AGD Renewal 4: Recent work Updates

[0xmigi]

- 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.

[0xmigi]

- February 2023

Overview

This recent work update is reporting on AGD’s work completed in February and is the second report for the sixth quarter of Aave Grants. It covers the grants that were awarded, key monthly metrics, and milestones reached since the recent renewal in January.

Grants Summary

The total numbers for grants awarded since the start of the program up until the end of February are outlined below along with a visual sketch.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 1589
• Total Applications Approved: 217
• Acceptance Rate:
  • written(stage 1): 8%
  • video call(stage 2): 66%
• Total Amount Dispersed: $4,958,946
• Complete Grant Payments: 85%
• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 15%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (102) ($2,379,556),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (19) ($658,740),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (52) ($672,550),
  • Developer tooling (13) ($365,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (17) ($185,000),
  • Other (11) ($204,900),
  • Protocol development (21) ($411,200)

February Approved Grants

In February we received 102 grant applications and sent out funds for 10 new grantees. In total, the 10 awarded grants amounted to a cumulative $130,000 in funding across single and tranche-based payments. The 10 awarded grants fell into four of the standard eight categories we use with Application and Integrations being the most awarded. The average grant size was $13,000 with the most commonly awarded amount being $5k. Listed below are the awarded grants for February ranging from largest to smallest by funding size:

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

• Projection Finance II - $40,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
  • “We are honoured by this grant renewal! You can’t predict the future, but you can prepare for it. Projecting your crypto-currency investment strategies in a simple and intuitive way is our ambition”
  • second grant to projection finance will be used to further develop the projection side of their simulator tool currently live on Aave V3 Avalanche

• AAVE-based CIAN Strategies & Automation Tools - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Through novel multi-chain LSD related strategies built on top of AAVE, CIAN is to help AAVE grow its adoption in LSD ecosystem to its fullest potential so that AAVE’s position as market leader is strengthened in the LSD era. This should drive extra TVL, users and revenue to AAVE. In addition, CIAN’s advanced automation tool will provide AAVE users with better security protection as well as capital efficiency. “
  • funds will pay for the development of automated strategy vaults for LSD on top of Aave V3

• 1Delta DAO - The decentralized margin broker - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “With 1Delta, we hope to open the door for traders to take advantage of the strong liquidity and attractive rates on AAVE without sacrificing the tools they have come to expect while trading.
    The grant will help us improve our DEX aggregation, UI/UX and enable deployments on Polygon and the Ethereum Mainnet. Our vision is to bring fully-featured, decentralized brokerage services to EVMs. This includes
    • Single-click margin trading (opening, closing positions, debt- and collateral swaps)
    • Connecting established DEXs with established lending protocols like AAVE to allow our users to access top-notch trading performance and highly competitive deposit and borrow rates
    • Seamless UX and visibility - easy risk management through risk parameter displays and single-click self-liquidations
    • Full transparency - Users hold the lending protocol balances themselves and can always see and access their raw balances with AAVE ”
  • funds will go toward improving the UX of their product as well as infrastructure and marketing

• DeFiSafety Quality Certificate for AAVE 2023 - $15,000(full) - other
  • DeFiSafety has requested another grant following their forum post detailing their ideas around a public-facing Quality Certification badge and requesting Aave DAO purchase another annual certification
  • funds will go toward an unbias assessment of Aave based on DeFiSafey’s rating system

• Butter - $15,000(full) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
  • “Our grant from Aave will help us test the effect of governance incentives on delegates and voters. DAOs, like Aave, must maintain strong alignment between governance participants to achieve their goals, including:
    • Fulfilment of the DAO’s objective
    • Growth in the adoption of services the DAO produces
    • Growth in the value of the DAO and governance token price
      (announcement on Twitter) ”
  • funds will be used to run a three-month pilot where delegates can earn $AAVE for their governance efforts. Most recent update - look out for the election from April 3rd to 9th!

