Karma GAP: On-chain Reputation & Grant Accountability

Transcript

Our mission is to kind of help people like make money, unlock economic opportunities. That's the promise of crypto. It automatically prevents people from blatantly lying about their work. Big problem of like they get tons of applications. A lot of it is like ChatGPT generated. On Gap, you can document all of the progress you're making and self-report it. We don't want to just solve the reputation solving the problem of reputation for the sake of it. Like it needs to be The Ethereum ecosystem thrives on community support and grants.

And the web3 funding is a still evolving. One of the biggest challenges for both grant providers and grantees is tracking how funds are used effectively. But I believe every challenge comes with a solution. And yes, you guessed it right. In today's episode, we'll explore how to enhance visibility and accountability for publicly funded projects and learn about a project that is supporting to improve transparency in web3 funding. Welcome to Ecosystem Project Demo, where we explore public good projects shaping the Ethereum ecosystem. This is episode

18 brought to you by ECG Institute and I'm your host Pooja Ranjan. Today, we'll explore Karma GAP, the Grantee Accountability Project, ensuring transparency and accountability for grant providers and receivers. Karma GAP bridges the gap in web3 funding by providing key data points, a reputation system, and a progress tracking framework, helping the community build trust in projects. To dive deeper into this, we are joined by Mahesh Murthy, the mastermind behind Karma Gap. Welcome, Mahesh.

Thank you, Pooja, for having me. I'm excited. It's a pleasure to have you, Mahesh. I first noticed the project when we were in Octant's community call. We learned more about it when this project was made mandatory to create a profile for grant application. So, I'm definitely excited to have this conversation to learn more about the protocol and share it with our fellow grant receivers. But, I would like to start this session here today with your introduction. So, please let our audience know about yourself, your journey in the ecosystem, followed by how you founded Karma GAP.

Wonderful. Thank you again. Yeah, my name is Mahesh Murthy. I'm the founder of Karma. My journey in the crypto space, I would say, started a while back, like 2014-ish, I think, when I discovered Bitcoin, like many people, like on Hacker News, and then kind of it was super interesting. I kind of kept in tabs with it. I tried to build some things with Bitcoin, but you had to use the scripts, and it wasn't like very programmer-friendly. So, but I still was kind of keeping tabs on the whole blockchain, and like this whole concept was so new for me.

And then, when Ethereum came, I started learning Solidity, started building toy applications, started blogging, and I was like very one of the first few people who were like who was sharing all these things as I was tinkering, and I got like this lot of like my blog was getting like hundreds of thousands of hits. And then, I started a small company on the side to teach blockchain programming to developers to like build full-stack on-chain apps. I did that while I had in my startup. And then, three, four years ago, I would say sold my like other company and my previous startup and then I kind of jumped 24/7 into crypto.

And I was looking for like what's a good problem to solve. And reputation was something which I had thought about for even like before this and that was something which like I couldn't take my mind off. So, I was like, "Oh, maybe we should tackle this reputation in crypto." And then I jumped into this thing trying to figure out like what does reputation mean? What is this in reputation in crypto? What is the benefit of it? Right? So, it was like it's a pretty big problem space. Like reputation means so many things to so many people. So, we identified a small niche in the the DAO space. We started building in the DAO governance space. We built a product there. If that product is still there. And then oh, a year and a half ago, we built what is now like

the core focus of the company. It's a product called GAC. It stands for Grantee Accountability Protocol. It's a protocol on chain application protocol and an application. So, that's my journey of how we got to where we are today. I have noticed early starters have always contributed the most. You starting in 2014 gave you a good head start to understand the ecosystem, understand the problem, and help onboard new contributors getting into the ecosystem. As you mentioned that you did some education related project work, then try to find out what is the good problem to be solved, and then getting

this project out. So, definitely a very good beginning and a lot of contribution around there. I think public good should be just that, publicly visible, publicly measurable, and publicly accountable. So, thank you for sharing about Karma GAP with us. As I understand, we have got a presentation and a demo about this project. So, without further ado, let's just get in. Yeah, so as I said, our product is called Gap. It stands for Grantee Accountability Protocol.

