing requests, we will help make one off connections when teams reach out. Going forward we want to standardize the process and look to make partnerships directly with auditing firms where possible.
No action after receiving OP rewards. Earlier this year we created a proposal and successfully received 300,000 OP tokens as part of phase 0 of OP Stimpack. The tokens are to go towards funding projects to help grow Aave on Optimism. We have yet to distribute any OP tokens as we have focused on distributing aUSDC and AAVE that we received from Aave DAO. However, this has not stopped us from providing grants to projects building on Optimism including: analytics from DappLooker and Block Analitica, integrations with Mean Finance and Layer3, and native apps like Pegasus Finance and Lyra Finance. We plan to make a proposal to the community on how the OP rewards should be distributed in the New Year.
Staying on top of ecosystem updates. With many different contributors and active projects across Aave, it can be difficult for reviewers to know what features and changes are currently being worked on. This can cause uncertainty over whether a certain application or area is worth funding and can lead to funding grants for duplicative work in the ecosystem. We will continue to try our best to keep up with everything that is publicly shared by contributors and open up lines of communication with contributors to get clarity where needed.
Leveraging existing grantees. We have funded a talented and diverse group of contributors but have been limited in our engagement with grantees outside of the grant process. There is an opportunity to take advantage of AGD grant recipients to help decentralize AGD by involving grantees in the review process, making a space for grantees to connect and uncover mutually beneficial opportunities, and unlocking other areas grantees can support AGD such as at events.
- Three of the current seven members on the review committee are former grant recipients. We want to explore other tools and ways to involve other grantees in the review process.
- As mentioned in success stories, we partnered with Gateway DAO to release an exclusive NFT for all grantees and have created an exclusive Telegram channel. We hope this will be the start of growing a vibrant and engaging community of grantees that can be a key resource and differentiator for AGD into the future.
Grant process delays. Grantees have faced negative experiences arising from applications being left un-reviewed for a significant period of time, grantees waiting to receive follow up after an interview, as well as payment delays after receiving confirmation of their grant. We are constantly looking for areas to update and improve our processes such as moving to a set cadence for payments and increasing automations in the process flow. We have also looked to improve communication along the way and better set realistic expectations about the process timeline with applicants. Our average monthly time to initially review applications (image below) has significantly improved over the past year. Since July 2022, it has been less than 7 days on average between submitting an application and getting an initial response. We will continue to work to reduce times throughout the grant process and increase communication with grantees where possible.
6 Likes
Hi everyone - we have posted the proposal on Snapshot. Voting starts tomorrow (Jan 4th) morning EST and will run for 5 days. Snapshot
2 Likes
Penn Blockchain is in full support of this. Being a past recipient, we see the value this provides and thanks Shreyas for all his past work. We’re looking forward to @0xbilll and are confident he’ll lead the team well.
2 Likes
Congratulations on the work thus far.
It has been a pleasure to work with the team from Aave Grants DAO and a great experience working with @0xbilll @daveytea @0xmigi @corbpage as I did my research report.
I do have some questions I would like to add to the mix here that I would like to understand better:
- What makes great reviewers for this cycle? What are your criteria for picking someone to join the team?
- Can you describe the tooling and infrastructure used today to support the grant lifecycle (Notion/Airtable/etc.)? What are you happy with, and what do you feel could be improved?
3 Likes
We would also like to formally apply to become a reviewer for the Aave Grants DAO.
Describe your involvement in the Aave ecosystem: We have worked with many teams to help cosponsor and draft proposals, most recently being the Certora AIP and the deploy V3 on Celo discussion post. In the past, we have received an Aave grant ourselves to look into ways of increasing Aave governance participation. We have been delegates for Aave for about 1 year and a half now, and from the delegate standpoint, we have been very active with our current ~90k Aave delegation.