• Building dApps on AAVE from scratch - $5,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • “Educational program for Spanish-speaking developers that will teach them how to use and build DeFi applications over the AAVE protocol.”
  • funds will be used to pay for instructors, marketing activities, and an academic coordinator

• SlothyFi - $5,000(full) - application and integrations
  • Slothyfi is a no-code automation tool that allows users to create their own yield workflows in a modular fashion. Their goal is to become the first fully on-chain and permissionless strategy protocol (the web3 Zapier)
  • funds will help with development costs, onboarding more protocols and expanding the integration library

• Cetra Finance - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Delta-neutral strategies based on UniV3 with automated market risk hedging on AAVE“
  • funds will go toward the project’s upcoming launch and adding an analytics section for automated strategies

• Weave - $3,000((full) - applications and integrations
  • a protocol for highly customizable yield strategy building. Users can drag and drop premade elements and deploy their own smart contracts for a particular yield strategy
  • fund will go toward adding premade Aave elements to their drag-and-drop strategy builder

• Franklin DAO - $2,000(full) - community (marketing and educational)
  • “Aave is hitting saturation in its core addressable market: over-collateralised lending. Innovation and new product development are thus essential to expanding the addressable market, thus the swap volume and, consequently, the revenue earned by Aave token holders. We believe that our research will present differentiated insights into the ability of Aave 3 to do that. Specifically, we would delve into its isolation mode and the high-efficiency mode and explore the improvements in liquidity and capital efficiency they can be expected to bring. These improvements will be put into the context of the revenue opportunity they can generate and the risks they create.
    Additionally, we plan to provide an overview of Aave’s market opportunity in real-world asset lending. We will provide recommendations on RWA implementation that would drive the greatest expansion in TAM and revenue. We believe the research would offer actionable recommendations that would enable Aave to capitalize on its market opportunity.”
  • grant will fund the research and production of an analysis report on Aave that will be published in their student newsletter/network

Event Change: ETHGlobal Istanbul → ETHGlobal Lisbon

As mentioned in our renewal proposal, AGD would stay on top of ongoing changes in the events landscape, respond accordingly and communicate any changes in these monthly updates.

It was announced earlier this month that ETHGlobal Istanbul is being moved to Q4 of this year. As such, AGD will not be sponsoring ETHGlobal Istanbul and, after careful consideration, have decided to move our sponsorship to the newly announced ETHGlobal Lisbon (May 12-14). This will also be the location of the rAAVE we will be sponsoring as a part of our most recent proposal. We hope to see you there! If you have received a grant from AGD and you are planning on attending - please let us know, we have something planned you won’t want to miss!

Ongoing Updates

Next month in the middle of April we will be sponsoring our second in-person event of the year, ETHGlobal Tokyo. AGD will be awarding $10k in prizes to projects built on Aave, especially ones around GHO. Look out for more details on our bounties ahead of the hackathon! If you are planning on hacking at the event and have an idea which involves Aave or the GHO stablecoin definitely apply for the Aave track. As well, if you have received a grant from Aave Grants and will be attending, please let us know!

In regards to new reviewers after giving it much thought, we will hold off on expanding the review committee for now. This has nothing to do with the quality of applications we received rather it is what we think is best given the feedback we’ve received. We will revisit expanding the review committee next quarter.

Lastly, as always, we welcome any feedback and are happy to surface detailed metrics the community would like to see. Feel free to comment below.

[0xmigi]

- March 2023

Overview

This recent work update reports on AGD’s work completed during March and is the third report for the sixth quarter of Aave Grants. It outlines the grants programs’ metrics to date along with details on the grants that were awarded in March, ones that were completed in March, and an overview of recent events and ongoing updates.

Grants Summary

The program’s total numbers for grants awarded since the start in May 2021 up until March are as follows.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 1680
• Total Applications Approved: 223
• Acceptance Rate:
  • written(stage 1): 8%
  • video call(stage 2): 66%
• Total Amount Dispersed to Grants: $4,961,956
• Complete Grant Payments: 85%
• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 15%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (103) ($2,394,556),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (19) ($658,740),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (52) ($672,550),
  • Developer tooling (13) ($365,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (18) ($186,000),
  • Other (14) ($294,900),
  • Protocol development (21) ($414,200)

March Approved Grants

In March we received 126 grant applications and sent out funds for 6 new grants. In total, the 6 awarded grants amounted to a cumulative $106,000 in funding across single and tranche-based payments. The six awarded grants fell into four of the standard eight categories we use with an average grant size of $17k. Listed below are the awarded grants for March 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