So, just to take a step back, our mission at Karma is to help builders and creators showcase their work, build on-chain reputation, and unlock economic opportunities. So, that is our mission. We don't want to just solve the reputation solving the problem of reputation for the sake of it. Like, it needs to be it needs that reputation should be useful for something. That is where like our mission is to kind of help people like make money, unlock economic opportunities. That's the promise of crypto. So, that's I think is like the intersection of like reputation and like economic opportunities where we personally are very excited to help in play a role in the crypto ecosystem. So, with Gap, I can let's walk through what

the problems are today in the space, right? So, if anyone like listening who is in the crypto space, you know there is every web3 ecosystem is deploying millions and millions of dollars giving out grants. They want to encourage people to build in their ecosystem and then grow their ecosystem. But, really the million-dollar question is is it really working? So, I don't think it's working. And if you actually speak to all the grant operators who are like administering these grants, they have these like this big problem of like they get tons of applications. A lot of it is like really like ChatGPT generated. Like, they're like they're sifting through like so many applications. They don't know who these

builders are. They don't know their history. What have they built in the ecosystem? Like, they don't have anything. And then, they're giving out so many grants. They have like two or three people one sometimes there's one person operating this like they don't have the time to keep track of like what is happening right like are they actually delivering on the things they said they are and then okay you deployed all the funds now how do you measure impact and like outcomes of your program you deployed all this money what came out of it there's no structured way to do it so those are like the sum of the challenges of the grant operators and then builders I'm a builder in the ecosystem and I personally like the reason we built this product is to like solve my personal pain point I used to

apply for a lot of these grants and a lot of these places and sometimes we used to not get this grant and then I used to be like confused this literally our product we are building for the long term why didn't we get it and like someone who is like just like a grant farmer who's like really good at like farming grants right they would get it I'm like they're not just aligned with the ecosystem at all like I don't know why they got it I'm like I need a way to just showcase all our work we have worked with other ecosystems we have continued to help them so I was like I need a place where I can like show all of my work not just point them to my website point them to our GitHub repository but like a clear proof right we received this grant we delivered this

we are continuing to build there we are not grant farmers like so I wanted to show our work so to solve all of these we built gap so just to summarize like for builders on gap you can document all of the progress you're making and self reported all of it is stored on chain so the entire application is built on top of ethereum attestation service which is another amazing protocol in the ethereum ecosystem so our protocol is built on top of it so anyone can like share their project they go create a project profile share their project uh progress, they can like receive donations on the project. Like they can like get endorsements. All of

it is stored on chain. A lot of communities use Gap for recognizing the work, rewarding them, funding them. So, there's like a lot of benefits to the builders. That's the core value of Prop for builders. Like showcase your work, build reputation, and then kind of like receive rewards and funding. And for the community and the grant admins, it's like the best way to stay up-to-date on what are all the projects which were funded in the community. Like there's one place you can go look at all the projects which were funded, what they have been doing. And then we now have like a custom impact measurement framework which we have built, which can be used to see what were all the activities of these builders, what did they perform, what was the outcomes. So,

measure that outcome, improve the funding program. So, and then we also have like a lot of like AI tooling which we have already built to kind of like improve like help with the operationalizing all of the work. So, that's Karma Gap in a nutshell. The heart of the product is your profile. So, everyone on Gap like who wants to use it, like any grantee, they first go and create a project profile clearly saying this is what our project is, this is our mission, this is the problem we are solving. This is like this one unified profile you can use. And we have a lot of like these features where anyone can come and endorse your project which is stored on chain. This is like also a discovery platform you can see like people come in and like look for

different types of projects. And then they can request like introduction if they want like a partnership, like they can like support your project. There's like a lot of these things. But this is the core and heart of the project. I'll go through the demo of the product, but like I wanted to just give a high-level overview. So, yeah, you can see this is our project profile which clearly shows like how many grants we have received, endorsements we have received, all our team members. So, this is like your on-chain project resume, really. So, you point them to this profile and they can get a complete overview of like what you're building. So, this is great for if you're applying for a grant, if you have this profile up-to-date, you can just like point anyone to this and they can get a complete overview. You can see

