Season 3 - Ep. 4 - Grants Report Eugene + Mashal

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of five to 10 episodes every couple months this season is impact season how can we manifest the meme of impact equals profit what are the most interesting experiments and in Impact tracking and how do we move from virtue signaling to cryptoeconomic proof of virtue these are the the themes of green pill impact season in 2024 this season we are allowing you to collect each episode as a nft if you go to pods.

medgreen pill and find all the episodes and start collecting you can collect this episode and other episodes from green pill impact season my guests today on this episode are Eugene lenthal and michall wakar I'm excited to talk talk to them because they wrote a report about the state of web3 Grants basically looking at web3 Grants programs and how they are creating impact so this is a broad peanut butter spread look at many different grants programs in the web3 ecosystem and how are they doing in distributing Capital to places where there is so you can access the stateof web3 grants report using the links in the show notes you can also access the Zora collectible associated with the

state of web 3 grants in the link in the show notes and I think that this is a really foundational episode because of the amount of research that has gone into it from Eugene and Michelle I'm also joined by my co-host for green pill impact season Carl who uh is is helping me pull out the major themes from the stateof web 3 grants report so the stateof web 3 grants reports talks about the alignment of intentions and positioning for web3 Grants programs how different web3 grants programs are investing in operations for operating their grant program a diversity in Grant approaches there's no single right way to run a web three Grant programs but there are some best practices that are starting to emerge uh transparency in

Grants programs how can these grants programs become more transparent to the people who are applying to them how are they governed how do you govern the grants programs and make sure that they are on the right track how do you build support systems for grantees how do you address conflicts of interest and accountability how do you build fairness and checks and balances and how do you do impact reporting and assessment in web three grants programs are all themes of the web three grants report and this episode about the web three grants report so I think that as we figure out how to connect impact to profit and how to do impact tracking the stateof web 3 grants report is a really good state of the coordination state of where things are now and grants programs are such an important Capital allocation mechanism that brings tens of millions of dollars

to builders in the web3 ecosystem so this is a really Germaine episode because we talk so much about the capital allocation that's going on in web 3 grants and how to push the state of that forward so I think that you're really going to enjoy this episode with Eugene and Michelle Hey Eugene hey Michelle how you doing hey pretty pretty good really excited to talk to you today about the state of web 3 grants report that y'all published can we start with some quick intros Eugene I'll start with you and then on to Michelle yeah sure uh thanks for having us and excited for the conversation uh intro wise I'm currently the interim executive director at metago which is a governance research nonprofit I'm also a

research lead at the plurality Institute and helping to kick off a new proposer Builder focused uh independent Research Foundation sweet um yeah uh excited to be here and looking forward to this conversation uh I'm Michelle and I'm the head of ecosystem at Octon we do governance experiments and have staked 100,000 e um and are funding public goods rewards through that um and having Community decide where that funding goes um and yeah sort of started my research Journey um researching token models with seed Club moved on to qf research um and ventured down a grants funding path uh before join joining hands with Eugene and um yeah doing this report really

excited to talk about the stateof web 3 grants report that yall put out could you tell me how you came to be working on this project and uh basically a high level summary of the of the research you did yeah sure happy to get us kicked off there so uh the idea kind of came up early uh last year uh where meta within metago and dowar there was already some energy picking up around creating a metadata standard uh though as that project for a variety of reasons was losing a little bit of steam starting early summer I was starting to think about you know how can we do some more focused deep Dives on different Grant programs in the space uh there were some examples like SVS compendium and some other resources here

and there that would do kind of individual program deep Dives but there wasn't really anything taking sort of a more holistic view across Grant programs and trying to get at least some baseline comparison uh and so uh as we started talking to various folks in the space uh you know Michelle and I got connected pretty early in the process and we both just started geeking out on uh interest and excitement in exploring this and and we knew that this was not going to be the end all be all capture every possible ounce of information relating to Grant programs but we did want to start with at least some kind of qualitative study and assessment of some history current operations how do people even think about their own impact as sort of a foundational work for us to

continue exploring it uh and it's been really exciting to see you know positive reception since then we've been able to gather a bunch of Grant operators and infrastructure providers we're gearing up towards the web 3 Grant Summit in Denver uh and within metago we' launched this sort of initiative called the grant Innovation lab to be a rapper around the different research technical work and Community work and it seems like the the Grant Community at large is really excited about it which is fantastic anything to add there no I think you pretty much summed it up um I got into I i' been on the grante side of things so just going through a lot of application processes and um was just really confused about why there really wasn't enough around how these programs are

running there wasn't a lot of metrics shared and I just kind of felt like grants were and still are a black hole for a lot of folks right so it just kind of made sense to want there was a lot of curiosity that went into it and just had a lot of questions going into it and so talking to Eugene if fell like we were just really um curious about a lot of the same questions and and wanted answers and wanted to help uncover this so that really would led to a lot of um us working together on this yeah I guess if you were to explore some of the questions that you wanted to look at for each of the different ecosystems that you could included in the report what were some of the the main things that guided your research what were some of

