The first round of Honduras grants has been completed successfully! This marks an evolution for the Honduran community from being passive observers to being able to signal and fund what’s important to them. This round had $444 contributions and $12,000 in matched funds.
The complete duration for this round, from signing grantees to vote tally, was 2 months long. It took several months more of working together with the CLR.fund team in order to prepare the contracts, learn the magic of zk proofs and run some test rounds.
Grantee’s only requirements were that they offer some kind of public goods, have Hondurans as team members, and be Ethereum friendly or use it somehow. We allowed anyone to donate to the total match pool (around $60 were donated like this), but only Honduras community members were able to decide how to assign the funds. We used POAP NFTs handled on community events to whitelist who could vote.
Why create a CLR round?
The idea of using a CLR mechanism wasn’t new at all for the community, we used Gitcoin Grants to fund community activities for a couple of years. At some point, the community started getting priced out by gas fees and some couldn’t keep donating. As we use a multi-sig, Polygon donations were disabled and ZkSync required more skills from the donors. Another issue, the increasing number of projects and activity on Gitcoin made the match go from ~$200 per round to ~$3 (not worth claiming), even with an increased number of votes.
Our community also has some specific needs that the global Ethereum community might not have, for example, we had the Gitcoin grants funds and a lot of projects with a lack of funding, but how we should allocate it? Which project to prioritize?
Having our own CLR grants program empowered the community to signal where the capital should go according to their leads, it also allowed leaders to focus on raising funds for the matching pool, increasing the total amount of matching available to Honduras by 50x.
Results analysis
The great majority of the grants that applied had some educational component, meetups, blogs, video tutorials, and local communities represented at least 73% of the grants that applied. The number of educational grants is a direct reflection of a need that the community has.
Overall, the Match distribution was well distributed and it’s no surprise that the top projects are from the education category, Blockeadas offers a space for women wanting to learn about web3 and Ethereum, The Future of Art the same but for artists that want to fall into the rabbit hole of NFTs. Another interesting grantee in the same category is P2E HN, it helps gamers to enter into the play to earn space with scholarships and training for Axie Infinity and other games. Another interesting project is Gallina, a DAO tool that helps organizations/communities to distribute funds, somehow like Coordinape.
Matching distribution of the first round
Something that the grants team prioritized and were key for the success of the first round was focusing on educating and onboarding the community to be able to participate.
Community onboarding activities
Even with the experience of some members, a custom grant required a lot of effort onboarding grantees and voters, we had to teach how to:
- Connect to Gnosis Chain.
- Get xDAI.
- Create a grant.
- Donate or vote.
We organized meetups (even the first physical one since COVID-19 started), created written and video tutorials to educate our community on all of the activities. We focused heavily and gave more time to the creation of grants as with no grants there was no logic in voting.
The good thing is that all that work spent in education will carry on into the next rounds, we won’t need to teach the same users how to create grants or vote, so we can focus on onboarding new users.
Conclusions
For the goals that we set at the start, we feel that the round was a success, for example, we had 15 projects, in the whole Gitcoin grant there are only 3 Honduran projects. So this was a huge improvement.
Another interesting result was that the local community deeply care more than global supporters. In a normal Gitcoin grant, we receive donations from ~50-100 supporters, that’s around $200 in donations. In the local round, we only had 23 donors, but those 23 donated $382 to projects and $60 to the pool, much fewer persons but more investment in the ecosystem.
After the round finished, the community got energized, they started organizing more events and being more active on the discord, you can definitely see the difference before and after the round.
Even if we feel this round was a success, there is still a lot of stuff to be improved in future rounds like:
- Focus less on grants applications and more on voters, 23 voters is a small amount to decide where to allocate funds.
- Scaling using POAPs will be hard, we might need to migrate to unique identity projects like BrightID or Proof of Humanity.
- Increase the amount of funds for the matching pool, as this was just a test, we wanted to keep it small, once we fix the amount of voters problem we will focus on increasing the funds.
- Reduce the duration of the grants, we spent so much time onboarding that the register and voting period lasted almost 2 months.