@HelloShreyas - thanks for this comprehensive update and overview.
Aave Grants has benefitted multiple orgs, such as our own, and has the potential to encourage greater development in the ecosystem and product improvements for the Aave protocol.
For this reason, I would be interested in filling one of the two departures on the grants committee.
My involvement in Aave:
Governance Contributor at Flipside Crypto (a grant recipient, bringing CEA to Aave)
New User of The Month in Aave Forum (October 2021)
Active Voter in the AAVE Governance (flipsidecrypto.eth)
Personal user of the Aave Protocol and fully crypto native
My skills/experience:
DeFi Research @ Proxima Capital, a cryptocurrency market-making and arbitrage firm
Protocol Specialist @ Flipside Crypto, data analytics and BI for blockchains
Social Media @ Voyager Digital, a large cryptocurrency brokerage with $5B AUM
These past and present experiences has given me a range of knowledge, from a centralized brokerage to a Web3 analytics platform. I am skilled in Marketing, Market Research, and Governance, with exprience in community management, on and off-chain voting, financial analysis, and risk review. This diverse knowledge has helped DAOs identify new opportunities in the space, current product gaps or limitations, and different use cases, from institutions to retail investors.
I share a unique understanding of how Aave can boost TVL, on-ramp more daily users, and cement itself as a luminary in the space.
Can you commit ~5 hours a week?
Yes
I welcome any feedback from the community and look forward to growing Aave Grants DAO.
I’m Eric from the Omni Analytics team. I wanted to briefly comment on how the Aave Grants DAO afforded us a fantastic opportunity and how appreciative we are. We received a grant to develop an Analytics portal and growth dashboard for Aave. We believe this not only helped the community see the tremendous growth of the platform, but it also gave us an opportunity to hone our skills, particularly in SQL queries, and to work with the Covalent API to help build out an R-based interface for analyzing Aave growth.
We’ve received some great feedback on it. Working directly with the team, we also identified the sources of some data anomalies that were only visible after the dashboards were created. This allowed the core Aave team to gain insights, and provides a platform for the future, where unexpected spikes in volume can be traced to specific events that occurred during various timeframes.
Lastly, we had a fantastic experience working with the team, and we believe there’s a lot more that can be done to expand on this work. This Aave Grants DAO made it all possible and we would love to see them continue to support new and old projects alike.
For those who haven’t seen our work, we have a thread up where we’ve provided development updates and screenshots / links. You can see that here.
Thanks for the proposal @HelloShreyas .
Considering the work done by the Grants DAO on the previous period, and the abundance of grantees, I think it is a good idea to increase the grants budget to $2m.
But I would like to know the rationale of increasing the operational budget from $250k to $2m per quarter, as that is already a big expense, considering that the people contributing to the Grants DAO is more or less in the same range.
Could the community get also an operational financial report of the operational side in the previous tenure? Basically a detailed recap of where all operational budget was spent, same as with the grants’ budget.
Nice work on growing the grants program @HelloShreyas and team!
It may be useful for the community to know # of applications received vs # grants given. This would help inform where future efforts should be focused, as well as serve as a ‘KPI’ to track the growth of the grants program.
Some rhetorical questions for the grants committee to consider:
How many applications are being received at the top of the funnel? How can we increase this? Are enough grants being granted, or are too many being granted? What is the status of grantees 3, 6, 12 months after receiving the grant? Is there a tangible impact on the protocol after these time periods? etc
P.S. I saw on the original proposal there was a “What does success look like?” section with measurable criteria. Maybe this is already posted somewhere that I’m not aware of? If so, can you link?
Appreciate your input, @eboado. To confirm - we are not increasing the operational budget from $250k to $2m. We only recommend increasing the total program budget from $1m to $2m a quarter. Our planned operational budget for the pilot program over 6 months was $250k and we spent about $130k. You can see the list of expenses outlined here and a list of grants given out here. I expect our max operational budget to be slightly more than last time but unlikely to exceed it. Our spending can be seen on the Aave Grants website (links above), but we will work on providing a concise, periodic report going forward on our spending. Happy to collaborate with you on making that report template so we can include items you think are most relevant.
Thanks for the clarification @HelloShreyas, I would suggest to modify the description of this thread to not confuse anybody then, outlining clearly the cost of the updated program, both for grants and operationally, probably also including the amounts that the Grants DAO will receive initially, if some others at the end, and how a potential return of non-used funds will be managed.
About the reports template, was not finding the one you just linked, sorry for that. As general recommendation, I think it is pretty important to have as much transparency and granularity as possible on the budgeting (e.g. list of transaction done for all different expenses, hours allocated by all participants), for which at least personally I would be completely in favour if you engage some accounting person.
Good points. I will separate the operational costs of the program in the proposal. Agreed on engaging an accountant. I just reached out to someone who has worked on Aave reports before; we will put together a reporting template for the next round of grants.