the big questions that led you to um certain ecosystems and certain Explorations within those ecosystems yeah I mean I think that as a initial starting point it was just getting a basic understanding of like what the heck is going on across these Grant programs uh even just trying to capture you know what's the mission of your oreg is there a separate mission for your grant program and how well are those articulated and how easy are those to find I know for some of them we literally had people following up with us being hey you didn't catch the text that was in the Google search like that's our mission like why is it in your Google search and not on your website that's kind of bananas like why wouldn't you prominently host that somewhere and so I think it was at least

for me one of the motivating factors was just Baseline knowledge we can't have a real comparative discussion at least until we have some basic information in the same format across in this case 13 programs and I think we're going to get another eight or so in the V2 that'll be hopefully launched in Feb to March timeline this year yeah and then it went from there to really being able to understand how they were operating right so we broke it down into the operations part we looked at the review side that was when we really wanted to explore was understanding how the review process works what that entails um what's used as a basis for even comparison between applications from round to round um and because there were different programs

there were some Legacy programs who had been there from the start of I'd say this industry as a whole but then there were also a lot of iterations that happened and so just being able to understand what the learnings from those were and then finally how impact was being measured evaluated if at all um and yeah those were a lot and and trying to find some form of similarity even around how um these programs were working because it felt like everyone was working in silos right so just being able to even get that same level of response from each program that was that's s a challenge for us I mentioned in the oh go ahead Carl I think we might have been going to the the same question here uh which is probably around impact monitoring and

and obviously the theme for the season is looking at how uh crypto is able to measure impact and what improvements it can offer over Legacy systems um so I'd be curious if you could offer some hot takes on the current state impact measurement in web 3 what are some of the things that are pretty abysmal and where are some of the things where there's actually some some pretty interesting Innovation happening I'd say there were a lot of disappointments because I I I guess like just going into it we sort of I don't know what I expected but I think I expected something right and so um one of the most shocking revelations from quite a few programs is that like there really aren't um there really isn't a lot of tracking happening right um let's forget evaluating impact there's no no tracking

there's no measurements most programs aren't even aware about grantees and whether and what their status is I think we barely had like I I don't want to name them uh by name but again maybe like one or two programs who really were really on top of their game in terms of understanding where grantees and that ecosystem's at and so that was one of the most shocking yeah that that was pretty shocking as a finding um and that really set the tone for us understanding what a lot of the issues were and and one theme we kept running into and we experien is that almost every program is underresourced right now so it's not really out of not wanting to do it but when there is one round after the others and and there's just so much that's happening and there aren't enough

resources like on the team and just on board like you're going to focus on what the priorities are and the priorities are running the next cycle of of you know the next Grand cycle and so because of that like it just feels like there's not been enough time to even absorb reflect and really think about that impact side um of course this isn't true for all programs that was like that was a pretty big one that was pretty shocking um the other part being that for a lot of programs there was a lot of hesitation to report what was happening and part of it was because they weren't tracking a lot of these metrics and um it kind of felt like if there wasn't growth they almost didn't want to share it so the metrics they'd share from One update to another that's public facing

would change right so if it's like a certain um type of metrics like that just kind of again almost felt like a PR exercise in in ways right like what's going to make us look really big and fancy and just like we're growing versus actually being able to be honest and in being genuine and I guess the business side of things is where you know this just this dictates like what yeah why those decisions were made but that was that was quite disappointing too yeah I think go ahead Eugene no I was just gonna say I mean I think just building off of that there was this kind of sense of uh and I guess this isn't shocking for anyone who's been around web 3 for a while but Reinventing the wheel unnecessarily uh and not always looking to the relevant examples of

where we can pull from you know it felt like there were some parallels I know for folks who were in Dow conversations in 2016 17 18 and uh you bring up word Co-op and you get this kind of deer and headlights look a lot of the time of uh not being aware of all of the body of literature and relevant examples from that space You know here as we were having these conversations and we bring up hey what's your theory of change what is your actual desire impact your ecosystem growing is an outcome it is not an impact that outcome itself leads to impact and there needs to be some more thought there and that seemed to really be missing even from the more well-thought out uh really intentional programs that have spent a lot more time trying to codify their impact um and I

know in some of the interviews people just flat out said we have no clue what good impact measurement metrics are and we don't know where to start we don't know how to improve we we got to start somewhere that's why we have what we have and that that yeah that just very much felt like the underlying tone of a lot of the groups of not just having Clarity of where to actually learn from here I I think it's mind-blowing that some of these grants programs are spending Millions maybe tens of millions of dollars and they have no clue how to measure impact yep more priority I I wonder if there's an opportunity for more you know you all did such a great job of looking at a breadth of Grants programs in this report I wonder if there's an opportunity for cross po from the best practices from some of the best