all of the grants we have received, what work we have done, everything is shown here. And for the communities, we have this community page where the community can come in and say like, "Okay, in our community, what were all the projects which were funded?" So, you can see every project which was funded, the milestones they have created, updates they have posted, every like single detail. They can even subscribe to their You can they can just If you have funded any projects, like you can just like email subscribe to these projects, too. So, it's a great way to kind of keep up-to-date on like what these projects are doing. And we recently In fact, last week launched impact measurement wherein you can track like the activities and the outcomes of the projects. So, we funded these projects, like are they

even active? Are they Are they dead? Right? Like you can like track like are they like committing code like often, PRs merged? And okay, we funded these, they launched these on-chain applications, for example. Like what's their transaction count? Like number of transactions on chain. We have like integration with Open Source Observer, we have integration with Dune, we have like GitHub integration. So, all of these We're pulling all these data and kind of making sense of it and presenting all that information. So, this is really good for like the community and the funders and the grant operators to see like how the funding is being utilized and what is coming out of it. So, and then we have about 12 or 14 communities using it now.

So, you can see some of the communities who are like actively using the product. Pooja You said like Octant kind of mandated the that you use this. So, Octant asks like everyone to like create profile on this on the platform so they can kind of start building up their profile and we have had discussions for like future more deeper integration as well. And if there's anyone like who's like technical here interested in like understanding how our thing, I thought I'll spend a couple minutes on the technical details. As I said, the whole protocol is built on top of EAS attest EAS. So, what that means is when you go create a project profile, that's an EAS attestation. When someone makes an endorsement of your project, that is an

attestation which is linked to your EAS has this really beautiful way of like you can kind of like refer one attestation by another attestation. So, you can kind of build a whole like a graph of attestations. So, which kind of fits perfectly into like what we are building. So, you have a project attestation, there's a project endorsement which is linked to it. And then let's say you see or receive a grant from like Octant epoch five or epoch six. So, that would be a grant the funding which you received which is linked to your project. There you can post grant updates of what you're doing.

Like so, you say, "Oh, if I get this much money like I'm going to like hit these these milestones, right?" Every milestone is attached to that grant and every milestone is an attestation. When you complete that milestone, that becomes an attestation. So, you can see like a project can have like impact, project has members. Every single piece of these kind of forms like almost like a graph of attestations. So, we kind of like do all of this work like on chain and then we also have like an index and have a replica so that you get like a more web two experience.

So, this is at like a very very high level. We have SDK, we have the docs, many We have In fact, a lot of this information is like already integrated into Gitcoin platform like any Gitcoin grantees, their information is automatically pulled and displayed on the Gitcoin platform. The same with Octant. So, Octant's website displays a lot of these milestones and updates and everything. So, and we have like many more integrations coming up as well. So, today we have around 3,300. I am I think we are like probably uh a few hundred more now. They're like 3,300 This actually I think today morning when I checked we have around 4,500 grants being tracked. Around 3,000 progress

updates people post like regularly updates. They're like post their milestones, updates, grant updates. They're kind of like showing their work. So, people are using it and like we are pretty excited to like kind of keeping keep building on this. Before I go into the demo, this is like a high-level overview of like what we have. If there are any grant operators who want to work with us or if there is a builders who want to create their profile and like there are a lot of things we can help with to get traction, to help them find funding. So, you can like directly reach out to me on Twitter or email or Telegram.

So, that's the presentation I had. I can now walk through the just a demo of the product itself. Okay. So, this is our um website. It's gap.karmahq.xyz. So, as I said like these are all like the some of the communities who use our product today. And let's go into actually wonder if we can just go into um Ethereum Cat Herders project and see um how this project looks. So, you can see Pooja and team have done a really good job of actually clearly explaining what the project is about, their mission, everything they

have. They have received like various grants. All of these are documented here. And I believe you have guys have also gone in and like added some of the milestones and details also in many of the So there's like the milestones. We have the whole reminder system to like and send reminders of like when to like post updates and things. So yeah, like here is a project with all the details. So this is great. We have like updates tab for the usually for the community members or the grant operators. They can just come in here and then just see like all of the updates like milestones created, grant updates posted, everything is in like this one place they can see.

