16min chapter

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148 - Leveraging the Gitcoin Grants Stack with Meg Lister

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CHAPTER

Grant Stack: Simplifying Grants Programs

They discuss the Grant Stack, a decentralized app that simplifies the process of creating, managing, and running grants programs. They explain the step-by-step guide on leveraging the Gitcoin Grants Stack, from creating a program to reviewing applications. They emphasize the significance of quadratic funding in funding what matters within the community.

00:00
Speaker 2
Oh, glad you asked. I get going. Grant stack is a decentralized app that allows anyone to create, manage and run a grants round. I almost said quadratic funding grants round there. And I stopped myself because yes, quadratic funding is our bread and butter. And we're going to talk about that all day today. But we're also supporting other mechanisms.
Speaker 1
So basically this is an app that anyone can run a quadratic funding round or a Gitcoin grants round in. And I'm wondering how it works. So who are you targeting? Who's the product for?
Speaker 2
Yeah. So we're targeting basically with three grants managers. If you are working on a project and you have a community that is looking for more ways to get involved and make their voices known in your ecosystem. Or if you're trying to grow your community and find ways or things for people to do because you've just had an air drop or an exciting event. Or you're in the growth stage even and you're trying to get projects funded and off the ground. A great solution for all of that is to run a grants round and to set up a grants program for your ecosystem. And if you're looking to do that, you're probably really excited and really overwhelmed because it's really hard to do and there's a lot of things to manage and we're basically here to make your life
Speaker 1
easier. How does it work? Say I'm running an ecosystem that has a treasury anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to a billion dollar treasury and I want to deploy some of that through GrantStack. How does that work? Yeah.
Speaker 2
So first of all, if you've got a billion dollar treasury, let's definitely talk. Right. First things first. You need, let's say, 10 minutes and a wallet. And you log in at manager.uk-kind-deco, which is totally open. If you're a grants manager and you want to create a round, go there. If you just want to check it out to have fun, also go there and connect your wallet. We support a bunch of different chains and are always expanding so you can choose to run on Ethereum, optimism, PGN, et cetera, et cetera. And first things you do is you create a program, which is basically, hey, my name's Meg. I'm going to run grants with my friend Kevin and I'm going to add both of our wallet addresses as admins. So great. Okay. Let's say that you're 90 seconds in and you're done setting up a program. So next thing you do is you set up a round. And a round is something that is basically constrained by time and money. So you set up the dates that you want to receive applications, the dates that you want to receive community donations, as well as commit in writing to the amount of funding that you want to provide as well as the token you're going to use to provide funding. You check a couple of boxes that help us help you prevent bots and spam in your round. You click publish and all of five to 10 minutes later, you have to play to grants round on chain.
Speaker 1
And so basically, once I have a grants round on team, what can I do with it
Speaker 2
there? Anything you want. But the first thing you probably want to do is to give people to apply to your round. So your round is going to go live on our grants homepage under the section for builders who are looking for grants programs or places where you might send builders in your community to apply for grants. So you're going to publish a project to start receiving applications. You're going to live on the grants homepage at Geekcoin too, which is just some great publicity for your project and a great place for builders who are looking for opportunities in one three to go. Once you start receiving applications, you'll have kind of a swim lane in the Grants Deck manager for you to review those and either approve or reject them. And then once you've gotten through applications, the fun part starts. And this is where you engage your community to help decide where your grants funds actually go. And it's a really meaningful way for your community to participate. Everybody loves to have opinions on how money should be spent. And not only are they getting to make their voices heard, like you're as a grants manager getting to harness the collective intelligence of your ecosystem to determine the best things to fund.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit more about that. I feel like I've given the quadratic funding explainer a billion times before. And I'm wondering if you could just take us through how you explain what quadratic funding is and how it helps your community fund what matters.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I would bake the Libra and quadratic funding. And I still feel like an imposter when I explain it, which is one of those things that probably a lot of other people feel when they're using it too. And so I'm always trying to remind myself that it's actually pretty simple at its core. And so quadratic funding is a way for your community to make their voices heard in a way that's meaningful and significant because it involves money, but also doesn't allow money to steal a show. And so you're basically using your community's dollars as boats for where your matching funds should go. And so let's say that I am a donor who is super passionate about the ecosystem and also we only have like five bucks to spend. So I spend a dollar across five different projects and that's great that counts as one vote for each of them. On the other hand, you are a donor with very deep pockets who also cares enormously about the ecosystem. And even though you can outspend me a hundred to one, you can outvote me a hundred to one because we take basically the square root of the donation that you make and we count that as a vote. So if you donate nine dollars towards the same project, that's going to count as three votes.
