- December ‘22
Overview
The Aave Grants DAO (AGD) is currently in the process of renewing before we start awarding grants for our sixth and seventh quarters since inception. A good overview of our previous work and future goals for the next two quarters is covered in detail in our recent fourth renewal proposal post.
This recent work update is reporting on AGD’s work completed in December and is the last report for the fifth quarter. It covers the grants that were awarded, key monthly metrics, and milestones reached since the start of September. Below is a timeline of AGD’s funding for the month of December including the fifth quarter of the program.
Grants Summary
Total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below starting from mid-May of 2021 when the program began up until the end of December (updated).
- Total Grant Applications Received: 1386
- Total Applications Approved: 197
- Acceptance Rate:
- written(stage 1): 10%
- video call(stage 2): 66%
- Total Amount Dispersed: $4,611,956
- Complete Milestone-Based Grants: 86%
- In-progress/Incomplete Milestone-Based grants: 14%
- Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
- Applications and integrations (84) ($2,240,556),
- Code audits (3) ($82,000),
- Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (16) ($598,740),
- Community (marketing and educational) (46) ($645,050),
- Developer tooling (11) ($357,500),
- Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (13) ($185,000),
- Other (8) ($189,900),
- Protocol development (16) ($313,200)
December Approved Grants
This last December we received 105 grant applications, and sent out funds for 10 new grantees. In total, the 10 awarded grants amounted to a cumulative $217,000 in funding across single and tranche-based payments. The 10 awarded grants fell into three of the standard eight categories we use with Application and Integrations being the most awarded. The average grant size was $21,700 with the most commonly awarded amount being $5k. Listed below are the awarded grants for December ranging from largest to smallest by funding size:
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Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant category
- grant description - “grantee self-description”
- use of funds
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Block Analitica II - $90,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- Block Analitica second approved grant, this one is for continued maintenance of already developed risk and other dashboards along with new integrations such as Aave’s upcoming ETH v3 market along with others (Avalanche v3, Polygon v3)
- funds will go towards the completion of the milestones above across three tranches
-
Ethereum Climate Platform - $50,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- effort organised by Consensys along with a number of other partners to generate emission reductions that exceed the entire 7-year Proof of Work carbon debt of Ethereum.
- grant will be used to help finance technology, product integration, ops development, legal, regulatory, tax, accounting, UN collaboration, project pipeline development and working capital
-
Development of new Governance UI / Radish - $24,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- “To enhance AAVE Governance we are creating a tool to extend the platform with proposal creation, account overview with address specific delegates, activity, and power.”
- funds are for building out earlier designed prototypes proposed in the forum here
-
Tookey - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “Tookey.io is protecting Web3 from unauthorized access and loss of keys, while remaining a non-custody solution”
- grant will fund the build-out of Aave integration into Tookey Signer (Signer - mobile application for generating a distributed key and generating a signature)
-
Linen - $10,000(full) - events / hackathons / sponsorships
- Linen is a community-funded multi-sig smart contract wallet similar to Argent. this grant is to help with the marketing of their Polygon launch
- funds will be used for prizes in the launch campaign of their Polygon integration
-
DeFi Education Program - $5,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- a series of DeFi educational videos targeting the Turkish ecosystem. “will include 15-20 top legit DeFi projects with deep-dive explanations about the protocols (technical background, data-backed informatics, tutorials, and news updates)”
- funds will cover design and video production costs
-
Blockpay - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
- application with the goal of onboarding web2 users into web3 by adding all features used in web2 to web3 with corresponding UI/UX
- funds will contribute to building out of product
-
DeFunds.co - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
- DeFunds is building an investment tool that allows investors to continue self custodying assets while reaping the rewards of enabling the best managers to trade their capital
- funds will pay for the integration of Aave’s borrowing and lending primitives
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Invictus Labs - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “Building the first Systemic Risk Assessor of under-collateralised DeFi lending pools. Our V1 will include a dashboard that will allow AaveDAO to check the health (risk metric) of the under-collateralised Aave pools. The visualiser component of the dashboard will offer explainability into the measured risk to bring visibility and understanding of the borrowers.”
- funds will cover frontend engineering compensation and ML model training/storage
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Valha - $3,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “@ValhaHQ is an open-source DeFi abstraction layer for developers: It enables wallets, dapps and investment platforms to integrate Aave lending pools and implementing zap transactions into their interfaces”
- grant will help fund the development of Valha’s on-chain adapter contracts which will allow developers to combine user actions into a single call/transaction
Events Summary
There have been no significant events or related happenings in December from the AGD side. A breakdown of AGDs total events spending up to the end of the fifth quarter since the start of the program is as follows:
- Hackathon Bounties - $124,000
- Main/Side Sponsorships - $657,895
- Digital Marketing - $935,461
- rAAVEs - $617,898
In total, this has accounted for $2,335,254 of AGD spending and can be detailed further on our website here. Check out our updated governance proposal for which events we are planning on sponsoring in the first half of 2023 along with an events policy that covers the goals of AGD event activation, how AGD chooses which events to attend, and AGD engagement at these events.
Milestones this Quarter
As described earlier this last quarter ran from September until the end of December (or until our renewal proposal is voted on). Some significant milestones from the quarter are the different achievements made by some of our grantees, as well as improvements made to the program by setting up additional benefits for awarded grantees. A list of built achievements from grantees chronologically is:
- Tranzo completed their position transferring tool on Aave V2 Polygon
- BlockZero labs completed Flashstake and Flaave two products that let you receive fixed-rate future yield upfront by staking and lending through their contracts.
- Picnic released a live version of their portfolio management protocol live on Polygon with integrations to Aave
- Anthias (formerly Defishy) released their risk dashboard intended to give insight to little fish before they are hurt by liquidation cascades of whales
- Gateway helped us (AGD) release an NFT-mintable credential for grantees that allows them to connect in a telegram channel and receive Lens profile
- DappLooker completed their user retention and analytics dashboards for Aave v3
- Warden released their custom Aave dashboard with a number of new features
Regarding improvements to the grants program, this quarter with help from Gateway we released an NFT-mintable credential for grantees as listed above in grantee achievements. This is exciting as it will allow grantees to connect with each other directly and in the future may be a community aspect that can be built on top of. All past AGD grantees are eligible to claim the AGD NFT through Gateway. Then grantees are able to join the exclusive Telegram group and mint a Lens profile.
Ongoing Updates
The Snapshot vote for our renewal proposal wrapped up earlier today (Jan 12) with overwhelming support (527K AAVE or 99.99% YAE votes) from the community. Thank you to everyone who has participated in the discussion and voted. Llama is currently working on the payload for the AIP and we will share an update as soon as we are ready to move the proposal forward.
Lastly, as always, we welcome any feedback and are happy to surface particular metrics the community would like to see.