What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?: Team members have been in similar grant reviewing positions in the past. We have worked for Near Protocol, Uniswap Foundation, and other web3 related grant teams. We have also received a few governance related grants ourselves and are very familiar with good and bad characteristics for the grant application process. We are an active delegate in various defi protocols such as Compound, MakerDAO, dYdX, Uniswap, Centrifuge, etc., and are familiar with other successful grant programs through there as well.
Can you commit between two and ten hours a week?: Yes, (@Juanbugeth on twitter) who leads our Aave delegation will take point.
3 Likes
Some feedback from my side.
First and foremost, I think Aave Grants DAO has been evolving well over time and there is a clear public impact of its presence in the ecosystem.
That being said, I think there are things to improve and adapt on:
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Budget on grants side. In isolation, it is always debatable and frequently empty to discuss a budget. When the decentralized and partially volunteer nature of a program like this is mixed into the picture, things become even more complicated. But considering other expenses of the DAO, personally, I think for Aave at this stage (we are early, creating and improving infrastructure) to budget an estimated ~$4m ($1.8m * 2) per year in pure grants is clearly too much.
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Budget on events side. Sponsoring events and being present at them is clearly important; obviously requires funding. Points that are not too clear for me on this are 1) How are the events chosen? 2) What are the metrics to choose certain digital marketing sponsorships against others? (looking at Sponsored events / community initiatives)
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Grants morphology. Probably related to formalizing, being a bit more strict on evaluation, and defining clear targets on the topics looked for on each AGD renewal. For every grant here Funded grants, there should be a deeper post-analysis on what it gave to Aave as a whole, or to the goals of the renewal period. When going through the list, it is relatively simple to see that some grants have little relation with Aave. If the project didn’t deliver, it should be public for awareness.
I’m personally aware through my involvement on BGD (reviewer last period) that there is work on this direction, but trying to abstract myself from that, I just think it is completely mandatory to re-evaluate this because it impacts directly on both the budget and quality of grants given. -
Payment approach. The way of receiving the funds has been done wrong in the past and it is not really acceptable with the size budget moved. The funds should be received as an allowance, and only pulled from the Aave collector whenever needed in smaller batches. What Aave Grants DAO asks for is an allowance, not for transfer. When that kind of transfer happens like here https://etherscan.io/tx/0x990e2518f37d28996d753d41e1af6cf845b6d6f2fb1ea1edfd60291eea444c5a, it means the Aave Collector stops accruing aToken (aUSDC in this case), factually providing that “growth” to Aave Grants DAO.
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Currencies of payment. This should be a bit more formalized, in my opinion, the 70/30 split sounds arbitrary. aUSDC is to be used in expenses, so preferable for some types of projects. AAVE is governance power, so probably makes a lot of sense for other types of projects. From my perspective, other venues of “grants” should be explored especially on the latest, for example by having as a type of grant given some AAVE delegation power for a period, instead of just transferring funds.
3 Likes
The ACI would like to propose feedback & an adjusted budget that will allow AGD to achieve a cost cut while still supporting the growth and development of the Aave ecosystem.
Intro & Cost-cutting
First of all, I would like to congratulate Bill on his new role as the lead of Aave Grants DAO (AGD). I am confident that he will bring valuable experience, leadership, and community engagement to the program.
We all understand that the current bear market has made it challenging to operate as usual, with the market being down 70-90%. In light of this, it is essential for AGD to be strategic in its spending and to focus on what will have the greatest impact on the ecosystem.
The next semester is also highly strategic for Aave as it’ll see the bloom of V3 on mainnet, GHO release & portals release, among other innovations. That is why this feedback & recommendations of cost-cutting is a “tame” scrooge McDuck and is unwilling to sacrifice the essential budget points.
I agree with the proposal’s recommendation to prioritize events and swag as efficient marketing tools. While it may be necessary to scale back on their quantity in the current market, it is essential to maintain the quality of these efforts in order to make the most impact.
Grants
the ACI does not support cutting any grant budget, with the release of V3, GHO & Portal during the period, every $ count.