Speaker 1
So the broader the support, the bigger the match, basically.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1
And just real quick shout out to Zoe Hitzig, Glen Weil and Vitalik Buter and her, the inventors of the mechanism, the brains behind quadratic funding. We're just one of the, Bitcoin is one of the apps and ecosystem that builds on top of it. Always like to give a shout out to the mechanism designers when I talk about QF. So so Bitcoin has funded 18 rounds of Gickland grants. As I understand it, according to impact.getcoin.co, it's, it's done $50 million worth of funding, 2. something million transactions so far. And um, grand stack just allows me to take the power of that. What was working for the Ethereum ecosystem and deploy it to my own Dow or EVM based community is my understanding. Is that how you understand it? Yeah.
Speaker 2
What I always tell people is, gay coin did this thing over and over again and got really good at it. And also realized that while we got really good at it, everybody else was asking, Hey, like, what can we learn from you guys? Can we use the things that you've built? Because we started out super early and you guys started out super early. I've been here for months. Um, but trying to boot start the and grow the Ethereum ecosystem and then as parts of that ecosystem grew into their own, they were like, great. Um, now we're going, it's like a Russian nesting doll of funding public goods. We're going to fund the next layer down in our ecosystem. And so it's such a like fulfilling and rewarding idea to me that we just keep funding and supporting these different layers of the ecosystem through different types of support and tooling first through the original grants program. And then by actually giving some of the original recipients of that program, the tools to do it themselves.
Speaker 1
One of the things that I've always sort of liked or just found kind of fun is that the alumni of the grants program. So, you know, say your project X and you raised in get going around two through five, you might now have a billion dollars how and you're actually trying to allocate capital to your community. And we've seen a lot of those projects go back and give back to the main matching pool on the grants program, but then also have their own grants programs to pay forward. So this sort of like a full cycle reciprocal relationship there.
Speaker 2
Yeah, our first self-serve customer earlier this summer, um, they were amazing and I had never worked with them before and was like, how did you guys get this idea? And he said, oh, we've been funded through the quick coin grants program years ago. And now we're growing our own ecosystem and paying it forward. So props to GOM for doing that.
Speaker 1
Yeah, this school, um, I really like the idea of bootstrapping an economy that's not just transactional. If you do X, I will do why. But it's based off of these reciprocal social relationships where it's like you give without the expectation of return. When that project succeeds, you share in that success in the future. I mean, it just feels, feels very regen, which is what this podcast is all about. Um, what's
Speaker 3
the grants program?
Speaker 2
Yeah. Um, the current program is kind of the historical backbone of get coin that presented the, um, idea and also the initial implementation and customer base for grant stack. So they're like the grant stack. Oh, geez. In many cases, the grants program started out, um, raising money to fund things that were important to get coin community supporters. And now they do the exact same thing, but they use grant stack in order to do that.
Speaker 1
Got it. So it's kind of like the showcase for the grant stack program. It's the biggest customer of, of grant stack right now. Um, I'd be curious to see if it ever becomes not the biggest customer of grant stack, though. If it gets, it gets surpassed by someone else using it. Yeah.
Speaker 2
I think that, uh, I want them to always be our best customer, but not our biggest customer, if that makes sense, the idea that we get to work so closely with a team that has such deep expertise in grants and gets to try all kinds of crazy things and find important things is just such an awesome advantage to have as a product manager working in the space. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Totally. Well, uh, so get coin grants round 18 just happened. And that was run on top of grants. Uh, how do you, how do you feel like that went?
Speaker 2
Pretty good. Actually, um, I see this with the caveat that, Hey, it's an early stage product. We launched publicly earlier this summer, um, like ended May, the beginning of June. And so we're, we're an early stage product that has early stage product growing pains. Um, I've been joking with the team that this is our Pinocchio season. Um, you are a fan of animated Disney movies and have watched Pinocchio, you know, the like, I want to be a real boy and we want to be a real product. We're, uh, cleaning up our code and our infrastructure and building things that are important to people. Um, but really proud of the progress that we're making. We have made some really big steps since the last grants round two. And so when you're early like this, the more testing you can do, the more incremental progress that you can make. Um, that's the stuff that makes me really confident that we're going to be successful.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, I think that so 18 rounds of grants and, and if three have been run on the new product of which you've only been there for one or one and a half or something like that,