And then for once you have a project like if it is Octant or Gitcoin, we automatically sync those into your profile so you don't even have to like go create those. And then all you have to do is for any of these grants, you can simply go and add a new milestone. Like create all the details of the milestone and then when the when you're completed, you just post an update on those. So it's like fairly like we're make it and all of these is like basically execute on-chain transactions for these, but it's deployed on various L2 networks. We have Optimism, we have Arbitrum, we have Celo. So we have a number of um L2 networks where we have deployed and

it's it costs like 0.001. The transactions are extremely cheap. So it has worked out pretty well. And then another thing which I wanted to show is we have what is so I want to show a place where we have this impact measurement. So if you go into for example like the Celo um Let's see if we have So these are all the projects in the Celo ecosystem. So for example, they are using it for they are running a program now called proof of ship where they are rewarding all the projects who are continuing to build. These are all the were the hackathon projects. So, after

the hackathon, if they continue to build on their projects, they're kind of like rewarding these projects and they are using gap for this. So, you can see all of them have like created milestones and they're posting updates. And one of the thing which we are doing with them is also you can see this is like the new impact measurement which we built wherein any of these projects who are participating. So, for example, in season 2, there are a number of projects which are participating. So, the program operators and also even the their builders themselves, they can see GitHub commits, like how they're doing.

Like the So, are these projects actually working? Like are they dead? Or like are they doing it? That's one. And then number of transactions. So, let's see if someone has Okay, here's a one of the projects. So, Transit is a project who have plugged in their information. So, they can like we pull the data from Dune and kind of render like their transaction counts and everything. To do this, they simply have to go here. Let's say my project. So, if you were to go We have made it like really simple. So, they can just simply go here and if you have an open source observer profile, so you just have to link your OSO profile ID.

And if you have like a multiple GitHub repositories, so you can just link those repositories. You have contracts. So, let's say you have deployed on Celo or Optimism or whatever you have. If you just enter the contract address, we will pull all of the data and then kind of just display it in the in here. So, we have a pretty good like tight integration. So, yeah, we're like super excited about this. Another thing which I'm like really excited about is like we built this tool like an AI tool called Karma Beacon. So, this is like an um, tool which the the funders can use to evaluate and like kind of continue funding these projects.

So, you can go here and, um, let's say these are all the projects participating. Um, you can just say show me all the projects who have, uh, GitHub activity. So, let's see. On a demo call, it's probably risky, but hopefully it'll work. Uh, no, it did not work. But, yeah, we're like working through these like Yeah, I should go back and but essentially like we're building this AI tool for you to like evaluate these projects, compare these projects, and then basically help them like kind of find the projects they want. So, soon there is going to be Gitcoin QF round happening. There will be hundreds of projects. Like how do you know which project to fund? Who is active? Who is

live? So, we want to kind of get this tool ready by then so that people can come in and say, "Show me all the projects who have had activity in the last 3 months." Right? Only I want to fund only those projects. Or show me the ones who have posted milestone updates, accomplished something in the last month or two. Right? So, for example, if I eat cat herders, like you don't have GitHub comments or anything. So, but you have been like creating milestones, posting updates. You're doing like, uh, creating these podcasts. There's a lot of these things you're doing. So, you can like search for all of those. We'll index all of those and then kind of like help you kind of fund these projects. So, yeah, those are all the things which we are we're building. And our ultimate goal is

to help the projects succeed, give them more visibility, help them build reputation, kind of expose them to like the world, and kind of help them become discoverable, and like make them more sustainable. So, that that's the core of what we're building here. Pretty awesome. I mean, I was fascinated to see the amount of data that is being analyzed here in order to provide a report for the grant providers as well as the options available for grant seekers to showcase themselves. Great job over there. Thank you so much for the work behind this project. I believe that you know, in general, when we are in Web3 transparency, that is not just a feature. I mean, it it should be there

