DAO DROPS ROUND 1 RESULTS ARE IN

Read below to learn more about how it went!

Apr 16, 2023

DAO DROPS ROUND 1 RESULTS ARE IN

dOrg recently concluded the first round of DAO Drops, a retroPGF mechanism that leveraged the wisdom of the crowd to distribute $250,000 to a range of projects and individuals in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Retrospective public goods funding (retroPGF) is the concept of rewarding efforts that have already yielded impact. This approach aims to address the weaknesses of traditional prospective funding approaches which implicitly need to predict the future impact of what to fund.

DAO Drops takes retroPGF one step further by assigning the responsibility of impact evaluation to thousands of pseudonymous addresses based on past on-chain activity. We used data on governance participation from Deep DAO, smart contract deployments from Galxe, and ecosystem event attendance from POAP to assign voting power to over 30,000 addresses.

By giving power to a diverse range of ecosystem participants, our hope was to do a better job of targeting areas of the ecosystem that are often overlooked by centralized allocation bodies.

Results of Round 1🫧

Below are the simplified data corresponding to the nomination and allocation phases.

Nomination

265 unique nominations submitted (416 total)
57 nominees after curation
10,000 pageviews during nomination phase (7,700 unique visitors)

Allocation

277 addresses voted (out of 40,000 eligible)
14,000 pageviews during allocation phase (9,400 unique visitors)
$3,056 median grant size
$18,185 largest grant

Here is the relative breakdown of how the allocators distributed the points:

See the full list of Round 1 recipients here.

Key Learnings📝

In addition to one-on-one conversations and responses on Twitter, we also distributed a survey to collect the community’s feedback on Round 1. We’ve aggregated the key insights below.

Positives

User experience for nominating and voting was well-designed. It was smooth and easy to participate.
People were happy to see another mechanism for directly supporting the maintainers of public goods.
Many nominees remarked that they normally would not be included in public goods funding because of the area they work in or marginalization.
Randomized nominees on each page load for fairness.

Negatives

Confusion about how voting scores were calculated.
Data sets were overly narrow and excluded many potential voters.
Desire for better project descriptions on the UI.
Concerns over the stringent KYC requirements.

We also received some great suggestions for how to improve the address scoring formula by broadening the data set to include:

Addresses that have proven personhood through BrightID, Gitcoin Passport, Worldcoin, Proof of Humanity
Participation in Gardens, 1Hive, Token Engineering Commons
POAPs from a wider range of events
DAO multi-sig signers
Addresses which have received significant funds from DAO multi-sigs
Addresses which have donated through Gitcoin or Giveth
Addresses which hold Pooly NFT
Addresses that have contributed to RossDAO, AssangeDAO, UkraineDAO and others

Next Steps⏩️

We want to improve DAO Drops based on community feedback, to provide a better experience and continue to empower and reward underfunded contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem.

To that end, we will be working to improve the mechanism design, community outreach strategy, and sponsorship model for future rounds. Some examples could include:

Additional sources of data for scoring addresses (see above).
Mechanisms to incentivize good evaluations.
Come up with a way to limit the set of eligible nominees without centralized curation– this was necessary to avoid over dilution of the funding pool.
Making it easier for nominees to port over their profiles and proof of impact through new primitives like Hypercerts and the Ethereum Attestations Service.
Collaborating with other public goods funding projects to develop open standards (Optimism, Protocol Labs, Protocol Guild, Giveth, Gitcoin).

We’ve also received inquiries about using DAO Drops for other decentralized funding use-cases such as clean energy and regenerative agriculture projects.

Want to be part of the next round?

If your organization is interested in joining as a sponsor or data provider for Round 2, please get in touch through Twitter at @dao_drops or send us an email daodrops@dorg.tech. Also feel free to reach out with any other questions, comments and feedback.

Huge thank you to the Ethereum Foundation for making this all possible, and to Deep DAO, Galxe and POAP for the excellent data!