I support this proposal with the relevant changes and look forward to AGD’s continued catalysing of the ecosystem.
Thanks Shreyas for all his work in setting up AGD, he has definitely made a mark on AGD and the Aave community. Also very excited that @0xbilll has taken on the responsibility of leading AGD into the next phase. He has shown a lot of skill and commitment to AGD and i have full confidence that he’ll do an awesome job. 
Hi Bill and Aave Grants Team 
,
Thanks for sharing this great overview and update. As one of the previous grant recipients, I’m rooting for and excited to see what’s next for this great ecosystem. Besides that, I see this update as an opportunity to put myself forward as a candidate to fill up the spot on the review committee given my connection to the ecosystem and my skills and experience. Below some details:
- Describe your involvement in the Aave ecosystem
- Co-founded the Yieldgate project which was the first project to use Aave’s protocol enabling users to stake assets and have the generated yield be claimable by a dedicated beneficiary. This allows for a multitude of applications ranging from yield-gated content to no-loss payments, donations, investments (NFT minting), bug bounty pools (e.g. for security researchers), subscriptions, and DAOs. Yieldgate is a recipient of the Aave Grant Foundation and also received further grants from The Graph, Toucan Protocol, etc.
- What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?
- +2 years as a Product Manager at Santiment, the first crypto analytics player running its own node infra, cleaning and standardising the data to build metrics (i.e. integrated with Bitfinex + built SANsheets)
- +3 years as a VC investor at leading Silicon Valley venture funds where I saw/see crypto deals on the daily
- In the crypto space since 2016, having invested into Kraken and also actively participating at several hackathons (have a closet with plenty of Aave swag ;))
- ETHBerlin winner/finalist - prizes from Dune
- ETHAmsterdam winner/finalist - prizes from ETHGlobal, Coinbase, Aave, Polygon, and WalletConnect
- Can you commit ~5 hours a week?
- Yes, can go up to ±10 hours a week
Being a direct recipient of an Aave Grant, I see the reviewer role as a unique opportunity to give back and put my experience to work for the benefit of the wider ecosystem. Besides that, with my VC experience and deep knowledge of the space, I am certain I will be able to hit the ground running and be a great asset to the review committee.
Happy to hop on a call and share more about my background. In any case, excited to see what’s next for the Aave Grants DAO in 2023 and contribute to its success.
Cheers,
Overall I am in support of renewing the Grants DAO, but had two questions that I think the community should get more color on:
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The Grants lead compensation has changed drastically. While @0xbilll working on this full-time with no outside commitments for $9,000 per month ($108,000 per year) sounds incredibly reasonable, this calls into question the prior lead’s compensation of $150 per hour capped at 30 per week ($234,000 per year), which is over twice this amount for someone who seemingly had other commitments. Do we have a breakdown of how many hours were worked and how much was paid for this work? My optimistic take is this new budget is in line with prior payment records, but would appreciate more information to confirm.
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Beyond this, does the GrantsDAO have a more detailed cost breakdown of how prior budgets were used and what funds were leftover, if any? For an $8m annual cost, which is more than most Series A companies, the community should expect some level of detailed reporting on where this money is going and how spend compares to what was budgeted. Maybe @llama could help in this regard under their existing engagement?
Excited to see the continued growth of this program, but hope that there will be some structure in place for community visibility on expenses outside of just the Grant Awards.
Overview
Since launching in May 2021, Aave Grants DAO has awarded over $4,395,000 in grants to teams building on Aave or contributing to the ecosystem. Aave Grants has also been a key driver of growth by awarding over $120k in Aave bounties across ten different hackathons, hosting three rAAVEs, and making other sponsorships to help proliferate the ghost. We are proposing to renew the program for the next two quarters by providing $4 million dollars ($2 million per quarter). See our initial proposal, our second proposal from November 2021, and our latest renewal proposal from May 2022.
Mission
Aave Grants DAO (AGD) is a community-led grants program, focused on growing a thriving ecosystem of contributors within Aave through funding ideas, projects and events that benefit the ecosystem. We aim to drive development on top of Aave and ensure a constant influx of talented builders to maintain Aave’s long term growth. We help build culture and community around the Aave ecosystem that in turn attracts the best contributors.
Background and Progress
This is the fourth proposal for AGD:
● The initial proposal launched AGD with $1 million of funding over two quarters, from May to October 2021.
