AGD Recent work Update - thread

[0xmigi]

- August ‘22

Overview

Aave Grants DAO (AGD) is near the end of its fourth quarter and has completed funding for grants approved this past August. This recent work update will cover projects awarded in August, giving a little detail on how they plan to help expand the Aave ecosystem along with some statistics on AGD in general, and key metrics achieved.

The fourth quarter began on May 15 after the AGD renewal proposal was executed and is one of two $3 million per quarter budgets that were approved. Below is an up-to-date timeline of AGD’s funding so far with the August update highlighted in red.

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August Approved Grants

August has been a busy month for AGD with the largest amount of grant applications submitted of any month so far. In total, ~133 applications were submitted with 26 approved for funding. Of the newly approved grants, 21 received funding for August across our eight main categories with an awarded sum total of $379,350. Additionally, at Eth Mexico, we gave out three prizes to the best hackathon builders submitting a project using Aave V3.

The most awarded grant categories have been Applications and Integrations similar to past months with Community (marketing and education) second most awarded. The average grant size has been $16,500 with the most common funding amount being $15K. Awarded grants by funding amount from largest to smallest are as follows:

• Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant type
  • grant description - “grantee self-description”

• Shippooor - $50,000(tranche) - developer tooling
  • second milestone grant for the Shippooor team building analytics dashboards for Aave
  • “Shippooor is building an analytics and risk dashboard for the Aave community. The dashboard will enable users to simulate changes in asset prices and see how it impacts their account. “

• Flexible Voting - AToken Support - $50,000(tranche) - protocol development
  • “Flexible Voting support for ATokens will allow governance token holders to deposit their tokens into Aave while still participating in governance votes with their share of the pool.”

• 1click - $40,000(tranche) - application and integrations
  • a seamless one-click user experience for investing in any Aave lending pool directly from fiat all in a single dApp interface.

• Holdler Vault - $25,000(tranche) - application and integrations
  • an ERC-4626 compatible vault that manages the depositing of crypto into AAVE, borrowing of stablecoins, and investing those stablecoins into an underlying protocol that gives a yield bigger than AAVE’s borrow rate. This will incentivise borrowing of stablecoins via Aave V3 and at the same time, keep depositors’ funds protected from liquidation risk.

• Au Fait Films logo redesign and videos - $25,000(tranche) - community (marketing and educational)
  • Au Fait Films has offered to produce a complete AGD branding redesign along with some high-quality film/video content on Aave, see their proposed work here

• Flashstake DAO - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Flashstake allows you to receive your Aave returns instantly, upfront. No more waiting to earn yield!”

• APY.vision - $20,000(full) - application and integration
  • an analytics tool to show APY earned/paid on a loan over a specified date range for any specific users position

• Polypus Protocol - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • polypus is a lending protocol using NFTs as collateral differentiating itself from the competition by offering better LTV and instant borrowing - unmatched liquidity providers will earn a yield on Aave through a native integration

• Community Health Analytics - $19,000(full) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
  • a detailed set of analyses on community health by RnDAO
  • “Both DAOs and Web3 projects depend on the health of their community and vibes—yet understanding and measuring Community Health is challenging. @RnDAO__ has taken on this challenge, researching the topic and developing an analytics tool for Web3 communities!”

• Aave V3 User Retention and DeFi Analytics - $15,000(full) - developer tooling
  • a second grant for the DappLooker team creating insightful dashboards for Aave
  • “Cohort analysis will help measure user engagement of Aave users on the Polygon/Avalanche/Optimism network over time. It will help track repeat users on the Aave platform and understand what makes them happy. The tool will help understand vital metrics such as churn, user lifecycle, and customer lifetime value and to identify the success of the feature adoption rate. A funnel report gives information on how Aave users progress through different stages and where they drop off, helping identify barriers that cause users to leave before reaching a conversion point.
    Defi Analytics will help understand the day-to-day activity across each network. It will help track the transaction data that is ongoing in real-time. The benefit of this is in the engineering of the tool made that makes complex data turn into easy-to-understand dashboards that track the token’s activity and help build a data-driven web3.“

• YSchool - $15,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • an educational video series/set of courses on Aave for students in India. YSchool will be hosting the content on their mobile application and site with more than 100K users

• Accel Defi - Decentralised trading desk - $15,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • a decentralised trading desk product codenamed: UnRekt, aims to serve a wide spectrum of users and have the same feel as a CEX trading platform.