because without this, funding is just a shot in the dark. As you mentioned that we have no clear where it is going. Yeah, which is literally like exactly what we are trying to solve. I mean, this is just like the first layer of it. Like there is like multiple layers of this. This is not a perfect solution yet. Like but this is at least a start. When we started, there was no one place you could go look at all of these. So, there is a place. And then some people started complaining like, "Well, like I can attest whatever, right? Like I can just say whatever. Like how do I trust this?" We're like, "Okay, like we'll get to it." Like then that's the next thing which we are trying to solve. One is we're doing all these analytics to solve that. And then by putting all of this on

chain and for anyone to be able to see, it automatically prevents people from blatantly like lying about their work, right? So, because it's all public. So, they don't want to like hurt their reputation by doing it. But we also have we have thought about like building like a reviewer network. Anyone can kind of go review these and see if if it's actually real or not. But then we also have to figure out like the incentive structure for it. So, we are doing that. And then we want to go further like use these AI tools. Like a lot of these is like you just need a lot of manpower to do it. So, now we have these powerful AI. So, can we use that to kind of like improve and kind of provide

distilled information to whoever needs it. So, there's so much more work to do. But yeah, like we're we're just excited to solve these problems one at a time. Absolutely. Like Karma GAP is trying to bridge the gap of information from grant providers to grant receiver. And AI is trying to bridge the gap on in collecting this information which is like missing here. Definitely accountability in Web3 funding has been a missing piece and it's really exciting to see solution like Karma GAP and OSO emerging. We had a chat with the team OSO and we were wondering like uh are these projects complementing each

other or are they are competitive in nature? But it seems like more information we have, we have better decision-making capabilities. So it's good that you already have integrations. Yeah, we are very complimentary solutions. Yeah, we have an integration with OSO. We pull like a lot of that information kind of to show surface like as much information as possible and kind of summarize it for the end users whether it be the community or the grant operator. So yeah, we are very complimentary solutions. That's very good to know. I mean I think it is always comforting to know that there are multiple solutions even if there is one failure to checkpoint, there could be other data that we are receiving may help make the decision

that we are looking at. While we are talking about data and decision-making, I would be curious to hear like what were the key metrics that you thought would be needed to initiate this like kind of presentation of creating the summary of a project that is seeking grant. Yeah, so I think it depends on what type of a project it is. So on GAP today we have open-source projects. We have community initiatives, education initiative projects around that like ReFi projects, right? So the way we have structured it is is how do we make it kind of fit to all of them for the diverse set of projects you have in the

ecosystem. So for open source projects like we look at all of the OS or data, the GitHub data, and the on-chain metrics. So those are like the more key data points I would say. Not much of lot of like open source projects and things they don't like go and like create milestones and updates that much. They're like oh my code is like is really the source of truth. So we kind of like pull all the data from there. But when there is like education initiatives or like initiatives or like like for example like EthCat Herders. This is like really valuable for you to like kind of post your roadmap. In the next 1 month we're going to like interview like these many ecosystem projects or we're going to run these like EIP calls. So right there's like

all these things you do. Which when the funders see they're like oh this is like super valuable. We need to continue kind of fund these kind of teams, right? So for them more like text context based is that's the data which we look for from such projects. So it's really depends on like what type of project we and we have designed the system so that it's applicable to like all different types of users. Right. And I remember in your presentation you mentioned about there is an option to add multiple GitHub links. All right. For example, Cat Herders, we may not have been like actively pushing things in our own GitHub repository, but as a project which is supporting Ethereum protocol

development, we definitely we push things to Ethereum PM repository and different repositories of Ethereum. So I'm curious. Does Gap allow to add different repositories as well in order to keep track of work? But if it do, how do we make sure that it is relevant to the team? Because there could be multiple different teams coming up and adding their inputs as well. Yeah, that's a good question. So today you can add as many GitHub repositories as you want because like a lot of the projects don't have a mono repository.