● The second proposal was executed at the end of December 2021 and funded AGD for an additional three months with $2 million of funding.
● The third proposal was executed at the end of May 2022 and funded AGD for an additional six months with $3 million per quarter of funding.
AGD is one of the most successful web3 grants programs, as recognized in posts by Gitcoin and Sovereign Capital.
Since our last proposal we have observed three shifts from the Aave DAO that influenced how this proposal is structured: an increased focus on events, the Aave DAO entering into several long term agreements, and increased prudence from the community on treasury spend.
Events and Sponsorships
First, events and sponsorships have become an increasingly important part of AGD.
Using the events we outlined in our last proposal as a guide, AGD had a large presence at Permissionless, ETH Amsterdam, ETHCC and DevCon. AGD collaborated with the Aave Companies to create memorable experiences at each of these events. Along with the main conference, we hosted a side event with aligned partners to better engage with attendees and connect our communities.
High quality and quantity of Aave branded swag has become a staple at events AGD sponsors. Ask anyone who attended, and they likely left with a shirt, cap, and/or bag that is beautifully branded with the Aave ghost. Distributing swag is a unique way to stand out from other companies at events, engage and reward developers, and help proliferate the ghost with the most passionate community members.
The other staple Aave has become known for is the rAAVE, which we have hosted in Amsterdam, Paris and Bogota. rAAVE’s continue to be an important pillar and another key differentiator for Aave’s brand. rAAVEs help strengthen Aave’s culture and grow the community.
A key learning from our experience hosting events is the importance of developers or other knowledgeable team members to engage with attendees. We would like to continue working with the Aave Companies to have appropriate team members at events as well as look to expand participation to include other ecosystem members such as BGD. Notably, we have hired an Events Coordinator to continue pushing Aave’s presence at ecosystem events forward.
The importance of events and sponsorships will increase with the upcoming launch of GHO. Events and sponsorships can create widespread awareness amongst the community, increase the number of integrations and use cases and overall impact developer and community mindshare. All of these can be crucial in increasing GHO’s chance of success, especially early on. As such, we are planning to be a large supporter of GHO once it is live.
GHO is important to support as it offers large potential for Aave DAO in terms of revenue generation and becoming a flagship product in the ecosystem. We plan on creating a well structured launch to create a strong first impression and fuel initial developer momentum.
Beyond funding grants to teams building on GHO, we will also fund conferences and marketing initiatives to help GHO become widely known, as well as hackathons to foster new ideas and attract developers to start building with GHO. See more about events in the section below, including some of the specific events we are already planning to support GHO early on.
Long Term Service Agreements
Second, Aave DAO has entered into several longer term service agreements with third party providers. Each provider has a scope of work and focus on a core competency for the Aave DAO: BGD focuses on protocol development, Llama focuses on growth and treasury management, Chaos Labs focuses on risk, and Certora and Sigma Prime focus on security. In the past AGD has given grants to teams building across each of these areas.
With many of the agreements with these service providers lasting through our proposed term (six months), AGD will place more scrutiny on funding grants in these areas. The AGD should be flexible, evolving with the full time contributors voted on by the community to serve the Aave DAO. AGD aims to place a larger focus on grants outside of the scope of any third party service provider, and reduce the focus on grants if the scope is already covered by a team.
For reference, the following is a historical breakdown of the distribution of ‘Grants Awarded by Category’ since our last proposal:
Treasury Prudence
Third, we have seen more prudence around the Aave treasury including a desire to spend stablecoins to preserve AAVE in the treasury. As such, we have proposed to receive 70% USDC and 30% AAVE. This ratio is also inline with other recent proposals. Stables have primarily been used for event sponsorships, and we recently began giving grants in USDC as well. We believe receiving AAVE helps to align incentives for compensation and some grants.
See a full list of grants and events funded on our website. We distribute grants based on completion of milestones. For larger grants, we typically have three payment tranches: an upfront payment, a payment on completion of the first milestone, and a payment on the completion of the project. We follow up with projects where needed to check on their progress.
We have checked in on the status of each grant we have distributed so far. In total, from 168 grantees (from May 2021 to November 2022):
● 51.2% Complete or Live
● 38.7% In progress
● 10.1% Inactive or Unknown
Notes:
Since grants are given with milestone based payments, some inactive projects have only received a portion of their total grant. Some inactive projects fully delivered on their grant, ran the project for a period of time and then decided to shut down for various reasons. In the majority of cases, the code has been open-sourced and is available for anyone in the community to use.
