AGD Renewal 4: April 2023 & Halfway Updates

[0xmigi]

Apologies for the delay in posting this update.

It covers our usual updates for the month of April and a halfway update for AGD’s fourth renewal proposal. The halfway update covers (1) grants distributed and achievements from grantees, (2) a snapshot of AGD’s current event sponsorships including recaps for past events, (3) a budget breakdown based on current spending and (4) operational updates.

- April 2023

Overview

May was the start of Aave Grants DAO’s (AGD) seventh quarter making this update the midway point of our two-quarters renewal voted on in January 2023.

This update reports on AGD’s work completed in April and highlights the work done during the sixth quarter. The timeline below shows AGD’s funding for the month of April, including the sixth and projected seventh quarter of the program.

Grants Summary

Total numbers for the grant program’s spending are listed below, starting from mid-May of 2021 when the program began up until the end of April.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 1798
• Total Applications Approved: 231
• 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: 16%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (84) ($2,525,556),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (16) ($658,740),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (46) ($683,550),
  • Developer tooling (11) ($365,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (13) ($186,000),
  • Other (8) ($294,900),
  • Protocol development (16) ($424,200)

April Approved Grants

During April we received 109 grant applications and awarded funding to seven projects that are contributing to Aave’s ecosystem. The seven grants awarded during April amounted to a cumulative $93,000 in funding spread across five of our standard grant categories. The average grant size was $13,000 with the most common amount being $11,000. The list below covers what projects were funded, what they are building, and how they plan to use the awarded funds:

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

• Into the Block Risk Radar for GHO Stablecoin - $35,000(tranche) - other
  • “The DeFi space is constantly evolving and poses several risks to its users, including economic risks that can lead to de-pegging events, liquidations or bad debt.
    To complement the efforts made by DeFi teams to address technical risks through smart contract auditing, economic risk analysis is extremely valuable. This is where IntoTheBlock’s Risk Radar comes in handy as it provides an additional risk management solution to monitor and mitigate these economic vectors.
    The Risk Radar solution is a valuable resource that empowers Aave and its community to make informed decisions while managing their positions on the protocol. With this grant, we are delighted to offer this solution to the Aave community, and it will be freely accessible on our Risk Radar platform at https://defirisk.intotheblock.com/. With IntoTheBlock’s Risk Radar, Aave can strengthen its risk management strategy and ensure the continued success of the platform.”
    • funds will pay for the completion of four milestones paid out over two tranches first will build the risk radar dashboard, then will move to writing documentation and covering maintenance costs

• Block Analititca - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • Block Analitica is receiving a grant to build out GHO support for their Aave Risk Dashboard, with similar features to the ones that exist for DAI in their Maker Risk Dashboard
    • the grant will cover adding features to the existing dashboard and maintenance costs

• Awesome Aave - $11,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • AwesomeAave aims to be a one-stop shop for highlighting different projects building on Aave or projects that have been funded by AGD.
    • funds will go towards the project’s development and maintenance costs

• Cryptografiq - $11,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • Cryptografiq will be a smart contract that can receive payments at regular intervals from a streaming protocol, such as Sablier or Llamapay, and automatically lend the tokens to Aave. This allows the tokens to earn yield for the users, rather than sitting dormant and waiting to be claimed.
    • funds will go toward development time and effort spent sourcing community feedback

• Strateg Protocol - $10,000(full) - protocol development
  • “Strateg is building an omnichain social yield infrastructure, allowing the creation of complex yield strategies without any line of code, which users can share with their community and be paid for this.
    Strateg received a $10k grant from Aave Grants DAO to integrate Aave and let strategists use Aave to create strategies (including automated loan management) but also to invest in strategies that leverage Aave without having to worry about the chain or the starting token.”
    • funds will be used for the costs of integrating Aave markets and implementing a rebalancing module

• Senate - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • Senate is a governance facilitation tool that aims to reduce the friction of participating in governance. First outlined in their temp-check proposal this grant aims to build tailored features specifically for AaveDAO such as real-time governance notifications for met quorum thresholds and live proposals.
    • funds will cover the costs for a three-month test run

• Aave Inspires ladies in blockchain - $1,000(full) - events / hackathons / sponsorships
  • This grant will help fund an event in Ghana that aims to educate around 50 women on the uses of blockchain and the Aave protocol. The event will focus on encouraging entrepreneurship and seeding new job opportunities.
    • funds will cover venue, marketing and speaker incentives costs

Halfway Update

The start of May marks three months since our recent renewal proposal passed, as well as the completion of the first of two quarters included in the renewal. So far, AGD has spent $400,000 less this quarter than the $1.62M initially expected, leaving $2M until our next renewal. In terms of grants for the sixth quarter, there have been 21 grants awarded with 408 applications received.