While not all grants have shown results, the AGD has done a good job so far and probably outperformed the results of most Crypto VCs in terms of quality produced by $ attributed. 100% success is impossible to reach, and AGD has ACI support in its mission.
Events
With regards to specific events, the ACI is supportive of skipping EthDenver, as it may not be worth the investment at this time the Aave brand is well known in that audience, and money is better spent elsewhere.
Consensus, is simply a terrible conference with low quality on every front and not worth the three main currencies we have to allocate: Time, focus & money. The ACI recommends skipping it this year & forever.
That said, I agree with the proposal that EthGlobal, Istanbul, and the GHO virtual hackathon are good events to prioritize, as they align with the goals of V3 and GHO and provide opportunities for adoption and engagement.
Concerning the rAAVEs, they are incredibly efficient ways to support the Aave brand, but they’re a luxury and not quite fit for current market conditions.
The ACI recommendation is to limit rAAVEs to only the three main events in 2023 (Devcon, Ethcc, and Ethglobal devconnect) as it allows AGD to focus on the most impactful events while still maintaining a solid presence.
All other rAAVE should be killed or paid for by the Aave companies.
Here’s an proposed updated list of events with Aave’s presence
| Event | Date | Location | Initial presence | Updated presence | Proposed Budget | Justification |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ETHDenver | March 2-5 | Denver | X | Removed due to high cost and low return on investment as Aave brand is already strong in the US and audience overlap Devcon, EthCC & Devconnect | ||
| ETHGlobal Asia | April 14-16 | Tokyo | X | X | $175,000 | Kept due to strategic importance for GHO adoption and strong Asian developer community |
| Consensus | April 26-28 | Austin | X | Removed due to low relevance for GHO and Aave ecosystem, Consensus is too generalist and low ROI event, should be avoided completely | ||
| ETHIstanbul | May 26-28 | Istanbul | X | X | $175,000 | Kept due to strategic importance for GHO adoption and strong developer community (Turkey is a big market for stablecoins & have strong devs) |
| rAAVE | TBD | TBD | X | Removed due to high cost and prioritization on 3 main events | ||
| GHO Hackathon | TBD - upon launch of GHO | Virtual | X | $150,000 | Added to kickstart development and adoption of GHO/V3/Portals | |
| Event Buffer | $98,651 | Buffer to adjust budget for any events | ||||
| Total Budget | $598,651 |
Compensation
the ACI does not support cutting any compensation for AGD team members. Fair work deserves fair pay, and it is essential to value and retain the talented individuals who are driving AGD’s success.
Others budgets
While some form of optimization can exist, the ACI is not particularly keen to cost cut in other budgets and have no specific recommendation for change.
Proposed revised budget
To achieve a cost cut, I suggest the following adjustments to the budget:
- Maintain the current budget for grants at $1,800,000
- Reduce the budget for events, sponsorships, etc. from $1,348,651 to $598,651
- Reduce the budget for Digital Marketing from $500,000 to $300,000 (good content creators should be supported in bear, but they need to adjust what they ask for to market conditions)
- Maintain other budgets points
I believe that these adjustments will allow AGD to continue to support the growth and development of the Aave ecosystem, while being mindful of the current market conditions and budget constraints.
Below is a full budget table outlining the proposed budget for the next two quarters:
| Item | Current Budget | Adjusted Budget | Comments on Adjustments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grants | $1,800,000 | $1,800,000 | No change |
| Events, Sponsorships, etc. | $1,348,651 | $598,651 | Reduced by $750,000 to reflect market conditions and budget & Raave cuts |
| Digital Marketing | $500,000 | $300,000 | Reduced by $200,000 (sorry bankless & frens but you’ll survive this) |
| Compensation | $240,000 | $240,000 | No change |
| Maintenance | $20,000 | $20,000 | No change |
| Legal Buffer | $90,000 | $90,000 | No change |
| Total | $3,998,651 | $3,048,651 | Reduced by $950,000 to reflect market conditions and budget cuts |
I believe that the AGD proposal, with these adjustments, is a well-thought-out plan that will allow AGD to continue to drive growth and development within the Aave ecosystem, while being mindful of the current market conditions and budget constraints.