• Delta One - $35,000(tranche) - other
  • “Delta One will conduct a deep-dive analysis on the current set of participants, creating a model for rating an LP based on a variety of factors: time in the pool, liquidity depth, stickiness during times of volatility, selling of rewards, and more.”
  • funds will cover the costs of their engineers, designers, and quantitative analysts over two milestone-based tranches

• Dullahan - $28,000(tranche) - protocol development
  • the team at Paladin have built a vault dedicated to the new staked Aave (stkAAVE) utility on GHO. Their vault will enable auto-compounding on deposited stkAAVE as well as the ability to mint discounted GHO onboarding less crypto-savvy users to mint GHO for arbitrage
  • funds will cover the costs of auditing the new vault contracts

• Token Terminal - $20,000(full) - other
  • Token Terminal has fully integrated Aave into its dashboard product which allows anyone to view detailed metrics covering Active loans, TVL, Fees, Supply-side fees, Revenue, Token Incentives, Earnings, Treasury, Active users, and much more.
  • funds will cover the operational costs related to the maintenance of the Aave dashboard on Token Terminal

• Credit Delegation Marketplace / Protonfire DAO - $15,000 (full) - applications and integrations
  • “Our goal is to create a marketplace for under-collateralized lending. Connecting lenders and borrowers in a user-friendly and transparent platform, where they can browse through opportunities and discuss the terms and conditions and reach an agreement for a loan to happen.
    Through a nouveau UI/UX focused platform, Liquidity Providers can check borrowers’ profiles and scores, offer their credit, monitor active loans, while borrowers can browse for opportunities, check and manage their debt.”
  • funds will go towards three milestones of designing and UX, building, and then testing and deployment

• Sharpe Labs - $5,000 (full) - applications and integrations
  • “Sharpe Magnum is a leveraged staking layer that is built on top of Aave. Magnum functions as a staking optimizer, enhancing the capital efficiency of staking pools by effortlessly leveraging staked assets via Aave lending and flashloans.”
  • funds will be used for the development of magMATIC a leveraged LSD product on Polygon and magETH on Aave V3

• LeverEdge - $3,000 (full) - protocol development
  • the LeverEdge team are building a leveraged trading protocol that uses the liquidity of Aave V3 to long and short assets widening the use case of liquidity deposited on Aave V3
  • funds will go towards three full-time developers building out the LeverEdge protocol

March Grantee Completions and Updates

Some notable project completions that have come in from past grantees during March are as follows:

• Tally - granted $20,000 ~4 months ago
  • Tally completed their outlined integration of Aave’s governance! You can try it out here

• Philand - granted $20,000 ~5 months ago
  • announced that the Aave quests are live in Philand. You can now mint NFT representations of your Aave use by visiting Philands quests page

• Projection Finance - granted $30,000 ~10 months ago
  • launched the public version of their multichain Aave V3 simulations app you can now use here!

• Cryptoversidad - granted $4,300 ~4 months ago
  • completed their GHO explainer video series which gives a good overview of how GHO works - also viewable on Lenstube

Similarly, some important updates/milestones reached by other past grantees this March are as follows:

• Apy Vision - granted $20,000 ~7 months ago
  • nearly complete with their Aave integration and are looking for private beta testers who can provide feedback on their alternative Aave integration - if you’re interested see this message from their BD team here

• iHELP - granted $40,000 ~6 months ago
  • submitted their first milestone which completed the preparation and testing of their codebase soon deploying on Ethereum mainnet. Starting with Avalanche their dApp allows users to donate crypto yield generated on Aave to their favourite charities.

• SimBull - granted $30,000 ~3 months ago
  • completed the initial build of their protocol on polygon integrating the Aave contracts. Learn more about their recent milestone from one of their founders Kenneth Giles in this video

Event Summary

A significant event from March was ETH Denver which took place from the 2nd - 5th. In next month’s update, we plan to share a more detailed report on the events from our last quarter including ETH Denver which will cover the Aave-related impacts that have taken place along with some numbers of people reached.