Grant programs to to be cross-pollinated to other grants programs and I mindful in pointing that out that there's a diversity in Grant Program approaches there's no single right way to run Grant programs maybe there'll be several local maximos that that people will approach in the grants ecosystems yeah and it's almost like I think we've really been trying to push that with a lot of our you know I think every chance we get and right from the start it's just felt like getting everybody together in the same room and just really even just having a heart tohe heart it's going to lead to a lot of learnings um but it feels like a lot more piay than actual action you know everyone wants to be part of something like that no one wants to fund it and that's that's a challenge yeah and I think it is it's definitely

exciting to see that there's at least interest in more coordination at this point uh I think most Grant operators see the value in at least hearing from other Grant operators and knowing what's going on I know there have been some attempts in the past of building community and shared calls and shared telegram groups uh that have for different uh reasons kind of not achieved their intended goals and uh maybe foolishly but we are trying a V2 of some of these efforts to see if we can as kind of a a neutral research org uh kind of be the ones to help pull together some of this just to make people feel more comfortable that it's not a single for-profit entity driving the community so maybe that was just one of the factors missing of as soon as you

know company X organ organizes a community convening everyone thinks like what what are they trying to get out of it and you know thinking of how does it unintentionally promote or support one ecosystem over another so we'll see how how those efforts pan out uh but I definitely think there's in a variety of capacities not just for Grants but there's definitely more desire for Learning and hearing from each other and I think now there seem to be a number of efforts and initiatives to think well how do we actually share those learnings uh you know if we have dense thousand page reports on every single program that no one's ever going to read is that actually better than what we currently have and so what is the in between in the Middle Ground of you know what other kind of reports I remember when we were

proposing uh the state of web 3 grants Carl you you had suggested on the Forum of hey you know think about a grant maturity scale is creating something like that feasible as part of that and it wasn't just with the amount of resources we had but it seems like there is more appetite for these more quantitatively driven Frameworks breaking out classification of you know what is the goal of your grant program right if your goal is to support devs vers support Community versus support the Arts you shouldn't be compared apples for apples uh directly and so how do you how do we as a space start segmenting appropriately finding the right comparables and from there figuring out interesting Frameworks and Suites of metrics and feedback loops because I think another big takeaway is

that there is no mythical platonic ideal of the perfect impact measurement metric and so figuring out what is the suite of metrics what is the stream of data and understanding what you have today might be different than what you have a year from now and that's totally okay uh I think just there's that kind of maturity happening right now which is really exciting to see oh I was just gonna add on I mean that's that's that's one part of it and then the other part of it is also it feels like there's a lot of appetite from the grantees side where grantees want to understand how like how they can make their projects more sustainable and so that was one of my biggest learnings from shelling point and stumble last month was just how many folks were on the grantee side of things and wanted to

learn more and and share more of those learnings and experiences and it feels like there's appetite on on both sides and that feels like a really positive sign and almost like the next step in iteration to what we wna what we want to build yeah just building on the theme that both you mentioned of there being this like connective tissue among the grantees and also bringing that back to what I'd imagine is the goal of most of these grants programs which is to grow the ecosystem to improve the health of the ecosystem however you want to think about that like you said it could be developer activity it could be the size or the health of the community it could be something more connected to say Downstream impact on on arts or others um and so I'm curious if you saw any

examples of of ecosystems or gr programs going Beyond just sharing learnings but also trying to encourage projects to build off each other and collaborate in different ways because one of the things which is is so powerful and we're able to see this with some of the data that we're collecting an open source Observer is that many projects actually have shared contributors there could be a person who's working on metago and the same person's also working on dowar the same person's also contributing to gitcoin and by having a finger on all these different projects you actually have an interest in all of them succeeding and doing much more than just focusing on optimizing your own project success yeah I definitely think that there were

a number of programs that and we just called this more grantee support uh and what kind of support structures are in place pretty much upon signing the Grant and confirming the fund issuance is that kind of it do you just say great thanks we'll see you at your next Milestone or is there a consistent structure to follow up with the grantees to say hey Project X we actually just funded project Y where there's some great synergies between the two of you two uh you know you should definitely talk and get to know each other at the very least so there are definitely a number of programs that uh I know I'm just thinking of like a and Unis swap Foundation of two off the top of my head that definitely dedicate time and energy um and that it's an operational overhead

and I think that's also an important thing to call out for anyone who's structuring or running Grant programs that does cost time and money and energy but it pays itself in a lot of long-term rewards and impact because you can actually maximize having a cohesive strategy across all of your granting as opposed to a lot of isolated projects and to your point Carl like just the nature of the web 3 space uh there are very few people who are just wearing a single hat in this space at the moment so just recognizing who is where and using that as a strength and encouraging more coordination and collaboration uh can actually be really positive for everyone uh instead of trying to overly segment but U at least from my