Speaker 3
it feels like one quarter, it's.
Speaker 1
Throwing you in the deep end, but yeah. So it's like the, so there's 15 rounds of product iteration that have happened in the past on the old platform and then kind of get going to clear bank bankruptcy and then moved everything over to the new product. So how does it feel to be, I don't know, hitting zero and then sort of starting with a clean code base, but also, you know, people aren't, are expecting features that used to be there that aren't there anymore. And, you know, like, how's that, how's that reset felt?
Speaker 2
Oh, it's been so strange, honestly. Um, I've launched a lot of new products in my career. Like I've done the zero to one thing several times. And so when I walked into Geekcoin, I was like, great. I, I know how to do the zero to one thing and I can do it again. Um, and I totally just personally as a product manager, like underestimated the history that comes with the Geekcoin grants program and the old platform. Um, and so in many, many ways, it's such an advantage for our product. And that people come back and use it again and again, that they're so invested, that they have such great ideas and also the expectations that people have at this point, um, it's so wild to me as a, or wild, so the wrong word to use it. Um, the expectations that people have are sometimes reflective of a product that's been along around for a long time. Um, versus the product that I know in recent history that launched publicly in June. And so making sure that we respect the needs of the community that has been around for so long and balance that with all of the traditional things in early stage product development, um, is simply challenging.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I see you out there fielding some questions on, uh, on, uh, Twitter, just like all of people's expectations for the grants rounds, uh, whether they're rooted in the old product or just in imagination and, and stuff like that. So I see you out there, like really leading in front and engage you with the community. I just like appreciate, uh, appreciate that you're getting out there and hearing all the feedback and, uh, people are really engaged during Bitcoin grants round. I think it's because it's been such a funding source for people for, for many years, but it's also hard to go from 15 rounds of progress down to zero and, and sort of decline from that local maxima up to that, that, that goal maxima. I don't really have a question, but if you have any comments on that, uh, let me know.
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. It's, um, one of the things that has struck me the most is just the faith that the Bitcoin community has placed in the Dow and the team to do that. And I really don't take that lightly to say, Hey, we built something that works, but we're going to rip it up because we think there's something better out there. Wow. Like that's the kind of community that I want to be part of.
Speaker 1
Longterm focus decision, but, um, I mean, I guess, you know, I've, I've been trying to like sit here in podcast host mode and just ask questions about it, but maybe I'll just like break the fourth wall right now and just say that as someone who was involved in making that decision to decline that local maxima from C grants, centralized grants down to D grants, we felt really like, um, public goods funding infrastructure should be incredibly neutral and democratic. And if it was going to be a company and a platform, then it would, could never be that way. Um, also there's a lot of spaghetti code that I wrote when I was just trying to figure out what Bitcoin was. And so hitting reset and having a close, close code, a new cloud base that was open source decentralized in modular was like the new hill that we were trying to climb there. And so that's why we felt like it was appropriate to reset and go down to, um, did decline that local maxima and then start climbing the new decentralized modular global maxima. And really excited for the point in which that becomes like an obvious choice in hindsight, uh, because it's been a lot of pain of like 24 months rewriting the entire organization, not to like the whole product, but not to mention the organization to make that happen.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I, I can't imagine honestly, like again, I've been here for four months. And so part of me has already feeling though, like, Oh, well, early stage product development is really hard. Um, and you having worked on startup products for a long time. It's, it's super painful to do that. And again, just really respect and admire how much the community has come along for the ride and been willing to support such an, in inspirational and also like long, you know, long game of a mission.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, public goods funding is, I feel like people think it's this like altruistic hippie dippy thing that, uh, that you just do it for, for good. And it is that in some ways, but it's also, I mean, I think the stat is that there's trillions of dollars of capital deployed by governments and NGOs and, uh, to open source software developers across the world. And so I actually think it's like a really interesting market that, that people don't see. So, um, really excited to see how it grows and, and now that anyone can just take the power of Bitcoin grants and put it into their Dow EVM based community or community, then I'll be curious to see how it grows and what kind of different communities use it.

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