In case you missed it in last month’s post there have been some changes to the upcoming events calendar for AGD. Most importantly ETHGlobal Istanbul is being replaced with ETHGlobal Lisbon (May 12 - 14) following an announcement by ETHGlobabl last month. See February’s events summary for more. Also as mentioned last time, if you are a grantee and will be attending ETHGlobal Lisbon please let us know by filling out this survey.

Ongoing Updates

Recently an update was posted by @0xbilll on how AGD plans to disburse the $300k OP we received as part of the Optimism StimPack phase 0.

In a different thread, AGD recently delegated proposal power to Llama bringing them back above the 80,000 AAVE threshold needed to continue contributing submitting AIP to Aave DAO.

That is all from AGD for March. As always, we welcome any feedback and are happy to surface particular metrics the community would like to see. Thanks for keeping up with our latest work.

[0xmigi]

April’s monthly update along with a Halfway update on AGD’s fourth Renewal Proposal is posted here.

[0xmigi]

- May 2023

Overview

May is the start of Aave Grants DAO’s seventh quarter, marking the start of the second half of our renewal voted on at the end of January 2023.

This update covers AGD’s work completed in May and comes after the recently posted April 2023 & Halfway Updates post.

Grants Summary

Total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below spanning from the program start up until the end of May.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 1878
• Total Applications Approved: 235
• Acceptance Rate:
  • written(stage 1): 13%
  • video call(stage 2): 74%
• Total Amount Disbursed: $4,757,253
• Complete Grant Payments: 83%
• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 16%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (103) ($2,559,066),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (19) ($693,780),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (51) ($683,550),
  • Developer tooling (13) ($445,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (14) ($186,000),
  • Other (12) ($294,900),
  • Protocol development (20) ($479,200)

May Approved Grants

During May we received 105 grant applications and awarded seven projects funding that are contributing to Aave’s ecosystem. The seven grants awarded during May amounted to a cumulative $198,500 in funding spread across three of our standard grant categories with a median grant size of $20k (dashboard image thanks to @Llama).

The list below covers what projects were funded as well as 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

• Sommelier Finance - $50,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
  • “The development of the Aave V3 adaptor for Sommelier enables the creation of state-of-the-art DeFi strategies that make use of Aave V3 for lending and borrowing. The Real Yield ETH vault, built by Seven Seas Capital and DeFine Logic Labs on Sommelier, uses Aave V3 to do leveraged staking on cbETH, wstETH, and rETH and has already amassed almost $4M in TVL.”
    • funds will cover development and audit costs for the adapter Aave V3 adaptor

• Warden Finance | Liquidation backtesting tool - $40,000(tranche) - developer tooling
  • “The Aave liquidation backtesting tool will allow anyone in the Aave community to validate the robustness of liquidation penalties for all supported assets on all Aave deployments.
    For a given asset and a given liquidation size over a specific time period, the tool will output the historical distribution of liquidation costs (gas costs, oracle price skew, slippage, fees).”
    • funds with go toward 2 - 3 months of engineering work

• Xenophon Labs - $30,000(tranche) - protocol development
  • Xenophon Labs plans to perform an analysis of the Aave Safety Module similar to the one they did for dYdX’s originally Aave-based Safety Module. With this grant, they plan to complete two deliverables:
    Deliverable 1. A research paper that determines an optimal value for the slashing percentage. This will be mathematical in nature.
    Deliverable 2. A forum post — and governance vote, once the safety module is in a state that requires it — providing a recommendation for how to optimize the slashing percentage. Although our aim is to be practical, funding is not contingent on a successful governance vote.
    • funds will go toward the analysis and share improvement suggestions of the current safety module

• Mosaic - $25,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
  • “Mosaic will benefit from the Aave Grants DAO grant to continue building its data analytics platform, provision Aave Liquidity data, create a model from that data, and generate insights from the activity of Aave LPs.”
    • funds will go toward Mosaic launching an MVP along with a campaign integrating 3+ AGD projects into their product