perspective Michelle I don't know if you would agree with this take but it felt that the groups that weren't doing it it's not that they didn't want to it's that they were either resource constrained or didn't uh put it into budgeting uh or just had some kind of operational logistical element to it as opposed to ideological uh desire to not do it um no 100% i' I'd agree with that um I'd also mention the ethereum foundation's ESP um the support program that they've got um they've done a really good job of getting different um grantees together and they have different Community calls that they organize and the whole point of that is one amplification and connecting different projects together but there's a lot of different OPP opportunities

that they put into just their regular programming um and and that was a really good um form and then just in different ways and indirect ways really connecting one project to another where it makes sense so it feels like it's almost like the different teams that are within um almost sort of take on that responsibility and in um help with that um yeah but but this is again this was one of those really key I think what you've touched on is it's a really key area like this was a sentiment that a lot of grantees really want support with is the amplification and the partner support um because it's really valuable and and just support Beyond financial support it's not just about getting the grant funding there's just so many more elements that they want support with

that we've been um having conversations around and then the other part of it being Financial stability and just road map planning and and that feels like a really really important part too where a lot of grantees are able to get funding for like a short amount of time but then how do you make that sustainable how do you make your produ survive right and there it feels like there's a lot of programs for startups and Founders and Builders but not enough for grantees in specific so I think that that's probably um a growth area for for programs to collaborate on and hopefully work on one of the things which is is really interesting is when grants programs actually have eligibility requirements around working in public and sharing things either in the form of Open Source Code or other artifacts that can be

easily accessed reproduced and used with that permission so I'm curious if you came across any examples of Grants programs that were actually able to change some of the incentives for how people build in the Reco system just by using the carrot of having certain eligibility conditions come along with a grand funding it's okay if the answer is no people are still experimenting with it but I I see that as potentially like a powerful way of trying to force people to collaborate um by making them do everything out in the open and build in public yeah it felt like there's definitely a spectrum in terms of I would say absolute hard requirement you know we're we're just

not even considering you if not uh that degree of it is probably more limited than at least strongly encouraged and I think more looking on an ad hoc basis is there really a good reason uh to not do it publicly uh it seems like more L1 focused projects so I know like ethereum and Solana were very big on pushing that uh I'm pretty sure Solana has like very explicit language if I'm remembering correctly around like you must be public good open for the public at least for our ecosystem which at that point it means for everyone effectively um and yeah I think you know um yeah there were some other ones I know like Unis swamp I believe also has That explicit public good language but at the same time some of these groups do in isolation run

specific focused Grant programs uh that are intended to have a pretty much invite only rfps or request for proposals where you're saying that hey given the nature of the grant that we're putting out we know that most groups are not going to be able to deliver on this because you need massive Network infrastructure you need certain type of Talent on board already this isn't meant to be building a new team it's a group that is already able to execute on this so I think in there are definitely avats and exceptions across the board I think uh but yeah there there were definitely some that had reasonably strong language in that direction I'm wondering if you can tell me where things you think are going in 2024 so you mentioned that there's another report coming down the

pike what are some trends that are going on in the ecosystem that uh if I offered you the opportunity to speculate a little bit where do you think things are going I say retro has been a big Focus area everyone's been talking about it just retroactive funding and so that's one where we definitely see a lot more programs um shifting towards and and experimenting with um so of course optimism's been pretty um I'd say pretty big in terms of really getting that going um but we we foresee a lot more programs really testing that out and there's a lot more talk but it feels like not enough programs who understand really how to go about it so the mechanism side of it is still something that's going to be uh tested out um and that's something we're going to be you

know I don't know can we can we talk about that just like the E Denver side of things or just a report yeah yeah let's do it all right cool uh just like you know I guess first update and everybody gets to hear about it here first but we're doing a retro uh report where we're covering programs tools and just covering that side of things so we're just actually making it a reality and we're going to be talking about it and sharing it during eth Denver oh sorry mute issues uh yeah and just to to build off of that so there's definitely you know we already have some of the work of the state of V2 of the grant report we have the Retro study looking at at least three orgs and we'll hopefully find some more backers to be able to extend that um I think it's

interesting where it feels like for retro at least this is totally my view so this is not meant to be any anyone else's uh but you know I think there's a rush to Retro right now at least ideologically because on the surface it seems like oh great then we don't have to figure out metrics up front like we will see that you have done stuff not recognizing like talk to anyone at optimism who's been there from pgf 1 to3 and you will hear a lot of discussions and talk about we need better infrastructure we need more robust systems more data capture more thinking about how to capture the qualitative side of things and recognizing your constraints and the fact that you're not going to solve all of those problems especially if you're trying to rush to a grant program in a month or two so I