The ACI will be supportive of voting YAE on an adjusted budget.
5 Likes
Thank you @0xbilll for putting the proposal forward with detailed explanations for the use of funds and metrics and explanations to support the proposal.
In general, I want to highlight that AGD has been important part of the Aave ecosystem on supporting growth of the ecosystem with grants, events and other sponsorships. AGDs work is the most hardest to value given AGD not only suppots ecosystem initatives such as grants, but also empowers the culture of the Aave community - something that many of the DeFi competitors haven´t been able to achieve so far or have the stickiness that Aave community has.
While I do agree that bear market is an opportunity for cost reductions, I do also believe that for the scale AGD operates and the empowerement it does currently for the exposure of the community and its products, AGD is in important position to capture market share especially around new initiatives such as GHO, where the market share starts from 0 and would be highly competetive market.
First and foremorest I am happy to support the current proposal from @0xbilll as it is since given next year would be important for Aave to gain market share and adoption in already highly competitive markets. Building products on bear market itself doesn´t guarantee success of the product, instead there needs to be awareness and exposure on what is being build and around the ecosystem. There are countless and countless DeFi projects including stablecoins that lack of adoption or have trouble for adopting market share simply because they don´t invest into their awareness, events and community.
Aave community has been in incredible position for being able to create exposure across the whole web3 ecosystem (beyond Ethereum) but this wasn´t purely by building products rather also being involved within the wider community and participating in events (big shout out for every single person participating in these events and raising awareness), giving away swag and hosting gathering such as rAAVE. In fact, the strategy and its success is being copied across the whole web3 ecosystem.
In case of the overall grants itself, as mentioned happy to support current proposal, but would also support scaling down to $1,500,000 or even slightly less, mainly for the reason that it would require distributing lot of grants during the next six months and would see value if increasing the quality and reducing the quantity but do agree on @MarcZeller point that lot of grants could come around GHO - reducing overall the size of grant program would help to shift more costs towards the community builders.
Regarding events, I would recommend to have ETHDenver as the Aave community´s presense has been somewhat limited there for the past years and traditionally the event is full of builders and also newcomers to web3. Consensus events are not dev oriented events but actually good opportunties to create exposure within the institutional space and improve the presense there. Having institutional presense is what leads to exciting experiments and wider DeFi adoption across the institutional space as DeFi matures to become the backbone of finance, and Aave community should be the leader in the space.
Regarding the rAAVEs, also it makes more sense to have rAAVEs when there is already an event or a hackathon that AGD is participating in, in the current case I would say ETHIstanbul would work quite well given as a new emerging market and a venue to expand the community. I do agree with @MarcZeller that selectiveness should come where rAAVEs are hosted (and events in general), but would not consider them as a luxury, rather valuable part of the events strategy. I do agree that 3 rAAVEs should be the max but would even argue that 2 could be enough for 2023, as long as one is during first 6 months, preferrably ETHIstanbul. Also nice to see as well some of the focus in Asian markets regarding the events and I think its strategically good area for growth.
Regarding digital marketing, would be good opportunity to utilize Bankless given the innovation that is coming up withint the Aave community - but also see value if it happens on second period of 2023.
Regarding the compensation it sems fair to me given how much of work and resposibility there is with the AGD ops.
Regarding cost management process - recommend to move any unspent funds to the next renewal, in case there isn´t enough grants to fund with the current budget with the criteria set by the AGD or all of the event commitments are not fulfilled. There is no need to fund every single idea, instead ideas that can make an sizeable impact on specific grants category (risk management tools, data tools etc).
2023 is the year for Aave 
and the community should not be reluctant of incurring costs for growth but also the community should be conscious of costs/spending and ensure the community gets most out of AGD, which the proposal steers towards a healthy budget for first 6 months.