1. Grants

Since January there have been a number of past grantees that have either completed their outlined grant or reached a significant milestone. A list of some of the top built achievements from grantees this last quarter is as follows:

• Tally completed their integration of Aave’s V2 governance contracts
• Butter completed their delegate campaign for the 3-month incentivized delegate program they are organizing for Aave DAO (read more on it here). The election had positive results: ranking as a top proposal in terms of voting power and participation rate, encouraging 84% of new AAVE holders to participate and sparking the launch of 10 new delegate platforms. Congrats to TokenLogic for winning.
• Projection Finance released the first version of their simulation platform that lets anyone project and simulate an Aave V3 wallet’s position in future conditions
• Philand announced their mintable Aave NFTs which are available to anyone based on their interaction history with the Aave protocol
• Cred Protocol launched support for Aave V3 live in their credit scoring app
• ScopeLift shared their Flexible Voting integration for available to Aave voters
• Aave Radio released their first podcast episode coving GHO
• Blockchain Education Network (BEN) announced their new course covering the basics of Aave
• Brew’s yield-earning self-custody wallet was made live recently for early users on iOS
• Fluidity Money live on Arbitrum has brought over $150k worth of new deposits to Aave via their deployments on the Ethereum and Arbitrum market, trackable here
• flaex released the first version of their margin trading platform that uses Aave at its center as a main source of liquidity

2. Events

There have been two main in-person events that have taken place during AGDs’ sixth quarter. ETHDenver took place from March 2 - 5 and ETHTokyo took place from April 14 - 16. ETHGlobal Lisbon took place at the start of the following quarter from May 12 - 14. To better document these events, we’ve written a report covering each event in detail including engagement numbers and a retrospective analysis. Please check them out!

In total across the three events: AGD engaged with 30 different existing grantees, inspired 44 teams to hack with Aave and GHO and awarded $16,000 in prizes to ten of the top projects.

As mentioned in our renewal proposal, events often change as dates approach so it is crucial to stay on top of ongoing updates and act accordingly to maximize value received from sponsorships. Of the five main events we originally outlined, we had to make several changes in response to the environment:

• After it was announced that ETHGlobal Istanbul was being rescheduled to Q4, we decided to replace it with ETHGlobal Lisbon. This is also where we hosted the rAAVE.
• With the GHO launch being later than we originally anticipated, we decided to move the virtual hackathon we had outlined to Q3 or Q4 instead of having it while GHO is only available on testnet.

AGD has also decided to sponsor the ETHPrague hackathon in Q2. This is a strong community that we have not previously engaged in and offers another opportunity to support and inspire hackers to build on GHO.

We kept the community updated in our monthly governance updates.

Here is an overview of the current event landscape for AGD based on what was originally outlined in our proposal.

Event	Status	Notes	Event Recap
ETHDenver - (March 2-5)	Successfully executed		ETHDenver Event Recap
ETHGlobal Tokyo - (April 14-16)	Successfully executed		ETHTokyo Event Recap
ETHGlobal Istanbul	Rescheduled for Q4	As outlined in our monthly governance update, we decided to replace ETHGlobal Istanbul with ETHGlobal Lisbon. Given our initial rationale, we will plan to sponsor ETHGlobal Istanbul when it does take place.	NA
ETHGlobal Lisbon - (May 12-14)	Successfully executed		ETHLisbon Event Recap
rAAVE	Successfully executed at ETHGlobal Lisbon		Included in ETHLisbon Event Recap
Exclusive GHO Hackathon and AGD Summit with ETHGlobal - Virtual (TBD)	Pushed to Q3 or Q4, event locked in with ETHGlobal	Once GHO launches, this hackathon will kickstart creating new innovative use cases for GHO, teams building on GHO and starting a funnel of new grantees.	To be released post-event
ETHPrague - (June 9 - 11)	New	See our comments above. We will publish an events recap in our June update.	To be released post-event

AGD x Aave Companies

To maximize value from sponsorships, AGD collaborates closely with Aave Companies. Aave Companies contributes significantly to the on-ground execution at events including branding, merchandising, developer relations, and operations.

