- September '22
Overview
Aave Grants DAO (AGD) is now in the second half of its two-quarter renewal proposal executed back in May of this year. We are keeping busy reviewing grant applications, supporting recent grantees, and sponsoring events that all help grow the Aave ecosystem. This update covers our budget spending, grantees approved, and different events sponsored this past month of September.
The current quarter began around the middle of August and will run until AGD’s next renewal proposal later this year. Below is an up-to-date timeline of AGD’s funding relative to this post for the month of September.
Grants Summary
Total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below starting from mid-May of 2021 up until now.
- Total Grant Applications Received: 1029
- Total Applications Approved: 227
- Acceptance Rate: 19%
- Total Amount Dispersed: $5,529,038
- Amount Dispersed This Term: $1,084,717
- Amount Left to Disperse This Term: $1,167,483
- Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
- Applications and integrations (70) ($1,733,450),
- Code audits (2) ($70,000),
- Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (18) ($728,000),
- Community (marketing and educational) (41) ($491,250),
- Developer tooling (12) ($457,500),
- Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (12) ($180,000),
- Other (8) ($84,900),
- Protocol development (16) ($251,000)
September Approved Grants
This September we have received 109 grant applications down from the record 138 received last month in August. Of the 109 applications received twelve have been approved for funding with ten receiving the awarded funds this last month. In total, the ten awarded grants amounted to a cumulative $137,340 in funding across single and tranche-based payments with $119,820 of that amount paid out this September. The ten awarded grants fell into five of the eight standard categories with Community (marketing and education) being the most awarded, unlike previous months where it has normally been Applications and Integrations.
The average grant size has been $13,734 with the most commonly awarded amount being $10K. Awarded grants by funding amount from largest to smallest are as follows:
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Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant type
- grant description - “grantee self-description”
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Aave Governance Facilitator - Boardroom - $35,040(tranche) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
- “A Governance Facilitator from Boardroom is integrating with the Aave community to increase transparency and improve communications for Aave governance. Facilitators provide a source of disclosure and information for key voters and delegates to help make informed vote decisions.”
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DefiLlama - $20,000(full) - other
- DefiLlama.com is the most used TVL dashboard in the DeFi space and prides itself on being committed to providing data that is transparent, open and neutral. All of their code is fully public on their Github and they have benefited Aave by being one of the only sources of Aave V3 information across the 6 chains and one of the first to cover Aave V2 on Polygon and Avalanche
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Phi - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “Through the gamified familiarity of our application, Phi encourages new users to overcome the mental barrier of participating in Crypto. Over time, this will create a flywheel for future Aave community growth and help people experience lending/ borrowing in DeFi. Phi has reach within both the NFT and DeFi ecosystems- allowing us to incentivise cross-pollination between products and encourage different communities to interact with Aave."
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The Product House - $10,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- “The Product House is a community of web3 folks where we enable them to learn, earn, build, and grow together in this space. We have a diverse and robust community which can help AAVE cater to a much wider audience.”
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Defishy.xyz - $10,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “Defishy.xyz will improve the Aave stakeholder/token holder experience by allowing users to identify wallets close to liquidation on Aave and position themselves accordingly.
The recent crash of May 2022 was caused largely by a series of liquidation cascades as large whale wallets were liquidated. As liquidators sold massive amounts of collateral on exchanges, collateral prices dropped, resulting in more liquidations.
We created Defishy to democratize liquidation health data of all wallets, such that users are able to manage liquidation risk more effectively. Our team at Defishy is thrilled to be working with Aave and supporting the Aave community!”
- “Defishy.xyz will improve the Aave stakeholder/token holder experience by allowing users to identify wallets close to liquidation on Aave and position themselves accordingly.
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AwesomeQA - $10,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- “We’re working hard to provide the best possible customer support for the AAVE community by automatically answering repetitive questions, giving insights on the frequently asked questions, and democratizing web3 support knowledge.”
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Proposal Inverter - $10,000(full) - protocol development
- “Inverter eases grant giving process by providing an interface that helps organizations manage the applications and funding of multiple proposals over a long term. Secondly, due to the milestone-based funding module, Aave grants DAO would have more confidence while funding proposals because Inverter allows funders to fund proposals as long as funders are satisfied with the completion of milestones.
Moreover, we imagine millions of dollars of locked idle funds sitting on proposal funnels to be deposited in low-risk protocols such as Aave to generate yield.”
- “Inverter eases grant giving process by providing an interface that helps organizations manage the applications and funding of multiple proposals over a long term. Secondly, due to the milestone-based funding module, Aave grants DAO would have more confidence while funding proposals because Inverter allows funders to fund proposals as long as funders are satisfied with the completion of milestones.