Will vote YAE on the AGD renewal
11 Likes
Thank you, @stani, for your feedback on the ACI proposed budget revision for Aave Grants DAO (AGD).
We appreciate your support and suggestions for adjustments to the budget, including hosting a rAAVE during ETHIstanbul and limiting rAAVEs to a maximum of two events in 2023, with one being hosted in the first six months. on the remaining proposed rAAVE, I think we can both agree ethCC might be the less strategic and could easily be replaced by ethIstanbul, Paris already got two rAAVE and it’s a good signal to host these strategic events for new audiences.
We also appreciate your recommendation to add ETHDenver as an event and to scale down the grant budget to $1.5 million or slightly less in order to increase the quality and reduce the quantity of grants.
We have thus increased the revised event budget for ETHDenver & a rAAVE to $175,000 & $150,000 in order to better reflect the value of these events in building and expanding the Aave community.
We still think Consensus conference is the least painful sacrifice to make, and we still think this event is costly with low ROI.
Here is the revised budget:
| Event | Date | Location | Proposed Budget | Justification |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ETHDenver | March 2-5 | Denver | $175,000 | Added due to value in building and expanding the Aave community |
| ETHGlobal Asia | April 14-16 | Tokyo | $175,000 | Kept due to strategic importance for GHO adoption and strong Asian developer community |
| ETHIstanbul | May 26-28 | Istanbul | $175,000 | Kept due to strategic importance for GHO adoption and strong developer community (Turkey is a big market for stablecoins & have strong devs) |
| rAAVE | TBD | TBD | $150,000 | Added during ETHIstanbul as an opportunity to expand the Aave community in a new emerging market |
| GHO Hackathon | TBD - upon launch of GHO | Virtual | $150,000 | Added to kickstart development and adoption of GHO/V3/Portals |
| Event Buffer | $0 | Buffer used for ETHDenver | ||
| Total Budget | $825,000 |
And the total revised budget incorporating your feedback:
| Item | Current Budget | Adjusted Budget | Comments on Adjustments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grants | $1,800,000 | $1,500,000 | Reduced by $300,000 |
| Events, Sponsorships, etc. | $1,348,651 | $825,000 | Reduced by $523,651 but now integrating both ETHDenver & a rAAVE |
| Digital Marketing | $500,000 | $300,000 | Reduced by $150,000 (350k$ will work, I’ll help with negotiation if needed) |
| Compensation | $240,000 | $240,000 | No change |
| Maintenance | $20,000 | $20,000 | No change |
| Legal Buffer | $90,000 | $90,000 | No change |
| Total | $3,998,651 | $2,975,000 | Reduced by $1,023,651 |
4 Likes
Thanks for the detailed proposal and the input from the community & contributors.
The members of AGD are the backbone and driving force of many activities that propel the success of Aave forward. The current compensation allocation feels low for the value and commitment the full time contributors provide.
Current Compensation Total: $240,000
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Lead: $9k/month
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Review committee: $150/hr, capped at 10 hrs/week
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Analyst: $5k/month
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Operations lead: $150/hr capped at 20 hrs/month
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Events coordinator: $3k/month
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Designer: one-off based on specific design engagements
Bumping this up by 25% - 50% for the lead, analyst, and events coordinator should be considered to retain and reward top non-techincal full time contributors.
Compensation scenario for +25% - +50% for lead, analyst and events coordinator:
Total: $288,000 - $336,000
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Lead: $11k/month - $13k/month
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Review committee: $150/hr, capped at 10 hrs/week
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Analyst: $6k/month - $7k/month
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Operations lead: $150/hr capped at 20 hrs/month
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Events coordinator: $4k/month - $5k/month
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Designer: one-off based on specific design engagements
2 Likes
Thanks @eboado @MarcZeller and @stani for your comments and overall support to continue AGD. First, I have canceled the Snapshot vote mentioned above in order to properly address the comments raised and reach a consensus before moving the proposal forward.
There seems to be additional appetite to reduce the overall budget. I can understand this given the current market conditions.