think that um similar how there were a number of Grant programs through the last uh boom and bust cycle uh or Bull and Bear however you want to call it that groups just like Rush to launch a grant program and then afterwards being like how did I why did I spend Millions if not tens or hundreds of millions in dollars of on question mark impact uh and yeah I think there's going to be the same like rush to Retro for some groups who don't realize the robust infrastructure and thinking that is needed and are just going to be dissatisfied of Oh I thought this was going to solve our metric problem and it didn't magically just make that problem go away it just reframed it a little bit uh so I think there's genuine interest towards retro from people who get this at a more nuance mon level uh I guess a

hot take might be a bunch of group or not a bunch but at least a handful of groups will start a retro program and then Sunset it within a year or so because they just realized they got into more than uh that they were ready to chew off um but yeah I think some other uh some other guesses for next year and I know prediction is always a Fool's errand so please don't roast me too hard when uh most of this ends up being wrong somehow but I think there's going to be more of a push of private foundations uh you know for the biggest problems that we're facing as a space you know technical challenges let's just say ZK or me proposer Builder separation uh or even some governance related challenges most groups are dealing with them so if everyone has an isolated program

targeting those questions they just will not be as impactful as running coordinated foundations in addition to some kind of individual level support so I think I know I'm involved in one of these foundations I believe I'm not directly involved I believe there's a second separate one on the ZK side that's happening with four or five different groups coming together that I've heard whispers about so my guess is that there will be kind of anywhere in the two to five private foundations or projects or initiatives they'll have different names and I don't know if all them will have legal entities but some kind of coordinated fundraising um and I really hope that there will be more focused theories of change workshops Mission Vision for your grant program type workshops and just more consistent

discussions along those lines because to understand your impact you really need to understand the value of you know you have funding you're encouraging people to do certain activities what do you hope to result from those activities from those outcomes and outputs what kind of impact do you want to see that having in the long run and having just much more nuanced and robust discussions in that direction uh so hopefully that means there will be an uptick in groups that are doing facilitation work and I know there are a lot of great groups in the space doing that kind of work and I hope that uh that will bode well for everyone in that sense uh and yeah I think as a result of that we're just going to have many more Shameless kick at the cans of like hey I don't know if these are the best impact metrics but

I'm trying them out because why just have the same boring ones that everyone else is doing where we know no one's happy with that outcome uh so yeah I think more experimentation on the impact measurement side especially as groups like OS Observer uh that Carl and Ray are running and hypers certs and uh Karma and their Gap tool the grantee accountability tool I think just the tooling infrastructure is much more robust now than it was a year or two ago for impact measurement so I'm just super excited to kind of observe it hopefully collaborate with all the groups that are trying to build the open source infrastructure side uh and yeah and just see how we can help each other make sense of a very hard and open-ended space one thing I'd on here I add on to that would be um the marketing side I

think a lot more um there's going to be a lot more of marketing and grants teams working together because it feels like um especially in this space like running a grants program or any grant funding announcement SE to Echo a lot of marketing and awareness and just Builders and just kind of builds the ecosystem in a lot of ways and so we're moving towards seeing a lot more programs mature but I think for a lot of the newer protocols or layer twos or whatever you want to call it um I think they're realizing the value of just grant programs as a whole and from a marketing perspective and Community perspective more importantly so I'd say we're going to see a lot more of all three meshed together in ways and and I think that changes a lot of organizational structures as well and hopefully gets programs more resarch in

in ways rate because once I think once the marketing folks come in and I and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way in anyway I'm a marketing person through and through but um yeah we're just G to bring a lot more resources and we're going to see that happen it's uh yeah and and see that trickle down yeah one of the things that I know that Kevin has said a number of times that I've also observed is that if you take getcoin for instance every quarter they run a grants round and they've now done 19 gitcoin grants and every gitcoin grants includes many sub rounds as well so you have all these experiments that are happening and one of the things which I think is really admirable is that each time they're just modulating on one or two of the variables so they are changing the

composition of projects or they're changing the um the way that Cil activities identified and hopefully suppressed and so because of that they're learning really really quickly they're not trying something deciding it didn't work throwing it out picking up something new trying that but they're actually sily iterating on something and so my hope certainly would be that um programs that are going to be doing much more experimentation they actually start creating that heartbeat of doing these regular rounds and even when they take one or two steps back they actually take the time to learn improve a few things and go back out and do it again um and so again getcoin has made many mistakes I'm sure Kevin can

speak to those or has written many articles about them um but the fact that they don't make make the same mistake twice they're quick to learn from it is one of the things which is really impressive about the space and hopefully we'll give it an advantage long term and you want add anything Kevin I think that uh yes and that's the model that I'd like to see replicate especially knowing that many of these other grants programs out there have started it out with underinvestigated gives a path towards not Redemption but just getting getting better finding that

