Update from Aave Grants: Winding Down AGD 1.0 and What’s Next

Governance
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Update from Aave Grants: Winding Down AGD 1.0 and What’s Next

Author:@0xbilll- Aave Grants

Date: 2024-08-19

tl;dr

Aave Grants DAO is evolving after three impactful years, during which over 250 teams were supported. To better serve the growing Aave ecosystem, operations will be wound down and the team will be disbanded, while remaining committed to coordinating the next steps. The community and Service Providers will be instrumental in shaping what’s next for Aave Grants. Current multisig signers will oversee the transition. Stay tuned for an overview of all grants awarded, a retroactive summary of how Aave Grants evolved, and a final treasury breakdown.

Update

This past May marks three years since the community welcomed the idea of a community funded grants program to the Aave ecosystem. Aave Grants DAO (AGD) has gone on to become a pioneer in crypto grants, supporting over 250 teams with grants to grow Aave and GHO, encouraging countless contributors to join the Aave ecosystem, and inspiring numerous grants programs across the industry.

AGD has evolved as the Aave protocol and Aave ecosystem has grown. AGD’s focus and support started with the first V2 deployments and shifted with new releases and priorities from the community, most recently with Aave V3 and GHO.

The last major interaction on the governance forum from AGD was at the beginning of 2024 when our renewal proposal fell short. Since then, we have continued to operate by awarding grants to builders with the resources we have remaining. We have also reflected on the feedback received from various stakeholders, Aave Grants’ role in the ecosystem, and how the ecosystem needs have changed since AGD’s inception.

AGD has continued to drive impact to the Aave ecosystem, with recent grantees being some of the highest quality teams ever seen. However, this is under the same structure and processes, that although have evolved and been augmented, are still relatively the same as when AGD started. Continuing to shift our focus and experimenting as we have done throughout AGD’s life is not enough at this point in time. A new approach is needed to maintain a high quality, impactful, and forward thinking grants program that the Aave ecosystem deserves.

There were no other Service Providers when AGD launched in May 2021. Today there is a thriving ecosystem of teams interacting directly with and driving forward the Aave protocol, including:

  • Aave Labs focused on innovation and events
  • BGD focused on protocol development
  • ACI focused on business development and growth
  • Chaos Labs and Llama Risk focused on risk management
  • TokenLogic and Karpatkey focused on treasury management
  • Certora focused on security verification processes

While we can work with Service Providers under AGD’s existing framework and processes, the impact and potential does not compare to what is possible if a net new program is made with the input of Aave’s diverse contributor base from the get go.

With this backdrop and after conversations with the whole AGD team, it is time to close the first chapter on AGD and start the process of creating something new with the community that will best serve the current Aave ecosystem and push all of crypto grants and community programs forward. To facilitate this, we will wind down the majority of operations and begin working with the community to create something new from the ground up. Specifically, starting immediately we will:

  • Pause all new grants. Any applications in progress will be paused and the application will be removed from our website. The aim will be to re engage these applicants once new processes are in place
  • Disband team. The AGD team will be appropriately disbanded. Bill will remain to coordinate discussions with relevant parties and guide the next steps.
  • Engage the community. We will reach out to Service Providers, delegates and other key stakeholders in the Aave ecosystem to help shape what comes next and understand how a new version of AGD could best serve them. We invite everyone in the community to share their opinion and participate in shaping the future of grants in the Aave ecosystem.

The current multisig signers and setup will remain until an appropriate transition plan is in place. The current signers have agreed to continue their duties reviewing and signing transactions, and helping to transition when appropriate.

In subsequent posts we will follow up with:

  • A final overview of all grants distributed and their current status. This information will also be made available in a way that is accessible and remains available to the community over the long term.
  • A retroactive summary of how AGD evolved, lessons learned, and other takeaways.
  • A final breakdown of the AGD treasury.

These changes will best position AGD to forge a new path forward. AGD is excited to work with the community and share updates as progress is made.