Due to this sentiment, below is a proposed new budget that incorporates the feedback raised and reduces the original budget by $750k. While this will impact AGD’s ability to fund builders and sponsorships, we are confident we will still be able to deliver on our mission. If the community is in favor of this budget over the original proposal, we can move forward with the updated budget. Here are the key changes to the budget:
Reduction in overall grants spend. While it is not an easy decision to cut from this area as it is the heart of AGD, given the importance of events and sponsorships (as has been mentioned numerous times by different commenters above), it makes sense to reduce spend to arrive at a lower total budget. This will also give AGD the resources to focus on quality and to develop an understanding of the different dynamics that will go into GHO, Portal and other new categories of grants. With the reduced number of grants to distribute, we can also evaluate the need to bring on additional reviewers.
rAAVE
- Agree with @stani that Istanbul is an exciting market and could be a great location for a rAAVE in the first half of 2023. We have kept an allocation to host a rAAVE in the budget.
- Outside of this proposal our tentative plan is to host 1 more rAAVE in 2023 (not included in this budget). As @MarcZeller suggests, DevCon is a strong candidate given previous rAAVEs around ETHCC.
We removed Consensus as a large-scale activation. There is still the option to potentially do something smaller, but given @MarcZeller’s comments and as it is not developer focused, it makes most sense to remove this as a main activation. This will reduce the total large scale activations AGD participates in from 5 to 4 in the first half of 2023: ETHDenver, ETHGlobal Tokyo, ETHGlobal Istanbul and a virtual hackathon for GHO.
The digital marketing budget has been reduced by $200k. Depending on the status of GHO and how well the initial sponsorships perform, we can look to increase spend to this category during the next proposal.
Finally we have decreased the buffer for events. This will mainly reduce other additional events AGD could sponsor and have a smaller presence at.
| Proposed Budget (2 Quarters) | Amount | Change from Original Budget | Payment Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expected Grants to Award | $1,500,000 | Reduced by $300K | |
| Grants Total Budgeted Cost | $1,500,000 | 50% aUSDC 50% AAVE | |
| Event Sponsorships, Hackathons & Bounties (including rAAVEs, SWAG and other event production costs) | $1,100,000 | Reduced by ~$250K | |
| Digital Marketing | $300,000 | Reduced by $200K | |
| Sponsorships Total Budgeted Cost | $1,400,000 | 100% aUSDC | |
| Compensation | $240,000 | No changes | 50% aUSDC 50% AAVE |
| Maintenance: Tooling, subscriptions, gas reimbursements | $20,000 | No changes | 100% aUSDC |
| Legal Buffer | $90,000 | No changes | 100% aUSDC |
| Operations Total Budgeted Cost | $350,000 | ||
| Total Proposed AGD Budget | $3,250,000 | Reduced by $750k |
Currencies of payment
Being clearer internally on what grant categories receive payment in what currency is a good idea to work towards. To put some more rationale and numbers to it, there is a payment column next to each budget item with an estimated % of what currency each item will be paid in. Specifically for the grants portion, AGD will work to create guidelines on what category of grants receive which payment currency going forward. With these figures, aUSDC accounts for >73% of the total budget. As such, we will update our proposal to be paid 25% in AAVE and 75% in USDC.
4 Likes
Thanks, bill for this updated proposal,
I think we reached a fitting consensus.
the ACI will vote YAE to this proposal in its current form.
6 Likes
Hey, @Sov thanks for the questions - I can comment on point 2. Currently, we use a mix of mainly Airtable (to process grants), Notion (for the website and public information sharing), Telegram (for operations and keeping in touch with grantees directly), Gmail (for more formal communication), and Gnosis Safe (for payment processing). Besides that, we have a few custom dashboards for tracking analytics and the regular use of Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, etc.
From a reviewer and analyst perspective, I am happy with the Airtable setup we currently use and think the automation is great! For things that could be improved tooling/process-wise, there is not much, but one area we can improve is analyzing and sharing the data collected in the Airtable. Further work on reporting with Llama and internally with OmniAnalytics should help improve this.
