Context

This document serves as a running list of considerations for the full Grants 2.0 portfolio as the genesis projects get up and running. It’s meant to be a companion to the genesis briefs, so that we can capture open questions that are relevant to all product domains.

The Grants 2.0 Vision

GPC’s mission is to build protocols that enable communities to achieve sovereignty through the funding of their shared needs. Currently we are building three protocols: Passport, a Grants Protocol (aka Round Manager), and a Project Protocol (aka Grant Hub).

We believe that launching open-source, modular, and decentralized protocols creates permissionless core primitives and infrastructure for the ecosystem that allows other builders to move more quickly. Further, these protocols are public goods.

Open questions / considerations

• What are we calling the aggregates of this work?

  • The original 2.0 vision referred to the collection of dPopp, Grant Hub, Round Manager, and Grant Explorer as the “protocol”, but we continue to refine this definition. The latest version was posited during the Grant Hub kickoff:

    • dPopp and Grant Hub are data stores that feed the “protocol”, which is predominately Round Manager + Explorer (i.e. the yellow part of this diagram)

    

• We need to clarify the differences between projects and grants

  • We know that web3 grant programs don’t perfectly map their definitions to real-world grants programs. There are nuances between what is a “project” and what is a “grant” in web3, and we need to clearly think through this design space. Some considerations:
    • project-level identity may need to be distinct from grants
    • some projects may have subprojects that want to have grants — how do we handle that?
      • example: Gitcoin is a large project, and it’s subprojects (MMM, GPC, etc) may want to have their own grants
    • how do we handle team members in this environment? If you’re working on a subprojects’ grant, can you be a team member of the larger project?
    • what does all of this mean for permissions? does a project have to approve you? how do you approve team members?
    • how do we handle situations where the project isn’t tech?

• Sketch of infrastructure — from @Kevin Olsen + @Lindsey Thrift