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It is unfortunate to see the AGD 1.0 Grants winding down, but in hindsight this is a good decision. Grant programs are a great tool to grow an ecosystem, but I believe based on experience and data that most grant programs today are flawed. As someone who has fully been involved in grants since 2021(Gitcoin 2021-2023 and started managing grant programs for Arbitrum DAO 2023- ongoing) I am aware of some of the issues that grant programs have today!

I am eager to help Aave grants upgrade their programs and consult on how to create both a more community driven grant program and a more effective one as well. This is me: x.com

I am also a member of the Cartographers Syndicate- a collective of experts focusing on improving grant programs. Think the collective would be interested in stepping in the conversation as well. Curios what the next iteration will look like and looking forward to help shape it.

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Hi,

i appreciate what the AGD did in the past for the DAO and I can’t wait to see what will come next.
I was one of the persons giving feedback in the past saying that there needs to be a change as the DAO matured.

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We respect the effort it took to decide to wind down the Aave Grants DAO and we are committed to lending our voice in deliberations on what the Aave Grants Program will evolve into shortly.

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AGD Team,

As an early grantee, thank you for supporting my work with the AGD Retrospective. Your belief in me was an important milestone as I transitioned to full-time roles in the Web3 grants space.

AGD’s broader impact on the ecosystem is commendable. You pioneered progressive decentralization for grant programs and supported 250 teams with a community-first approach. This legacy will continue to inspire future initiatives.

As you transition to the next chapter, I’d like to offer support leveraging resources from Gitcoin and the Cartographer Syndicate. This could include:

• Assistance with the operational transition, drawing on our combined experience managing similar processes.
• Help engage the community, facilitating discussions to shape the future of grants and incentives across the Aave ecosystem.
• Access to networks and insights from both Gitcoin and the Syndicate to aid in developing pathways for the next phase of grants and incentives with Aave.

Your early support meant a great deal to me, and I’m sure countless other grantees share this sentiment.

With gratitude,

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Good work on trying to evolve AGD and getting it to this point @0xbilll ! It’s not an easy job (mostly a thank-less job!) that a lot of people don’t understand / have visibility on.

As the OG Aave grants instigator, I’m happy to see the grants program continue to evolve. It is a good time to revisit the entire design of AGD, see how it can fit into the wider ecosystem, what funding mechanisms are now available, and what tooling can help in making a more effective grants program.

I believe the DAO would benefit from a type of grants program ‘service provider’, both in terms of accountability and independence. It needs to align with the direction of other service providers and at the same time have the independence to actively steer/influence funding priorities. There have been many experiments in the wider web3 ecosystem with quite effective grant programs that the future AGD could learn from - Optimism, Arbitrum, Gitcoin, etc (to name a few).

I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves!

P.S. I was previously against grant tooling such as Questbook, however i’ve since changed my mind after using them to apply for other grant programs. It’s a really smooth experience from the applicant’s perspective! I believe tooling such as Questbook, Gitcoin infra etc should be looked at again, since they have all progressed significantly from a few years ago.

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Thank you to everyone who has shared feedback so far and expressed excitement about a new version of Aave Grants. I am eager to hear from the existing Service Providers (SPs)—@AaveLabs, @bgdlabs, @Certora, @ChaosLabs, @ACI, @karpatkey_TokenLogic, @LlamaRisk, on how AGD can evolve to better support the ecosystem.

Given the evolving needs of the Aave ecosystem, a key opportunity for a future version of AGD is playing a larger role in empowering SPs to successfully fulfill their scopes of work. By aligning AGD’s goals with the priorities of SPs, we can maximize the tangible impact from grants while continuing to fund innovative experiments and high-quality teams that bring fresh competition and ideas to the ecosystem.

Final Grantee Overview

As mentioned in the above post, we’ve updated the ‘Explore Grantees’ page to provide a final overview of all grants distributed since AGD’s inception, including:

  • A summary of each grant and its impact
  • Grant Status: the current status of the work outlined in the grant application
  • Current Project Status: the most recent status of the project
  • Revamped Grant Categories: updated categories for increased clarity
  • Grant Amount and Payment Status
  • Announcement Details
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