They have like a lot of repositories where they do the work. So, we started with that use case, so that solves this. However, if you are kind of contributing to someone's repository, we do not support that because we are pulling all the stats from that GitHub from that repository, whereas you are more interested in your contribution to that repository, right? Yeah, that is probably we we'll be open to adding that to our road map if that happens a lot, which I think it does. So, Yeah.

Yeah, I believe you know, these days users are not contributing to just one repository, but they are contributing to multiple repository. Perhaps a solution could be when a project is created on gap and they have contributors, there should be an option to add their contributors GitHub handle. So, even if they are adding multiple repositories, that would help keep track of that particular group members and in order to like generate report, it would be helpful. Yeah, that is a really good point. We do have this team section like you can have like all your contributors in the project and there they can add individual GitHub repository. So, we have a provision for each contributor to kind of put in their information. We

don't aggregate that and show it in like one place, but yeah, that's an enhancement fairly easily we can do. But, that's a good feedback. Great. While we are discussing about you know, how we are looking into the system, I totally understand that when we are building a reputation system on chain and off chain, there could be some challenges. How does Karma GAP prevent data manipulation and ensure that whatever is added is credible? Yeah, I touched on that a little bit. There's no like one solution here. So, the way we think about this is like okay like there is nothing, so let's start somewhere, right? So, the first thing is the fact that you're putting it all publicly on chain and like when you want to audit like it automatically is like

first layer of thing it prevents a lot of people from doing it and manipulating it. That's one and then the second layer is if it is an open source repository or something like we pull in all these stats and then we are integrating more things like is this actually you're just like are you just spamming by to increase your commit rates in the PRs or is it like actually valuable, right? There are like a lot of tools which can do analysis of your GitHub like code and then see like how much actual valuable code was added or not. So, we are starting to integrate those things. But on the other side where it is more like which you cannot like use these tools, there we are one thing which we are really considering is like building out like an independent verify network who

can be incentivized to kind of like verify these things. Sometimes the grant operators are willing to fund this and like can have like a pool of people kind of verifying these. And we are also trying to like build a a network which anyone can tap into. Like if you are a program operator and like you don't have the resources, they can just say like "Oh, we want all of these to be verified." Which we cannot automate, right? Then someone can actually like we they can tap into our network. So, that's one thing which we are considering. Yeah, so I would say those are like the few things we are thinking about like how to do it. We ourselves our team constantly kind of monitors all these milestones and updates and things and we kind of do like a lot of like spot checks where possible. We haven't

noticed that many people still do a little bit of like gaming with like how they like going to post and little bit of exaggeration, but I haven't seen anyone maybe our like our platform is not like super popular yet, but like no one is like farming it yet, thankfully. But it's going to happen. So, we are like kind of trying to put in place a lot of these solutions before that. Yeah, but um I mean I'm sure there would be people who would like to take advantage of this tool and try to manipulate things there.

So, my next question is about the reputation only. There was something called as a reputation portability. Could you maybe explain what is that and how Karma gap is supporting that? Yeah, so reputation portability is like the whole idea of the cryptos and the ethos of it is like it needs to be like portable, right? And now the question is like okay, Pooja and her team are like her posting these milestones updates and kind of like showcasing their work building up their reputation on Karma. Like how is it portable, right? The way it is portable is literally on chain.

Even if Karma's website shuts down tomorrow, like your data is all on chain. It's in EAS, like it's so easily accessible through other indexers. Like everything is there. If you used tomorrow say, here is some other platform which I want to use, they have all these other features and they want to use it. I want to just take all my data there. Like literally you don't even have to ask our permission for access or anything. It's all there. We have even provided like an API service for anyone to kind of pull that information, but even if we shut that down, it's all on chain. So, anyone can fetch the data, kind of port it over. So, really that's how we think about portability. As long as we have like a clear clear schemas and structures defined which we do, like

literally every piece of information is portable without us being involved. Which is like the power of crypto, right? That's what we are like we want to enable. That is pretty interesting. Yeah, I think perhaps you know one project after 4-5 years there is no need for that particular project or a tooling, they can the people who were involved with that project can also refer back to the project like we have successfully completed this project by pointing out to Karma or as you mentioned by different indexes on EAS they would be able to put it. That's a very good piece of information. I think it would be helpful for many individual contributors to like showcase their work.