local Maxima of what your grant program can be and um you know that doesn't paint the whole picture because I think that a lot of these uh ecosystems will have many different types of Grants programs my vision is that there'll be uh regular plain vanilla grants and then there'll be retro pgf and then there'll be qf and there'll be like a whole bunch of different Legos that you can assemble to build your grant program in the next cycle as opposed to just like the market marketing team being like Oh we need a grant program let's I guess make something up an air table you know I think that that's one of the maturations that we see happening at gcoin but um yeah I don't have a question but if anyone wants to Riff on that they're welcome to if if not I can go back to to

asking questions well I'd say on the on the on the running a grant side like I feel like it's also because the tools that we have now versus when you know say two three years from now like Grant I I just ran this shifi Octon round on Grant stack and it was so easy I didn't you know didn't any Dev support on that front it was just like took like I'd say like 10 minutes at most um and so all that to say that it's becoming a lot easier to run grants and just directly connect with the communities and so I think from that perspective like once you can make that accessible and then another thing that we're realizing is that you don't need a lot of you don't need big chunks of funding even if you've got smaller pools right so funneling even the reason I said

marketing and grants together um you're better off running your ad budget which I mean I've got a lot of thoughts on Twitter ads in general but if you run that and turn that into a grant round or like a small Grant around like I feel like that's just a lot more effective for you if you're in the space and especially if you're in pgf and so um experiments like that which don't take a lot of effort and time and resources and you know can still lead to a lot of results so I think that's going to be another thing yeah just just one kind of final thought on that I guess is I think it's a great aspiration to make your Grant's program so simple that almost you know boring and yesterday I I I overheard a quip which was saying that you know getcoin oh that's just like a a simple

grants program when two or three years ago trying to explain the notion of quadratic funding on gitcoin you couldn't do it it would just you know there it it would blow people's minds and now that being seen as like vanilla grants making I think is just Testament to all of the improvements that have been made not only in the ux but in just um exposing people to this concept in this way of funding things uh so my hope would that my hope would be that more things kind of cross over the chasm and become completely normalized and seen as just the way that web through Grant making happens and hopefully that is true for RoR pgf hopefully that's true for other forms of of of donating and supporting projects but it's a cool aspiration to have yeah and just to pick up the thread with sort

of the experimentation and and some of the other things that were just mentioned uh and coming back to the idea of experimenting on the impact measurement side and the the sort of feedback loops from that uh I know uh I've spoken to folks in kind of the nonprofit impact evaluation space uh and I was catching up with someone who uh specifically her organization focuses on getting funding to rural farmers in a number of countries I think the example she was providing was in Uganda and she was saying that oh well as we really ironed out our focus and desired impact we spent a lot of time with those communities and so I think it's going to takes some time in experimentation and it is okay to be wrong in your first attempts at this as you build out these

feedback loops because if you're growing ethereum or you're growing Unis swap or you're growing a and your grant program is meant to help that it isn't necessarily clear who is the audience that you are going towards to understand how the impact is going for them because that might right if you go to ear all the early adopters that has its own bias in terms of diversity and spread and who's actually involved and so actually getting to spend more time with what again what is the type of impact you want to see in the world who will stand to benefit from that and how do you develop relationships with those folks and nurture that over time because if you want especially if you're an L1 or an L2 or a core protocol and your desired uses that like Hey we're the Baseline for the Global Financial system

for your grandma or your grandpa to be able to send a transaction around the world or do something like that um then we actually have to get closer to those audiences and understanding how they are experiencing this world uh and that feels very distant from where we're at because even just getting feedback from like the DG's hanging around the projects can be tough so getting to the point of many steps out with communities that are less aware of it for whom web 3 is a dirty scammy word at this point uh it's going to take a lot of time and effort and yeah I guess just to to plug some more getcoin stuff it is just really cool seeing that you know I I show up at a number of impact oriented or funding oriented convers in the web2 space and like one of the few positive

examples is yeah look at getcoin experimenting like that's cool should we be learning from that in terms of how we do some things and so uh we need more groups that are willing to spend the time and energy to nurture that positive ju guu especially in the face of know it would be great if we have no more scans I'm guessing 2024 is not going to be a scam free year a year for crypto so yeah for those who really are more regen and truly impact focused we have to think about like without plugging web three or blockchains how do we just focus on positive impact that people can care about and build those relationships over time reputation damage right just we're taking on that whole burden for the industry oh yeah well uh we're getting