• Brahma.fi - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Console will make it easier for users to onboard to AAVE, improve security, and enable non-custodial asset management through Safe. Allowing on-chain leverage management using Gelato, will increase the adoption of GHO. Console streamlines the GHO minting and position rebalancing process on AAVE, directly from users’ Gnosis Safe, eliminating custodial risk and the need for fund pooling.
    By offering automated monitoring and risk management, it enhances capital efficiency and safety, targeting improved multisig UX in DeFi.”
    • funds will go specifically toward the audit budget for their Aave integration on the Console product

• DeFi Simulator - $18,500(full) - applications and integrations
  • “DeFi Simulator will internationalize its Aave debt simulator to allow people across the globe to understand their Aave health factor and borrowing power in their local language and currency.”
    • funds will go directly toward adding support for other currencies and languages allowing the tool to reach a broader audience. 0xcazador gives a detailed explanation in his forum post about the project here.

• Credit Delegation Marketplace | Milestone 2 - $15,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
  • This is Protofire’s second milestone for the Credit Delegation Marketplace they are building on Aave using a peer-to-pool model. Current frontend and backend progress is visible in their Github.
    • second tranch funds will be used for scaling the Peer-to-Peer to Peer-to-Pool model of the design

Grantee Updates

Some recent updates from the Aave grantees are as follows:

• Silent Protocol a past grantee formerly approved under the name ‘Projecteuanthe’ posted a thread anticipating how they plan to bring private DeFi to users of Aave soon!
• Anthias also posted a thread announcing their new tool for DeFi risk management called Anthias Liquip Score. In short, it is a new method of measuring liquidation probability which they believe will prove a more effective metric for assessing a borrower’s liquidation risk than the traditional health factor. Read their pdf report for a deep-dive explanation.
• Butter gave an update on the forum reporting on recent delegate activity spanning from May 2 - May 16.
• BEN shared their “Intro to DAO Governance” video series which was funded back in October

Ongoing Updates

Most of our notable ongoing updates have been put in our recent AGD Renewal 4: April 2023 & Halfway Updates post but to mention a few. In the coming quarter, AGD plans to start experimenting with offering direct bounties to the community for building specific requests i.e. RFPs so look out for those. That is all for our update for the month of May. Like always we are happy to include any other updates or stats the community would like to see in these posts, just let us know below.

[AndrewA]

@0xmigi

Xenophon Labs - $30,000(tranche) - protocol development

• Xenophon Labs plans to perform an analysis of the Aave Safety Module similar to the one they did for dYdX’s originally Aave-based Safety Module. With this grant, they plan to complete two deliverables:
  Deliverable 1. A research paper that determines an optimal value for the slashing percentage. This will be mathematical in nature.
  Deliverable 2. A forum post — and governance vote, once the safety module is in a state that requires it — providing a recommendation for how to optimize the slashing percentage. Although our aim is to be practical, funding is not contingent on a successful governance vote.
  • funds will go toward the analysis and share improvement suggestions of the current safety module

FYI @MarcZeller @bgdlabs @Llamaxyz

[bgdlabs]

From the technical side of the community, it is definitely useful to see additional research on the fundamental aspects of the Safety Module, as our focus has been more on the technical parts.

That being said, we are aware @Llamaxyz and @TokenLogic are already involved (and have proposed to the community) in different improvements on the asset composition, slashing percentages, and incentives of the Safety Module. So it is more for them to comment if there is an overlap, and could be important to understand if AGD has taken that into account.

[Llamaxyz]

We are in touch with the Xenophon Labs team. We’ve already done a lot of work on the safety module (1,2,3,4,5) but hope to collaborate with them, specifically on slashing percentage parameters.

[0xmigi]

- June 2023

Overview

June is the fifth month since Aave Grants DAO’s most recent renewal in January earlier this year. This update covers AGD’s work completed in June and is the second post from our seventh quarter.

