Geo Web is an augmented reality network that allows users to anchor digital content to physical locations. Users access this parallel reality through a browser application on their smartphones or smart glasses based on their geolocation (similar to the Pokémon Go AR game craze back in 2016). On Geo Web, land parcel prices are set directly by the owners, and a percentage of each sale price is distributed to the protocol as a network fee. This helps encourage productive use of digital land and generates ongoing funding for public goods.
Back in December 2020, Geo Web received their first ever funding from Gitcoin itself. The project was a grant recipient in Gitcoin Round 8. GR8 was a Quadratic Funding round, meaning community members voted and donated directly to the project in an effort to support the protocol development. Specifically, the team received over $5,000 to experiment in the realm of AR protocol tooling. At the time, the core team had no idea they would one day go on to become grant round operators themselves.
Those early grants enabled Geo Web to build their MVP, developing a protocol and implementing its core mechanics. They focused first on building out the “Cadastre”, a web-based spatial browser where users can buy and sell pieces of land digitally, and a content layer on which users could anchor digital content to physical locations.
This anchoring mechanism is key - for Geo Web, intertwining the digital and physical must be done on a credibly neutral infrastructure layer in order to ensure that it won’t be monopolized by large-scale private actors. Providing opportunities for apps to co-exist on a shared network is also essential to driving more discovery and composability. For instance, one can imagine a hypothetical scenario where artists who anchor 3D NFTs to geo-locations could easily start partnering with museums to add spatial audio and AR animations as part of a virtually guided tour.
When land is sold, a fraction of the sale price goes to the network in the form of a fee. As activity on GeoWeb grew, these fees started accumulating, with the protocol slowly amassing a pool of ETH. Six months down the road, GeoWeb was facing an inflection point: in order for their open AR platform to gain adoption, it was essential to attract more builders to the ecosystem. The more builders would come and contribute, the more ideas would be generated, ultimately strengthening the protocol.
With their newfound treasury, they decided to explore running a grants program, a tested strategy for seeding development in new ecosystems. In an effort to lean into their mission of credible neutrality, the team decided to incentivize their community to participate in the grant-making. As strong proponents of public goods funding, they were already highly mission aligned with the Gitcoin grants ethos.
While Geo Web’s team was already familiar with Gitcoin, they still researched the other available grant tooling to make sure they selected the best tool for their needs. During the process, they realized that most alternatives required extensive development to tailor the round to their needs, including having to run their own infrastructure, which would be costly and resource-intensive. Other alternatives required forking a protocol, even longer development times, or a heavier engineering lift at the outset, which didn’t seem like a responsible use of their resources at the time. In comparison, Grants Stack offered a frictionless operating experience and seamless onboarding. As a SaaS tool, it was easy to get up and running with a new program. As a result, the team decided to use Grants Stack, an easy plug-and-play solution that enabled an early stage project like Geo Web to design and launch a custom program in just a few clicks.
When designing their program, the Geo Web team had a few clear objectives for their project:
While the team was keen to involve their community in the grant program, they decided to set some parameters around the types of projects which could be eligible to participate in the round. This included projects related to Augmented Reality (AR) and partial common ownership, a concept around land licensing in digital property markets. They also wanted to emphasize the importance of public good funding, which they defined as projects adding societal value beyond just a monetary contribution, and therefore chose to exclude applicants who had already raised funding through venture capital.
The Geo Web team decided to lean into decentralized governance one step further, and they submitted their core team as a grant recipient. Rather than unilaterally allocate funding from the treasury to themselves, the team wanted to ensure that their work aligned with the values and vision of the community. Getting the community to vote in support of their vision was important to maintaining credible neutrality around capital allocation decisions.
The team earmarked over $7,500 (the equivalent of 4ETH at the time) to distribute via matching pools and slated the program to run for two weeks time to optimize for speedy disbursement of funding. The round was featured on Gitcoin’s Explore page, which generated a lot of visibility for the team and bolstered interest among the wider community. This was a huge benefit to the founding team, as they had limited capacity at the time to socialize the round.
Based on the criteria mentioned above, six projects were selected to be part of the round. In quadratic funding, when community members donate in support of a project their donation acts as a vote on where the program operator, in this case Geo Web, should allocate their matching funds to. Having the round listed publicly on Gitcoin’s Grant Explorer helped to increase visibility and drive Gitcoin community members to the round. Additionally, the team focused on a content marketing strategy to further amplify awareness of the round, including blog posts and Twitter spaces. This exposure was key to generating interest in the round. Despite the (relatively) small funding pool, there was strong traction from the community. The round received over 100 unique contributions, which were then matched by Geo Web’s pool of 4 ETH. The distribution was as follows:
You can read more about each of the supported projects here. Given the brand’s association with the round, it was not surprising that the core team received the most votes. However, the other grantees still managed to garner significant support for their respective projects. As Geo Web Founder Graven Prest noted,
“One of the most delightful aspects of running the round was seeing people come together, actively participate, and take our idea to new heights. It's truly inspiring to witness individuals benefit from our initiative and then venture off to create their own paths.”
Part of the appeal of partnering with Gitcoin was that Geo Web would be able to learn from, and help iterate on, Grants Stack itself. Using Grants Stack provided a clear learning experience from which they continued to innovate on new funding mechanisms in the future (more on this below).
Although the round was able to successfully activate community members, there were still learning lessons for the team moving forward. For a future round, they would want to do the following:
The Geo Web grants round was instrumental in helping the team grow their early community and building the foundations for strong governance. Since the round, Geo Web has gone on to experiment with their own iterations of decentralized grant-making. Leveraging their experience with Gitcoin’s quadratic funding, the Geo Web team created a novel type of fund distribution mechanism called Streaming Quadratic Funding, which tailors quadratic funding to allow for continuous fund disbursement instead of time-bound rounds. Using this system, QF matching is done continuously and in real-time. Funding allocation is calculated every minute based on the amount of projects in the round and funds donated.
Moving forward, Geo Web plans to continue to innovate on their Streaming Quadratic Funding mechanism and help other projects who are also considering implementing a similar mechanism. They are also currently focused on their ARKit (AR tooling compatible with Apple) and WebXR (to enable AR viewing in existing browsers).
Overall, it’s safe to say that Geo Web’s ability to innovate in the funding distribution landscape wouldn’t have been possible without the collective mindshare of the Gitcoin ecosystem. From grants recipient, to round operator, to funding mechanism creator - their story illustrates the growth potential of grants.
Want to learn more about Grants Stack? Read more about the only end-to-end grants platform here.
Use Gitcoin Grants Stack to run your own funding program