towards the bottom of the hour so I think we should start moving towards wrapping up but before I get to my wrap-up questions I did want to ask if we could uh pinch and zoom a little bit more on this grant standard that yall published it's it's it's not um really a focus of the grants report but I do want to make sure that we cover it while we while we have you so uh tell me all about the metago grant standard that that y'all have been cranking on yeah absolutely happy to share about that so as uh as mentioned we released a dow IP Dow Improvement proposal five which is just the the dowar language around these uh standards that we're working on including some just general interoperability standards between Dows and different web3 orgs uh and just for clarity for a moment sake dowar is an

initiative under metago that's our specific web 3 work because metago as an or looks at governance and digital communities not exclusive to the web 3 space so uh yeah the focus of this metadata standard is really making it or the attempt at trying to create a standardized structure for how we refer to and call certain uh certain variables that are just part of grant program such as a standard field for name of program for name of project for funding ask amount and uh right now we are going through a feedback phase uh with having discussions with a lot of different groups that include both Grant operators as well as infrastructure providers like the gitcoin Alo team like questbook like charme uh and some of these other groups

that are sort of providing and the gitcoin stack team and the others that are doing the actual technical infrastructure for executing grants and even if we do create the most perfectest uh standard possible it is highly unlikely that everyone will adopt it because especially the groups that have been around Forever at least as far as the space is concerned um they're going to have less incentive to conform especially if they are not necessarily pushing to publicly share their data which is the case for some of the longest standing Grant programs so the goal is not sort of to try to create some master layout that everyone must buy into or else it's all bust the goal really is to try to figure out for the

groups that do want to opt into more interoperability and more coordination at least on a technical side between programs how can we enable that with a standard and some of the immediate benefits that we've had excitement about in terms of what comes after the standard if it gets adopted is we can have a single shared database of all approved grants across the space and then we can really start having much more nuanced analysis that doesn't involve spending dozens of hours combing and putting you know combing different spreadsheets and forums and putting together your own database it can just exist and be available and be public for everyone to see that data and especially if that gets integrated with tools like OS Observer with Karma's Gap with these other protocols that are capturing data

and elucidating how we think about impact and getting feedback on the projects over time that can become a really tight feedback loop to help us understand how to better measure impact uh which that's one of the big hopes and then I know one of the other potential projects is the idea of a common app for Grants so how can we have a potential open- Source protocol that can integrate with any tooling so that if I as Med as you know the person from metago am applying for say 100K grant for some work that we want to do I can immediately signal that hey I have 100K ask that I'm splitting across 10 groups everyone has that transparency on it so uh you don't know am I asking getcoin one amount and asking another group another amount and you know it's uh

you'll have that transparency and ease for the granteed to not have to go through you know 10 different portals to start off and just copy paste most of the same information um and at the same time a hope hopeful benefit for operators is to actually start capturing reputation of grantees across Grant programs if I just show up at Unis Swap and you can see that I've delivered on grants at a and ethereum and Etc that can potentially be part of assessing my new Grant application as opposed to if I just show up and I have you know I I've burned Bridges everywhere I've been then you should also factor that in and know that I'm probably here to Grant farm and just capture whatever your first miles

St is and then never show up again um so yeah those are some of the the hopefully intended projects and in Denver we are going to have a working session specifically focused on trying to drive this forward and we're going to have a number of virtual calls in January so if that's something you're specifically interested in uh yeah please do reach out thanks Eugene Carl you want to take the next question one of the products that we've also been following quite closely is the ethereum attestation service and what's interesting about that is they basically take any arbitrary schema and you can make a onchain attestation using that schema so when I think about the the grand standard one way of looking at that would be instead of getting every

ecosystem to use that entire standard and have every project tried to fill at every field many of which might not be applicable or might not be suitable to what they're doing and at the same time there might be other things that they they want to add that aren't all captured there another approach could actually be to uh use something like e to represent a grant as effectively a series of attestations so it could be there's a set of attestations which plug in for an open source software project and there's another set of attestations that plug in if you're doing some kind of event management where you want to track participants in real world attendance um I think with something like that you kind of have the best of both worlds where there's a common

standard which gives you guidance about how to think about each of these schemas and how they relate to each other but at the same time you give each Grand program the flexibility to mix and match the parts that are most suitable for them for sure and I I appreciate you very clearly elucidating the thing we're going to focus on after we get the initial phase of feedback because we recognize that the grant standard is not going to be perfect for everyone and nor do we want to force Conformity for groups that it doesn't make sense uh so we feel Step One is see how much interest and Alignment is there for a grant standard right everyone can come back to us and say hey we're just never going to align you know optimism as test stations are just going to be fundamentally different than gitcoin

allows versus Etc etc's in which case we just have to go to that modular approach that you just mentioned but our hope is uh as you brought up that it can be hybrid that you know maybe we can have 60% of the grant programs in the space conform with the data standard so we could set up easy scraping and feeding into certain shared data structures uh and then for everyone else hey here's a proposed version of doing some kind of EAS uh enabled Patchwork of of attestation and that space will offer not endless but will offer a lot of experimentation and we're not going to know the best way to to do it we're going to be really excited to see different uh attempts and experiments in that