Grants Summary

Total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below spanning from the program start until the end of June.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 1972
• Total Applications Approved: 238
• Acceptance Rate:
  • written(stage 1): 12%
  • video call(stage 2): 75%
• Total Amount Disbursed: $4,508,067
• Complete Grant Payments: 84%
• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 16%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (103) ($2,578,566),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (19) ($693,780),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (51) ($683,550),
  • Developer tooling (13) ($445,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (14) ($186,000),
  • Other (12) ($294,900),
  • Protocol development (20) ($479,200)

June Approved Grants

During June we received 107 grant applications and awarded three projects funding. The three grants awarded during June amounted to a cumulative $64,040 in funding spread across three of our standard grant categories with a median grant size of $21k. The list below covers what projects were funded as well as 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

• Governance Facilitation for Aave by Boardroom - $35,040(tranche) - committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem
  • Boardroom who have contributed to Aave DAO with the Governance Weekly Recap receive a second grant to continue posting them for another 6 months.
  • funds will go toward a Boardroom analyst’s salary

• Libree - DAO’s treasury credit delegation - $19,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “Libree has created a Credit Delegation plugin that can be used by any existing and new Aragon DAO. This plugin allows DAOs to deposit their treasury in AAVE and grant a credit delegation on other DAOs, projects, or users. This will enable DAOs to make their treasury more capital efficient and to execute automatically approved credit delegation proposals”
  • funds with go toward research, smart contract implementation, frontend implementation, data marketplace integration, and an awareness and marketing campaign

• Decentralized Analytics for Monitoring GHO’s Health and Stability - $10,000(full) - developer tooling
  • Dapplooker a past grantee who developed the V3 User Retention dashboards have received another grant to create a GHO Health and Stability dashboard that will be live at https://gho.dapplooker.com.
  • funds will pay for development efforts and infrastructure costs of hosting/maintaining the dashboard

Grantee Updates

Some recent achievements from past grantees are as follows:

• the Unit a grantee from May of last year posted an update announcing that their UNIT product is finally ready for launch on the mainnet and the UNIT vaults will be available at unitindex.org. Here’s a tutorial video on how to create, and update a UNIT Vault also check out their latest blog posts for more.
• Fuji Finance’s allow listed V2 beta was released and then more recently the public version was launched just the other day.
• Senate Labs announced their discord plugin for governance notifications where you can track Aave activities right in your discord.
• Ithil Protocol gave some updates on the progress of their Aave-based strategies launching on Arbitrum.
• Projection Finance open-sourced all the logic for their simulation platform built around Aave V3.

A similar update to the achievements from past grantees is the ETHPrague hackathon winners who were awarded prizes for their hacks on Aave. The three prize categories and winners were as follows:

1. Best GHO Hack

   • Brian is an AI assistant that allows anyone to learn and interact with on-chain protocols via conversation text, for example:
     • Ask questions like “How can I borrow GHO?” or
     • Use the built-in tx builder to complete on-chain actions like “Borrow USDC using 0.1 eth as collateral”.

2. Best use of Aave with OP

   • Leverage ReFi’s mission is to become a new era for ReFi and stablecoins like GHO by making them powered by ecological real-world assets.
     Praave enables private transactions for Aave and beyond with Railgun.

3. Best Governance Hack

   • PEER UP revolutionizes how we connect and live. Empowering individuals to build strong local communities by sharing resources, governing together, and positively impacting neighborhoods through a common treasury of aTokens.

To learn more about how the ETHPrague event went and the Aave DAO-related activities read our recent recap of it here.

Ongoing Updates

If you are excited about GHO’s launch and are considering applying for a grant make sure to keep an eye on the aavegrants Twitter we may have some requests for grants (RFG) to share soon.

Lastly, like always we are happy to include any other updates or stats the community would like to see in these posts just let us know below.

[0xmigi]

- July 2023

Overview

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 July.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 2097
• Total Applications Approved: 249
• Acceptance Rate:
  • written(stage 1): 12%
  • video call(stage 2): 75%
• Total Amount Dispersed: $4,852,753
• Complete Grant Payments: 85%
• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 15%
• Status of all grants:
  • Complete/Live - 67.6%
  • In-progress - 24.8%
  • Inactive - 7.6%
• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
  • Applications and integrations (108) ($2,664,556),
  • Code audits (3) ($82,000),
  • Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (18) ($703,780),
  • Community (marketing and educational) (52) ($698,550),
  • Developer tooling (13) ($415,000),
  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (14) ($185,000),
  • Other (12) ($294,900),
  • Protocol development (21) ($474,200)

