Challenges
Best use of the project registry
Best Novel Funding Distribution Tool
Project details
HACKMD version: https://hackmd.io/c_rMYiFOTO2zA4fi4gfASw
Project Description
Overview
Grant Ships is an ‘evolutionary grants game’ where the responsibilities and permissions typically held by a centralized grants program are divided across a handful of clearly defined roles: Facilitators, Grant Ships and Recipients.
Each actor filling a role has a particular set of actions available to them, and the sum of these actions represents a comprehensive grants program. Each actor is granted permission to perform in a role when they are given the appropriate Hats Protocol hat (NFT).
The long-term vision is to use this mechanism to establish a self-sustaining, community-guided grant allocation system that can function seamlessly without central planning and without vulnerability to capture.Game Flow
When the game begins, participants apply to become Grant Ship operators. Approved operators each become the manager of their own pool using GrantShipStrategy. This strategy is a modified version of the DirectGrantsStrategy tweaked to use Hats for revokable role permissions and to allow interaction with the GameManager metastrategy.
Each funding round, the Grant Ships (grant-giving subDAOs) compete to best deploy capital from a common funding pool. Facilitators oversee the process by performing safety checks on grant recipient addresses and optionally issuing yellow or red flags to ships to signal violations of rules, community norms or bad faith activity.
At the end of each funding round, facilitators can initiate a new round with new relative funding levels for each Grant Ship, ideally based on their performance in the previous round.
Future
By incorporating game mechanics, we’ve made involvement both engaging and straightforward. The next step is to build an interactive dash board that visualizes the activities of each Ship.
We are attempting to answer these questions:
How easy can we make it for qualified candidates to recieve grant funds?
How can we eliminate ‘spreadsheet hell’ from grants administration by utilizing Allo’s metadata standard to make record-keeping a passive side effect of giving grants.
How do you make it easy to give and receive funding without increasing risk of capture and bad actors?
How can a community curate and evolve skillfulness at grant allocation without simply centralizing allocation powers among a few powerful actors?
How can we use competition and accountability to create increasingly high-impact grants programs?
Allo Protocol
We use Allo protocol and two custom Allo strategies to:
Define and enforce the actions available to each roles
Track participants using the Allo registry
Divide the act of funding into a multi-step process that includes allocation, distribution and documentation.
Hats Protocol
We incorporate Hats protocol to represent the roles as hats NFTs, so roles can be assigned to and revoked by the holder of the ‘top hat’ (e.g. a grants council or community DAO contract). This reduces capture risk by allowing the replacement of actors from any role as needed.
Allo Metastrategy
We created two new strategies that work together to create the game structure: GameManagerStrategy and GrantShipStrategy.
GameManagerStrategy (Metastrategy)
Holds the common funding pool
Creates and initializes the Grant Ship pools (GrantShipStrategy)
Allocates and distributes funds from the common funding pool into pools for each Grant Ship
Enforces round start and stop times, and allows initiation of new game rounds.
GrantShipStrategy (Strategy)
Allows potential grant Recipients to apply
Allows Recipients or Grant Ship Operators to supply milestones for distributions
Allows Recipients to signal that a milestone is complete
Allows Grant Ship Operators to distribute funds for a completed milestone
Allows Game Facilitators to issue a Yellow or Red Flag to a Grant Ship
Locks down Grant Ship Operator permissions when a Red Flag is active
Allows funds to be withdrawn back into GameManager pool if needed
Participant Roles
This section describes actions available to each role.
Participants within Grant Ships w/Allo are divided into 4 main roles: Game Facilitators, Game Admins, Grant Ships and Grant Recipients.
Game Facilitator
Approving fund allocations (after due diligence, such as KYC and deny list accounting), allowing Grant Ships to distribute at their discretion.
Activating or Deactivating the Grant Ship funding pools
Withdrawing funds from deactivated Grant Ship Funding pools
Flagging Grant Ships that are not operating in good faith, (e.g. Ships who have failed to make allocations, that make repeated attempts to fund bad actors etc)
Resolving Grant Ship flags that no longer apply
Grant Ships
Distributing funds to Grant Recipients
Capturing Grant Recipient details and including them in the disclosure
Reviewing Milestones declared by recipient
Rejecting invalid Milestones
Declaring Milestones for recipients (or recipient can do it)
Grant Recipients
Registering as a potential Grant Recipient for grants
Declaring Milestones (or Grant Ship operator can do it)
Submitting milestone completion
Posting updates as needed
Cool Features
GrantShipStrategy is a modified version of Allo’s Direct Grants Strategy with changes to integrate with Hats and to allow integration with the GameManagerStrategy metastrategy.
Game Start and Game End events. Game Start happens after initial distribution to sub pools. Once you get to game end it locks all the Grant Ships.
Hats. Hats provides revokable roles to provide capture resistance and lets a DAO or council assign and revoke game roles as needed.
Facilitators can flag ships and lock them down, or warn users if they notice any sort of malfeasance."
Every recipient, Grant Ship and facilitator will have a feed of UpdatePosted events.
GameStart and GameEnd - at GameEnd we’re going to stop the ships
Team DAO Masons
DAO Masons is a small service DAO with big ambitions to transform decentralized governance. Our goal is to create new mechanisms, strategies, protocols, and applications that will vastly improve the overall output and efficacy of DAOs.