3. Budget Breakdown

Some notes on the spend:

• Event Sponsorships, Hackathons & Bounties - several expenses related to events have been allocated but the payment has not been spent yet. These total around ~ $315,000.
• Digital Marketing Spend - With GHO being launched later than we anticipated, the current plan is to go heavy on marketing in Q3 and Q4. We are in the process of exploring and locking in potential sponsorships for these dates.
• Legal Buffer - We have been investigating a number of options and are close to arriving at a decision which should be in place by the time we issue our next proposal. The main reason for this minimal spending compared to the budget is that most lawyers require an entity to invoice which AGD does not have. As such, a majority of the conversations we’ve had with lawyers have not been billed.

Please note, any spend that has gone towards initiatives in Q3 or Q4 will be taken into account in our next proposal.

4. Operational Updates

Our main operational update to share is that Cree who was introduced as the events lead for AGD in our last proposal has moved on to a full-time role with Aave Companies. We thank Cree for her contributions to AGD and wish her all the best in the new role!

Other operational updates from AGD include:

• AGD’s recent Temp Check outlining how we plan to spend the 300,000 Optimism tokens received as part of the OP Stimpack 1 was approved. Starting with the seventh quarter AGD will spend up to 100,000 OP of the total 300,000 OP received this season with ~2/3rds going to grants and 1/3rd going to bounties and events.
• Helping Llama in response to their request for proposal power. This enables them to put up AIPs for voting by the community which is crucial to their scope of work as approved by the Aave DAO.
• Llama put up a proposal to correct an error from AGD’s renewal payload. The aUSDT spending allowance has been amended from the empty v1 contract to the active v2 contract.
• Llama released a public financial dashboard for AGD which gives the community an overview and insights into treasury holdings, spending, type of grants distributed and more. Thanks to Llama for the above items.

Ongoing Updates

A new initiative we are beginning to experiment with is offering direct bounties to the community for building specific requests i.e. RFPs. We will announce updates through our forum posts, the AGD Twitter and the AGD website.

With the completion of this sixth quarter update, AGD is around three months away from posting our next renewal proposal to the community.

Let us know any other updates or stats you would like to see from AGD!

[dmars300]

I appreciate the transparency and regular updates from the AGD team. It’s great to see the progress being made and the impact of the grants distributed. Keep up the good work!
In addition, I have a couple questions:

• I’m intrigued by the “Other” category in the grant breakdown. Could you share some example of projects in this area?
• In the last update there was a Budget breakdown for the operation updates. I think I’d be important to include it in the report.

---

Lastly, I believe that for future reports, I would be great to hear more about the impact of the funded projects. Perhaps we can share Core KPI’s that were improved. I think the AGD can benefit a lot by helping projects define and keep track of their impact.

[fig]

Hey @dmars300 –

Addressing your second question, Operations is included in the first image.

You may see the line items here:

In addition, the total is summarized in the second to last line in the second image.

Please let me know if we can help with anything else!

[0xmigi]

Hey @dmars300, thanks for the comment!

Regarding examples of grants in the Other category, there are a few I can think of but for a full list, you should be able to see them on our website here. When teams apply they choose their own category(as you may remember) so sometimes there is overlap with more defined categories, like Application and Integrations etc. Looking back at some of the recent monthly updates Into the Blocks | Risk Radar and Delta One are some example of grants self categorized as Other.

And on better measuring the impacts of funded projects, I agree we can always do a better job of highlighting them. The Grantee Updates/Completions section of each monthly report cover exactly that and we’re continuing to make it more comprehensive. If you have any specific suggestions we’d be happy to consider them!