July Approved Grants

This July we received 105 grant applications and sent out funds for 9 new grantees. The 9 awarded grants totaled a cumulative $121,000 in funding across single and tranche-based payments. The 9 awarded grants fell into three of the standard eight categories we use with Application and Integrations being the most awarded. Listed below are the awarded grants for July ranging from largest to smallest by funding size:

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

• Range Protocol - $35,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
  • “For the network effects to play out for GHO stablecoin, it is essential that there is deep on-chain liquidity for GHO stablecoin against other stablecoins and large-cap assets like ETH, wstETH, wBTC, and alternate L1 assets like MATIC, BNB etc. At Range Protocol, our vision is to be a lego in making the decentralized markets across different asset classes more liquid and efficient. All the grant’s proceeds will be used to incentivize the liquidity of the GHO vaults.”
  • all grant funds will be used to incentivize the liquidity of Range Protocols GHO vaults

• Loan Metaprotocol for Ethereum Mainnet - $25,000(tranche) - protocol development
  • Hackathon builders from ETH Waterloo who made the project Roll a Mate are continuing to build out their application with a two-tranche grant. Roll a Mate will allow loan repayments on mainnet at micropayment costs
  • funds will go toward protocol development and testing of microloan metaprotocol along with later releasing a final version

• LangWallet - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “LangWallet is the first fully interactive AI crypto wallet. It allows users to make transactions and query anything happening on the blockchain through conversation - text or voice. The integration with Aave will allow users to borrow, lend and ask questions about Aave through natural language - e.g. “Which token that I hold that has the highest yield on Aave? Lend 40% of it.” Our aim is to bring new users to Aave - many of which are new to crypto and DeFi. We’ll also be hosting our service as an API so anyone can extend and build upon it.”
  • funds will pay for two devs time to develop and train the LangWallet and it’s AI features

• YaspFi - $13,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • YaspFi is building a one-stop shop for DeFi newcomers as well as for any users looking for a simpler UX. Their grant will be used to integrate Aave as the main leverage provider in their upcoming leverage tool.
  • funds will be used for integrating and testing Aave as the main leverage provider and providing Aave-based investment strategies for new assets and chains.

• AwesomeQA - $10,000(full) - community (marketing and education)
  • “AwesomeQA provides 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.”
  • funds will cover operational costs for AwesomeQA’s maintenance in the Aave discord

• Nilla Connect - $7,500(full) -
  • “@NillaConnect is a universal P2P leverage optimizer that helps Aave to utilize idle funds better through leverage, making cost of funds cheaper and generating better returns for users, hence bringing radical efficiency to Aave.”
  • funds will go to the development and testing of NillaConnect’s leverage optimizer

• Concero - $5,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • “We will launch our staking aggregation in September and will integrate Aave into it so our users will be able to stake into Aave pools and compare them to other pools. Also, because we are launching a cross-chain Dex aggregator this will allow our users to swap from any chain and stake into Aave pools.”
  • funds will go to launching and marketing the app

• Mobile aave positions watcher - $3,500(full) - applications and integrations
  • “@aavealarm is a mobile app that monitors your Aave positions and notifies you of critical events like low health factors or liquidations.” Meet Alexey and learn more about the app in their introduction post.
  • funds will cover the solo dev’s time spent building the app along with an App Store license fee

• Breezepay Merchant Rewads - $2,000(full) - applications and integrations
  • Breezepay is a crypto payments-focused team building tools for everyday users to pay with crypto easily. Their Aave integration plans to use both borrowing and lending on Ethereum mainnet to facilitate a smoother payments experience
  • funds will go toward integration development and beta testing of their initial product

Events Summary

Sponsored 3 prizes at the ETHArgentina hackathon to encourage developers to build with GHO, integrate Aave, and create applications to improve governance.

In September AGD will be at ETHGlobal NYC to help drive more builders to GHO. If you are planning on attending and want to hack on Aave, follow our Twitter where we will be announcing prizes for building on Aave or GHO and how you can engage with the team.

Ongoing Updates

With July being the sixth month since AGD’s last renewal proposal we plan to put up a continuation proposal soon. AGD will operate as is before then - grant applications and funding will remain open!

Thanks for reading our July report. If you have any comments or feedback we look forward to reading them below.