Aave Grants has been developing the Aave community and ecosystem with success. It is fantastic to see the community growing with the weekly Aave News and the community calls. The grantees are building new features for users who can now use Cono’s health factor protection tool for example. It’s great to see the focus on culture and ecosystem growth. Big thank you to you and all of those of have contributed to Aave grants
After a semester of operations, it makes sense to spend some time evaluating the efforts. To then best strategies on how to continue growing the Aave community next quarter. How did we do? What could be improved? Where do we need to focus?
In the initial Aave Grants proposal, Aleks had formalised some success metrics which have been tackled well - would be great to review the performance across these criteria.
“Measurable criteria:
Growth in the number of grants applications received quarter-over-quarter
Growth in the number of projects, ideas, and events funded
Growth in community engagement (e.g. increased activity on forums, Discord, etc.)
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)
Subjective criteria:
Improved sentiment and goodwill within the community
Improvement to the Aave protocol’s brand and positioning in the market"
I would love to have an overview of how Aave Grants performed on these points as well as some details on the monthly operations. The initial budget was stretched to 2 quarters so it would be interesting to understand and adapt the new scope to reality. An accountant could help bring more transparency and figures to draft a detailed plan for the next quarter or year. Transparency brings trust which will help the community do bigger and better things together
The community calls have become among my favorite Aave Rituals. It’s been so incredible to hear Aave builders from all corners of the world. This bonding event is a fantastic way to increase the sense of connection within our DAO
I believe one of the objectives of the Aave DAO this quarter should be to grow active contributors. For this we need to continue helping members connect and build trust. We also need to find ways to encourage leadership within the community. This is already taking shape with the formation of Aave grants, Aave treasury working group, Aave Risk DAO… and we should continue to invest in the onboarding of community members and contributors.
One idea would be to continue focusing on strong connections with even more regular calls on DAO themes or office hours. For example:
Aave DAO onboarding
How to get involved with the Aave DAO?
What is the Aave DAO? Its values
How to get a grant?
Contributors / Working Groups hours
Builders hours
Aave protocol
How does the Protocol work?
Workshops (using the APIs, making AIPs, gitHub deepive …)
Grants applications review and follow up calls - could the community participate more actively in awarding grants with a specific snapshot space (decentralised grants)?
This last year, the Aave community has had a chance to work closely with the Index Coop with many shared contributors. Indeed the Index Coop has been incredible at building a solid community and onboarding tens of outstanding contributors to DeFi. The Aave DAO could take inspiration from the Index Coop internship program that helped grow a diverse community by facilitating the transition to web3 work. These interns would contribute to forum debates and help working groups such as AAVE tokenomics, the Safety Module or the Aave DAO treasury group.
As Aave Grants is 6 months, it’s great to see the team grow and organise. A roadmap for scaling the Aave ecosystem and foster the community would help to understand the path to growing the number of Aave DAO contributors and community. A clear view of the road ahead will make it more straightforward for the community to allocate more resources and for members to start participating more actively
Appreciate the positive words Alex. See below for a few comments including a breakdown of how AGD performed based on the original criteria set.
You bring up a bunch of great ideas (more workshops/calls, creating an intern program) and importantly mention the key to executing them successfully, growing active contributors. This along with decentralizing the grants process is something that has been top of mind. To give a taste of some ideas we are exploring:
Give the decision making power over awarding grants to previous grantees and other key community members
Potentially leverage Mirror’s write rate where relevant if we want to extend decision making power to the community
Setting up Pods with Orca Protocol to have independent teams make decisions within the general umbrella of AGD
We want to provide excellent post-grants support, including introductions to auditors, Aave team members, marketing support, and strategic advice wherever possible
As mentioned above, we will work to provide concise, periodic reports on spending going forward including getting an accountant involved.
Number of applications:
Q1: 113
Q2: 86
Number of grants given out:
Q1: 12
Q2: 19
Note that this does not include grants for hackathons, events, and sponsorships
Growth in community engagement on social channels from August 9th to today: Substack subscribers: 168 → 770 (+358%),Twitter followers: 3011 → 5317 (+77%), Telegram members: 370 → 654 (+77%)
Growth in Aave pools driven by applications funded via grants: think it is difficult / too early to attribute items like TVL, borrow activity, unique addresses due to grantees. We will make sure to follow this in the coming quarters.
Hi all, fairly new to Aave, we run a scholarship fund for college students who want to focus on blockchain/fintech studies, we are getting ready to launch the 2022 awards. Not sure if the community here may be interested in co-funding such a scholarship? TY
Hey @Prankstr25! Could you please apply through our website here? The main thing we look at is the benefit to the Aave ecosystem so be sure to include all the details and someone will have a look!
hii there, i don’t know where should i type this message but can some one tell me …Is there any post for support mod in discord. Now i am working for ENS DAO ( Ethereum Name Service ). i have a full experience in support mod.
i am expecting ( 700-1000 $ ) per month
Hi @EzR3aL - apologies for the delayed response, I am just seeing your message. Currently we are not looking to expand the review committee but likely will in the future. I can certainly reach out then if there is interest on your end! You can follow updates like this and others from AGD in our AGD Renewal 4: Recent work Updates post.