3 Likes
Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and expressed support to renew AGD! A Snapshot vote has been posted along with an updated proposal. The Snapshot will start tomorrow Jan 7th at 7am EST and run for 5 days.
2 Likes
Thanks for this thorough update @0xbilll !
I am writing to express my strong interest in joining the Aave Grants DAO committee, and to share my relevant skills and experience as a qualified candidate. I am deeply invested in the Aave ecosystem and committed to supporting its growth and development. I see Aave as a crucial protocol in the current and future decentralized financial system, and I am eager to help support the upcoming GHO launch.
*Describe your involvement in the Aave ecosystem
- I have been closely following the developments in the Aave ecosystem on a professional level. The past two years I have been leading the DeFi efforts at a goal-based savings dapp build on top of Aave, called GoodGhosting. There I helped integrate both Aave v2 and Aave v3 into the app. Currently it is responsible for providing 4% of the DAI liquidity on Aave v3 on Polygon. We were an early Aave Ecosystem grantee (prior to the Aave Grants DAO was established) and spun out of a 2020 ETH London Hackathon project, where it won the Aave prize.
- On a personal level, I have been an active Aave user since the ETHLend days. According to Degenscore I am a top 1% Aave user.
- Attended the first three rAAVEs
- Kept up-to-date with many Aave-related projects, such as Aavegotchi.
- Succesfully lobbied at Enzyme Finance to add Aave as a yield source to their platform
- Very excited about the launch of GHO, and the new capabilities.
*What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?
Some skills particularly relevant for reviewing grant proposals and interviewing candidates:
- Experience reviewing grant proposals as a Enzyme Finance DAO council member (from Sep 2020 until Okt 2022). There I was responsible for reviewing grants related to new DeFi integrations (e.g. adding new yield sources such as PoolTogether and IDLE finance) and UX improvements.
- Professional experience writing and reviewing academic grants, during my time working in Biotech academia (2013-2018), including budgetting.
- A good technical understanding of smart contract, frontend and backend development
- A good overview of what’s happening in the DeFi ecosystem across multiple chains
- An analytical mind and ability to make data-driven decisions
- Experience running a startup, and its realistic funding requirements
*Can you commit between two and ten hours a week?
- Yes
I would be honored to join the Aave Grants DAO committee and help drive the continued success of the Aave ecosystem!
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Application for a reviewer role: Questbook
We’ve helped facilitate $2.1M in grants and have spoken to 400+ builders applying for grants. We have received two grants from AAVE. We want to bring this experience and expertise to be a reviewer at AGD.
Describe your involvement in the Aave ecosystem
- Questbook received a grant from AAVE to build a grants orchestration tool
- Already being used in Aave developer tooling grants experimentally
- 20K builders on the tool every month
- For more details: Grant-61
- Sovereign Signal (@Sov ) received a grant from AAVE for the long-form retrospective on the performance and impact of AAVE Grants DAO.
- For more details: Grant-150
What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?
We know what it takes to run a grants program efficiently
- Grants Program Lead for CGP 2.0
- Designed the grants process for Polygon DAO
- Facilitated $2.1M in grants across Polygon, Compound, Celo, Solana etc.
More importantly, we understand what role a reviewer plays in a good grants program.
- We are a Developer Tooling reviewer for CGP 2.0
- Recipient of 2 grants from AAVE
- Have spoken to over 400 builders applying for grants across the ecosystem
Can you commit between two and ten hours a week?
Yes, absolutely.
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thanks @Deepcryptodive & @harsha for your interest to support @0xbilll & AGD but this thread is not the right place to do that, I invite y’all & other potential candidates to contact bill directly.
the conversation about the AGD proposal is now centered around a new thread Updated Proposal: Aave Grants DAO Renewal
I will close this one now and invite people that want to continue discussing the AGD proposal to participate there.
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