direction uh and yeah I know at at dowar we already work with the as crew in a couple of capacities so definitely going to coordinate with that uh with them in the new year or this year excuse me well we're getting towards the bottom of the hour uh I have one wrap-up question for you all and that's is there anything I didn't ask that you want say Michelle I'll go to you first it's a good question and I'm thinking um I guess one thing that I would um love to share as I think and this is sort of shout out to like a grow um one thing I'd love to see from more programs would be more transparency around sharing internal metrics and of course like where their grantees are at um it it's going to lead to a lot more transparency towards and

and just for the communities as a whole but also just understanding where we're at in terms of the space just if you know smaller pipelines or numbers growing is not a sign of failure um and should not reflect on the team as a performance um failure as a whole right I think there's just different like fluctuation points with each Grant cycle so just being cognizant of that um and I mentioned them because they've been doing these monthly updates um on their forums and those have been really helpful for everyone in the community to understand so I think that's like a good model to look at um for any Community that's trying to really go for sharing more of what's happening and in yeah that was one that I really did appreciate um and then I'd say shout out to the EF for taking on risks a lot of

the projects and just funding um you know while a lot of programs are very focused on growing their ecosystem I'd say like they've also had the luxury of focusing on and taking on more risks with projects other programs wouldn't want to fund and so that's something I've appreciated as was part of Summer protocols where we were studying protocols in the summer um and and that was the kind of program I wouldn't see other maybe orgs supporting or finan ially funding right so it would be really really cool to see other programs taking on risks for projects that you know sort sort of are open-ended and we don't know where they're going to go but um this is also my other part where not to go off into a rant but like you know we focus so much on metrics and and and there's so much

that you also can't quantify um as on on the grantee side um you know if you're part of a project where you haven't like you're still impacting people and they remember your name but there's no form of quantification that's happened there right maybe they're not subscribed to your newsletters anymore or to your socials or whatever um metrics or numbers you know you're thinking about but you were their entry point into the space that's something they're always going to remember and those are the kinds of things that maybe we're not thinking about as much um I worry that as we kind of hyperfixate on numbers there's a lot more on the qualitative end and even in terms of Industry industry growth that we're not thinking about and I would hope that we'd be more open-ended and a little more flexible in how we think about a lot of these things

especially as um we see these programs mature so yeah that would be my my two cents at the end thanks Michelle um sorry to put you on the spot there but I've asked Eugene to go first a couple times so I wanted to give you the opportunity to Eugene same question to you is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say yeah I guess maybe one question could be who should we publicly shame as far as Grand no I'm just kidding I mean I I think to to just build off of what Michelle was saying I think an important area for experimentation and focus in the coming year is also really focusing on the grantee experience because to better understand the qualitative to better understand the impact to better understand a lot of the threads that we've been talking about just talk more

to grantees and sometimes even bring in third parties to get honest feedback from them because it can be intimidating telling the person that's signing your check for grantee that's giving you a window of Life as a project to be like actually I think you're really messing up in a lot of places so I think finding the right ways to Source feedback whether anonymously or through facilitated interactions or just like hey here's a hall with Post-it notes at a big conference and just like come give us your Post-it notes of complaints with how we're doing uh whatever version it is just listen more to your granes Amen to that um Carl you're my co-host so I don't know if it's in bounds to ask you a question but is there anything I didn't

ask that you want to say as we close out the episode uh I just want to say I'm so grateful for this kind of work I think it's really uh I always like it when people start with some kind of question that occupies their curiosity and they explore it and that leads to something which they can share with a broader Community to further their thinking so thank you for for for having that itch and scratching it and sharing with the rest of us it's really cool samies yeah you guys are building a public good for the public goods ecosystem so it's like a meta public good uh which I guess is appropriate because it's it's metag that you're you're working out of love keeping it meta yeah oh yeah well um thanks so much uh the link to the three grants report

is in the show notes for the episode we also will have a link to the metago grant standard in there as well so uh thanks so much for coming on the green pillow podcast and keep up the great work in 2024 thank you guys have a good one yeah thank you all for hosting us you just heard from Eugene and Michelle I'm excited about them because I think that they did a ton of research going into the state of web 3 Grant report and it's a really foundational knowledge building block for the ecosystem to know about the state of web 3D grants today and where they are going in the future thanks again for listening to the green pill. Network podcast again this podcast features the people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring

positive sum digital systems to the world I think Eugene Michelle and Carl are a great example of that if you enjoyed this episode or you value our work you can go to pods. Media to collect this episode and please remember to subscribe great and review it really helps us bu build this movement of regenerative cryptoeconomics and push it forward in the world thanks again for listening peace and love see you on the next [Music] one