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