Read more about AGD’s recent work with monthly updates from 0xmigi starting in July 2022. These will continue to feature new grantees, updates on AGD’s budget and highlight other milestones or relevant information for the community. Please respond with anything else you would like the monthly updates to cover.
Success Stories
Since our last proposal in May 2022, we have awarded 122 grants. Some of the success stories over this time include:
People
Our big update on the personnel front is that Shreyas is transitioning out of AGD and Bill will be taking over as lead. Shreyas has done a phenomenal job setting up, leading, and scaling AGD. Notably, he helped set processes to scale effective grants distribution. AGD is one of the best grants programs today, and we thank him for his contributions.
Bill has added a ton of value to AGD. He brings useful experience leading events, coordinating with various Aave stakeholders, and communicating to the wider community. AGD is in good hands with him as lead. To help with the transition, Shreyas will stay close to AGD to offer advice and assist where needed.
AGD now has eleven members.
Aleks and BGD will be stepping down as reviewers after multiple quarters of support as reviewers. Thank you to both of them for their contributions to AGD.
Compensation:
Recruitment
We will look to add one new reviewer to the team. Reviewers judge applications, interview candidates, fill out feedback forms and in some cases present progress to the Aave community. If you are interested, please respond to the forum post below with the following information:
Metrics
We have received and given out an increasing number of grants over time. Most of the applications received and funded were in the “applications and integrations” category. This was due to primarily funding developer grants. However, over time we have been funding more events and community projects. Shoutout to Lawrence from Omni Analytics for creating the charts below.
Note: the steep drop off in grants received during December is due to pulling this information at the beginning of the month.
Proposed Budget
We have included a line item to set up an entity pending legal review. This will allow AGD to enter into contracts for certain sponsorships and help to protect AGD contributors.
Events & Sponsorships
Below is a list of events we have identified for AGD to host or sponsor in Q1 & Q2. This includes providing Aave branded swag for conference attendees where appropriate and costs to sponsor side events with partners to better engage with strong communities. The list is just to serve as a guide and is not comprehensive of every single event AGD will participate in. Given the nature of events, not all plans and details are available currently so it is important for the team to monitor key factors and connect with key stakeholders leading up to events. Any changes made or other events we participate in will be communicated in our monthly updates on the governance forum.
AGD Events Policy
The following outlines the goals of AGD event activation, how AGD chooses which events to attend, and AGD engagement at these events.
Goals of event activations
The goal of sponsoring events is to help grow the Aave ecosystem by proliferating the ghost (more on this below), attracting and retaining the best contributors to the Aave ecosystem, and encouraging the development of new ideas to be built in the Aave ecosystem.
Over the course of this proposal, AGD will aim to sponsor the events listed in the schedule above. That said, especially for events into Q2, details are still being finalized or are subject to change. We will continue to monitor the events landscape and make any changes if necessary. Any of these changes will be communicated through our monthly updates in the governance forum.
How AGD chooses events
When choosing who to partner with, AGD will consider a range of factors. One main factor will be alignment to the Aave ecosystem. AGD will especially look to partner with strong communities, not measured by their reach, but rather if they’re a dedicated community who have the potential to become long term partners and contributors to the Aave ecosystem.
High level, the benefits from events AGD sponsors can be split into three categories:
How AGD engages at events
At all AGD sponsored events, there should be at least one member of AGD who is there to lead the event activation, represent the interests of AGD and serve as a point of contact for all things AGD.
Other people from across the Aave ecosystem can also represent AGD at the booth or in other capacities at an event. These include members of the Aave Companies, different ecosystem contributors such as BGD or members from past grant recipients. In all cases, anyone representing AGD has to be vetted by the AGD team beforehand so the team can ensure a high degree of professionalism, accountability, and knowledge of Aave.
AGD members, AGD reviewers and other people who staff the booth or otherwise support AGDs sponsorship may receive priority access to conference tickets received from the sponsorship (or other perks offered). However, only AGD members are eligible for compensation through AGD for travel expenses. There will be no compensation for expenses such as flights, hotels or meals for people outside of AGD.
Next Steps