- January 2023
Overview
Hi everyone, Aave Grants DAO (AGD) has successfully been renewed for another two quarters with 702K AAVE votes in favour. Thanks to everyone who voted and participated in the conversation along the way. We are excited to help grow the Aave ecosystem over the next two quarters.
This recent work update reports on what AGD has done this past January and is the first update of the sixth quarter. Below is a timeline outlining this January update relative to our recent renewal and previous quarters.
Grants Summary
The grants program’s total numbers are listed below from the start in mid-May of 2021 up through this past January.
- Total Grant Applications Received: 1497
- Total Applications Approved: 204
- Acceptance Rate:
- written(stage 1): 9%
- video call(stage 2): 68%
- Total Amount Dispersed: $4,725,956
- Complete or Live Grants: 58.5%
- In-progress Milestone-Based grants: 32.5%
- Inactive or Unknown: 9%
- Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
- Applications and integrations (88) ($2,321,556),
- Code audits (3) ($82,000),
- Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (17) ($643,740),
- Community (marketing and educational) (49) ($667,550),
- Developer tooling (12) ($365,000),
- Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (13) ($185,000),
- Other (8) ($189,900),
- Protocol development (17) ($383,200)
January Approved Grants
This January we received 103 grant applications and sent out funds for 7 new grantees. The 7 awarded grants amounted to a $114,000 total in funding across single and tranche-based payments with an average grant size was $16,286. The awarded projects fell into four of the standard eight categories with Application and Integrations being the most awarded. Listed below are January’s awarded grants sorted from largest to smallest by funding size:
-
Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant type
- grant description - “grantee self-description”
- use of funds
-
FDD workstream at Gitcoin - $45,000(tranche) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
- “Understanding the personas behind the wallets which interact with Aave lending protocol is critical to its growth and long-term success. Gitcoin’s Fraud Detection & Defense workstream is a leader in understanding on-chain behaviour having protected the Gitcoin Grants program from over $3 million in fraudulent funding since its inception in August of 2021. Through this experience, they have developed advanced analytical approaches for the understanding on-chain behaviour of wallet accounts. This grant is for a wallet segmentation analysis to help Aave to better understand their user base & characterize platform momentum.”
- funds will be used to offset the cost of the FDD’s time and opportunity costs over the 3 proposed milestones
-
SimBull - $30,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- like PoolTogether but users purchase tradable sports team tokens with USDC which are deposited into Aave and earn a yield. When a team wins holders receive “dividends” (yield from deposited USDC) and when a team loses holders lose nothing
- funds will be used for integrating Aave into already developed contracts deployed on Polygon
-
Calyptus - $15,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- “This grant is to improve Aave’s technical education specifically for upskilling senior software engineers entering Web3. Our project-led education will be used as a global on-ramp for senior engineers to learn Aave, build on Aave and contribute to its community. We aim to train 10k senior engineers on the Aave protocol by end of 2023, and 1m by 2030.”
- grant will fund the building of an Aave curriculum over a 3-month period
-
flaex - $10,000(full) - applications and integrations
- flaex is building a decentralized margin trading exchange starting on Arbitrum that utilizes Aave as a source of liquidity - “flaex is super excited to receive a grant from AAVE. Our success will directly help AAVE attract even more TVL into its Lending Pool and ultimately benefits all Lenders/Borrowers as well as Token Holders.”
- funds will go towards front-end development and marketing costs
-
AaveQL - $7,500(full) - developer tooling
- “AaveQL provides GraphQL documentation which includes instantly executable helpful queries with built-in GraphQL editors for all Aave deployed smart contracts. https://www.aaveql.org/”
- grant will pay for maintenance and hosting costs as well as retroactively for work done
-
Alphaday - $5,500(full) - community (marketing and educational)
- Alphaday builds crypto experience dashboards, this grant will fund the integration of Aave’s different content sources from governance to video, social, TVL and personal dashboard metrics
- funds will pay for integrations costs and 12 months of maintenance
-
Buildoor (Buildoor Labs LLC) - $1,000(full) - applications and integrations
- Buildoor creates no-code tools for guiding, engaging and tracking all types of users in onboarding flows/product layovers
- funds will go towards their development of immersive experiences with user analytics
Events Summary
There have been no significant events so far this past January but AGD has been preparing for a few in the coming months. Devfolio who AGD first sponsored last year for ETH India Online will be using their second tranche for the ETH for All hackathon starting on the 4th of February and running until the 19th. Later in February, ETH Denver will start and AGD plans to have a booth there from the 2nd - 5th of March. For those coming, especially any grantees, let us know on Twitter if you will be there and be sure to come by our booth.
To see a more detailed breakdown of the different sponsored events/community initiatives see this page from the AGD website.
Ongoing Updates
As mentioned in our renewal proposal we are looking to add a new reviewer to the grants committee. If there are any final candidates who are interested in becoming a reviewer you can fill out this application form here and we’ll get back to you.
Similarly another improvement to AGD’s operation, over the next two quarters we plan to be more proactive in how we award the different tokens (stablecoins/AAVE) received in our renewal. Projects and contributors that appear to have longer-term alignment with Aave will be funded using AAVE tokens whereas others will be paid in stablecoins. This aims to encourage different grantees to participate more in governance and contribute to the protocol’s decision-making.
Lastly, as always, please comment if there is a particular metric you’d like to see surfaced in these posts - any feedback is appreciated.