• Layer3 - $15,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • incentivise protocol adoption through on-chain bounties, Layer3 has already accounted for 11% of all Aave V3 users on Arbitrum. With this grant, they plan to pick it up a notch and help people (re)discover Aave across Layer 2 networks with a new series of bounties/quests

• DeFiSafety - $12,000(full) - protocol development
  • “This grant will give DeFiSafety some funds to precisely identify how DeFiSafety might create an Aave-specific security framework to ensure the Aave protocol remains as robust and secure as possible”

• Penn Blockchain - $10,000(full) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
  • a series of governance proposals designing a recognized delegate framework for Aave and suggesting how to improve Aave’s delegation and increase community governance involvement

• Clip Finance - $10,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • a simple and intuitive UI that will allow new users to interact with different DeFi protocols with little complexity - “We’re extremely happy to receive an AGD grant to bring the best DeFi user experience and aggregated liquidity to Aave protocol.”

• Sovereign Signal - Crypto Grants Wire - $5,750(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • “Crypto Grants Wire: The project is an ongoing monthly publication detailing all the happenings across grants and incentives programs in crypto that will help to raise awareness of Aave Grants through sponsorship of my work.
    Grants Retrospective: In addition to Crypto Grants Wire I research and publish retrospectives on various grants programs. This report will give the history and background of the program.”

• DeFi Teller - $5,000(tranche) - developer tooling
  • an educational resource that does the due diligence for the user by providing information about blockchain technology and decentralized applications (reviews, video explainers, on-chain data) in the most accessible way

• Creation of Turkish Community - $4,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • “This grant aims to announce Aave in our country (Turkey), which follows the crypto ecosystem with great interest and to bring together people related to the Aave and web3 ecosystem. We will produce content about Turkish translation, news bulletins and the latest developments that will be beneficial to the community. We will organize events that will bring the relevant people together and create communication channels.”

• Aave API Telegram Bot - $3,500(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Use this Telegram bot to get Aave data from the Aave API. You can interact with the bot by sending /start to get the list of commands to the @aave_api_bot.”

• Blotic - $100(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • a project with the goal of engaging college students in India to take part in boot camps and meetups focused on blockchain education

Hackathons Winners

At Eth Mexico, AGD awarded $11,000 to three projects with the most innovative Aave V3 integrations. The three winning projects were:

• Short-Stop - $5,500 — gives the opportunity for users to take a short position on tokens

• Sticky App - $4,000 — bringing Crypto to the masses, by allowing creators to turn their content into crypto

• APPrende - $1,500 — a learn-to-earn platform that empowers individuals to begin their blockchain journey

Going forward these updates will include ongoing hackathon prize winners as well since they help grow the Aave ecosystem and hopefully benefit from the additional exposure.

Milestones this Quarter

AGD’s May 2022 renewal proposal requested funding for two further quarters and since then AGD has awarded 84 grants with a total sum of $1,956,366 out of the initial $3 million allocated per quarter. This leaves a remaining ~$1.04M coving past events, outstanding tranche payments for the previous quarter and any additional grants still to be awarded.
Based on the current burn rate we are near the halfway point of the renewal proposal and are still seeing an increase in interest and grant applications. A few notable growth metrics since May are:

• Twitter followers: 6930 → 12,928 (+87%)
• Telegram members: 595 → 610 (+3%)
• Lens followers: 0 → 1,392 (+∞%)

Ongoing Updates

If you’re interested in hearing more from some of our previous grantees make sure to tune in to the August Community Call. Additionally, AGD is looking to hire a part-time Events Coordinator and would love any help in finding one. If you think you might be a good fit or know someone who would see this Twitter thread for more.
Lastly, as always, we welcome ongoing feedback and are happy to surface any particular metrics the community is interested in seeing.