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Edge - $10,000(full) - applications and integrations
- a mobile self-custody wallet with end-to-end deposits and withdraws directly into a bank account, awarded grant will be used for the native integration of Aave’s borrowing, and lending using WBTC as collateral
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Aave Academy - DoDAO - $9,600(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- a set of two interactive courses one aimed at being an introduction to Aave and the second an Aave-centric developer course covering relevant smart contracts, fetching Aave data, writing a simple UI application on top of Aave and more. This is the second grant for DoDAO which previously created 11 educational guides on Aave here
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Opportunity Summit - $2,700(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- an educational outreach program teaching student communities in Ghana about the properties of blockchain technology and Aave use cases. Awarded grant will be going towards two sets of events an in-person event and an online event
Events Summary
To date, AGD has sponsored multiple different events directly and indirectly since its start in May of 2021. These have been a mix of hackathons, main/side sponsorships, conferences, and rAAVEs. A breakdown of total events spending is as follows:
- Hackathon Bounties - $124,000
- Main/Side Sponsorships - $596,895
- Digital Marketing - $895,599
- rAAVEs - $461,043
In total that has accounted for $2,077,537 of AGD spending with $124,000 going to hackathon bounties across 33 awarded prizes. Notably, of those 33 projects born out of the different hackathon bounties, 3 have gone on to receive further grant funding and turn their projects into beneficial tools helping grow the Aave ecosystem.
September Events
This past September AGD helped sponsored two events: Kyiv Tech Summit and ETHOnline. At the Kyiv Tech Summit, one prize of $4K was awarded to a team building a score based on your Lens data that can be used in DeFi lending like credit delegation.
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LensScore - $4,000 - LensScore for DeFi lending and Web3 interactions is a protocol to calculate users’ score based on metrics from Lens profiles and provide it to all EVM-compatible chains using RedStone Oracle.
ETHOnline was a larger event with ten prize-winning teams across five different Aave-specific categories. The winning projects by category were:
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Stablecoin Growth - Build projects and integrations that bring more stablecoin liquidity into Aave such as new yield aggregation tools, wallet integrations or fintech/e-commerce integrations.
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NoPoolNoGame - $3,000 - No Pool No game is the only GameFi game where you can earn money without taking the risk of losing any
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Napier Finance - $1,000 - Napier Finance is the most efficient fixed-yield market compatible with any DeFi yield source and Principal Tokens
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Credit Delegation with Lens Protocol - Assess the reputation of Lens profiles and use this data to enable users to delegate or access credit.
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Loki - $3,000 - Loki gives the opportunity to raise capital through social media, enabling the power of communities.
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Lwned - $1,000 - Lwned offers partially collateralized loans to users by crowdfunding the principal.
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Accessibility - Enable new ways or groups of users to access the Aave protocol.
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Senate - $3,000 - a one-stop solution for delegates to stay aware of all active proposals (on-chian + off-chain) across DAOs, receive reminders for unvoted proposals, and showcase their governance activity.
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No Cost Subscriptions - $1,000 - with No Cost Subscriptions you can add more revenue for your user base, and monetization without farming sensitive user data. NCS are a new subscription model that allows users to subscribe by saving with their favourite businesses.
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Aave Forex Tool - Enhance the ability of users to access forex liquidity by using one or all of Aave’s listed features: E-mode, flash loans, or other DeFi integrations such as Curve.
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Big Shot - $3,000 - Big Shot is an ERC20 shorting protocol integrating with both Aave and Uniswap pools to create a leveraged short position for the user.
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Rush - $1,000 - Rush makes it easy for Defi users to use flasloans as a strategy. Flashloans allow you to borrow tokens and return them in the same transaction. This allows defi uses an alternative to make extra returns when used properly.
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Transaction Builder - Create new ways to compose or visualize Aave transactions such as a dispatcher contract for submitting multiple actions in a single transaction, or a recipe builder with gas estimation.
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OneStopOrderDispatch - $3,000 - OneStopOrderDispatch writes a dispatcher contract that can allow the users to submit multiple actions in a single transaction.
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TokenFlow - $1,000 - TokenFlow is a Zapier-like web3 automation flow that fully leverages the composability of Web3.
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Milestones this Quarter
This quarter as mentioned earlier began around mid-August. The allocated budget was $3M of which $1.08M has been spent leaving around ~$1.16M left to disperse.
So far it has been less active in terms of applicant numbers than at the end of the last quarter, but still, there is generally more interest in grants than in previous quarters.
Ongoing Updates
Notable updates for AGD are the hiring of our new part-time Events Coordinator Cree and the upcoming events in Bogota: Devcon, an event with Boys Club, and rAAVE Bogota. If you are planning on being at Devcon make sure to come by our zone to pick up some swag, say hi to Aave fam and maybe even get a ticket for rAAVE Bogota.
Lastly, as always, we welcome any ongoing feedback and are happy to surface particular metrics the community would like to see.