Yeah, which is why we are making more enhancements to this team contributor section because when you're working on a project there's a whole team and the team members move on, there's like but they still want to be able to point to this project and say like look we accomplished these things there and here is all the proof, right? With clear timestamps. So, yeah, we are making more updates on the team section as well. Right, this is great. Like one of the most encouraging statement from open source was like you don't have to depend upon your LinkedIn resume anymore. You can just showcase your work by citing towards GitHub repository. So, what all contribution you have made made to the open source ecosystem. So, I think Karma gap is also

helping in that and kind of creating resume here for individual contributors of the ecosystem. Yeah, and we call Karma gap as like the on-chain project resume. Really? Yeah, like if whoever worked on it cat herders like it's all there. Like GitHub is good for like open source contributions and things but for like lot of other things yeah, gap kind of fills that role. Gap cannot fill that gap. Gap fills that gap. So true. So true.

So, when we are in this ecosystem we talk about projects. Mostly those are available as a public good projects. And I think the grants the public grants are generally for these categories of projects. I'll be curious to hear your thoughts. In your mind what kind of project should be considered as public good projects? Only if it is open source, only if it is doing something great for a certain community? Like what do you think of the idea of public good project? Yeah, that's a really really good question. Like for me personally like if it is a public good project, that means anyone should be able to use it for free essentially.

But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't charge money for like a subset of users. I'm of the opinion like yeah, like for you to be sustainable you should charge like money. But at the same time you should offer that service for like for free whoever wants to use it, right? Whether it be like a basic service with like some add-on service for like paid however. And should it be open source? I think so if your sustainability depends on funding from like public good funding providers, then I think it should be open source. Like otherwise like it just one is like you're like against the ethos of the whole like the open source and the public goods movement. And then like if you are like not at all open source then like well you should be a traditional

company. There's nothing wrong in it. You can charge money, use like use it like a regular business, but at least don't call yourself a public good if you're not like open source. At least that's my take. I don't know the textbook definition of it, but yeah. Yeah, I think it's debatable these days that the concept of public good has been a little watered down. There are so many projects they just want to participate in a grant round and call themselves as public good without any history, without any showcase of work. They keep something there and make it open source and say yeah, I'm public good project, support us and fund us and things like that. So it's a big challenge for grant providers, grant operators to actually identify which are those public good projects. I'm wondering if KarmaDAO may

be able to key point certain categories, certain indexing that can help identify these grant providers that these are the projects if we are considering only public good funding for this round, then these are the criteria that should be filled up. Do you think we have any provision provided by Karma GAP? GAP doesn't provide that today because what we believe is not some an ecosystem grant provider might believe to be the criteria. So, the criteria is like very different for each ecosystem, I would say.

We haven't had any requests for that yet. If there's any community like who's interested in that, like we could like we'll be happy to work with them and kind of have like a customized criteria for each community of like what projects they think are like public goods and like what they care about. And then we can like kind of work with them and kind of filter those. But we would never take the a stance on this is how it will be displayed on Karma, right? Like because we are like providing a service to different communities and we would let them define what they want to do and then we can I enable that. Yeah, perhaps we can come up with some kind of checklist even though if it is not actually implemented on Karma GAP, but those criteria's are clearly mentioned, then I believe the AI that is

inbuilt may be able to provide that list by making sure like these are the projects which checks those boxes. So, these can be considered as a public good projects. Just a thought over there. Yeah, I think that's an approach we could like definitely take. Yeah, many of the like the L2's and the like a lot of these ecosystems which we work with, that hasn't been like a main point of like contention or like something which they've like asked for like a lot. So, we haven't really focused on like that criteria, but yeah, if anyone is interested like we definitely are open to working with them.

And that's cool that we are having so many things around public good, around open source and supporting Ethereum ecosystem as well as many other blockchain ecosystem in order to come up with new project and create a like a supporting as you mentioned layer two projects. They are also part of Ethereum ecosystem, right? So, yes, it's very good and very supportive. I wonder if you would like to maybe either give a shout out to any other tooling available and um you know by which you think Karma gap maybe in future interested in any kind of collaboration in order to make the report more robust for grant providers.

Yeah, like first shout out to EAS because we like rely heavily on EAS like they're providing such a valuable public good. Very simple protocol, easy to kind of get your head around like wrap your head around it and it's like easy to build on and very supportive team. So shout out to them and then OSO we have integrated with them. They're like very helpful as well and they have like they're doing some great work. Dune and lot of the open source libraries we use like Wagmi and ethers JS like without those like obviously we couldn't have built all these. So we are a public good. We are like fully open source and we use all the open source tools to build these. So shout out to all of them.

And in the future like partnerships like any EVM ecosystem communities who want to have visibility into all the things they're funding across different grant programs. There are a lot of pluralistic grant programs. There's like some of those if they are interested we would love to work with them. We have like all of these will be on their own chain because our protocol is deployed on different chains and we have this whole custom impact measurement and the AI tools for evaluation. There's so many things which we are working on like and this is all to help the projects succeed builders succeed which is what the ecosystems also want. So we both are in coming from the same angle. So we would love to work with any of the anyone in the Ethereum ecosystem.

I was about to wrap up but you brought up a very good point of impact measurement. I remember following some tweet recently about impact measurement and you also mentioned in your presentation. So I'm curious to understand if this impact measurement feature that has been recently launched is only for the grant providers or can grant receivers also make use of that feature? It is both for grantees and the grant operators. More so for grant operators because they want to know how their dollars were deployed and what happened with it. So, there is this common impact data standards. It's from the common approach

which is like a framework in the traditional grant system which is like fairly simple and like easy to kind of understand. So, Monty who's one of the he's in the seller ecosystem like he introduced me to that framework and then we kind of collaborated closely and we built this. It's a very simple like framework where there's this inputs. You're giving them the money and the support to builders and they are using that money to do something. Build an application or do like host events, right? That's all the activity. And then you measure that activity with like outputs. And then because of that activity it results in some outcome. So many people were educated, some like so many people saw this video and like got

something out of it. And then you measure that with indicators, right? So, it's it's a very simple framework. That's what we implemented. The same thing is available for all of like the builders also. So, we have an impact tab on their profile where we will be showing all their stats. So, they can like kind of showcase that. So, it's for both. It's the same solution which applies to both of them. I'm sure it's going to be very helpful in future as the users increase of these tools, there would be many more coming up but that will be helpful for our decision making.

Yeah, we are feeding all of that to our AI tooling. So, no one has to go through every single one of them and inspect all of them. They can simply prompt the AI to kind of get the information they need. Even better. Make it faster. Right. Well, Mahesh, for those who are listening here today, is there any message or call to action that you would like to share from this platform? Yeah, I mean, if you're a builder, please come and create a profile on Karma Gap. Like, we have so many more initiatives. We have a pretty big road map for the next couple of quarters. We want to help any builder like succeed, receive grant funding, receive other types of funding, help them monetize their product, like give them the

distribution. So, we want to help builders win. So, and we want to invite all of the grant operators and the funders to please check out Gap, and we want to help you improve your capital allocation, as well. Well, that's a solid framework. That wraps up our deep dive into Karma Gap and its role in shaping Web3 funding transparency and accountability. If you are a grant provider, grantee, or someone passionate about making Web3 funding more transparent, be sure to check out Karma Gap. Details are added in description section.

A huge thank you to Mahesh Murthy for sharing about this amazing project, my co-worker at ECE Institute to help organize this talk and distribute the recording, and to all our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, share, and follow us on social media. For more discussion on innovative projects in Ethereum ecosystem, stay tuned. This is Pooja Ranjan, signing off.