$360K+ matching in Gitcoin Grants Round 7! Contribute today! To the Ethereum community, Gitcoin Grants Round 7 is here. It is live now — running for 2.5 weeks from September 15, 2020 to October 2nd, 2020 @ 5PM MST. This will be our biggest round yet, with matching commitments that are at least $360k – our largest round yet! If you haven’t created a grant yet, now’s your chance! This round wouldn’t be possible without the support from everyone reading this, but we’d like to…
To the Ethereum community,
Gitcoin Grants Round 7 is here. It is live now — running for 2.5 weeks from September 15, 2020 to October 2nd, 2020 @ 5PM MST.
This will be our biggest round yet, with matching commitments that are at least $360k – our largest round yet! If you haven’t created a grant yet, now’s your chance!
This round wouldn’t be possible without the support from everyone reading this, but we’d like to give a special shout out to several of our sponsors that are making this landmark round possible, ordered by contribution size:
These contributions to public goods mean a lot to us, and to the broader Ethereum community.
It’ll focus on a better mobile experience via Status Wallet, making donations even easier to complete. Status will also be contributing money to future CLR rounds as well, so definitely stay tuned for additional announcements!
Ultimately, with continued contributions and feedback from the community, we’re excited to continue building infrastructure that can support larger rounds and more unsung maintainers. The roadmap to Round 15 is coming together well…
In Gitcoin Grants Round 6, we added a cart functionality that made it much easier to checkout contributions to multiple grants. This allowed you to fund xgrants in one transaction, which was an awesome improvement for people who want to support many projects.
However, if you were donating to a lot of grants, gas transaction fees got high — and they’ve only gotten higher since then in Ethereum.
For Round 7, we’ve added an option to use zkSync, a lower-cost way to make contributions to multiple grants.
ZkSync shines when you have a big cart full of grants (at least 5), because the protocol allows you to pay a fixed price for n number of transactions.
If you have five or fewer items, going through the normal checkout process should work just fine. Don’t fret though, we’ve added a handy indicator during the checkout process to help you make the correct determination.
Here’s a comparison of L1 versus zkSync with multiple items in a DAI-only cart. You can see at a certain number of items, it becomes much more gas efficient to use zkSync.
To use zkSync, we ask you to login to a “Gitcoin zkSync” account. This account is created by asking you to sign a different message from the regular zkSync message, and this gives us an L1 account where the Gitcoin app has the private key. Gitcoin can then use this account to send transfers without prompting you for each transfer! Because it does not permanently hold funds, there is no additional security risk.
If you do decide to try zkSync, there is a fixed cost to move tokens onto L2. Once you use zkSync, payments and distributions to grant owners all occur on L2, and transfers are instantaneous and close to free. We will also give you the option to transfer additional funds to your L2 account beyond just your donations so you can have extra funds on zkSync for other uses!
zkSync transfer costs can be found in their documentation and you can read more about our zkSync implementation here.
Based on the items in your cart, we check your zkSync balances to see if you already have enough funds on zkSync to complete checkout. If you do, the checkout flow is as follows:
If you do not have enough funds in your zkSync account to complete checkout, the flow is as follows:
If you are only donating with one token, funds are deposited directly to your Gitcoin zkSync account. To ensure your deposit is not reverted, it takes 10 confirmations for your deposit to be accepted by zkSync and all transfers of funds are executed. Any leftover funds in the Gitcoin zkSync account are transferred back to your regular zkSync account.
If you’re a Grant Owner…
Funds from L2 donations can be accessed at https://wallet.zksync.io/. If you want to withdraw them to L1, here’s how:
If you are unable to connect your wallet, or have a contract wallet, please contact zkSync at hello@matter-labs.io for assistance.
A simple update for grant creators is a requirement to verify your Twitter identity if it’s referenced in your Gitcoin Grant.
This ensures you are indeed the owner of the brand you are representing as a grant creator and ideally, helps you reach your grant contributors. Keep your DM’s open to foster serendipity during the round!
In Gitcoin Grants Round 6 your CLR match contribution was influenced by SMS verification. Those who verified would have a slightly higher multiplier associated with their match.
For Round 7, we’ve included BrightID as additional verification method for contributors. Getting verified through SMS or Bright ID will allow your contribution to have higher weight within the CLR matching formula.
BrightID verification is a social identity network that aims to prove your unique identity.
Because there’s a social aspect to it, it requires some time to meet other Ethereum members and garner quality connections that help prove that you are indeed a unique human. Let’s run through some of the details.
Here’s the steps to get started:
You can make your donation anytime during the round, but as long as you’re SMS or BrightID verified by the close of Gitcoin Grants Round 7, all your contributions will retroactively receive the multiplier benefit.
We’ll be sending gentle reminders to get your verifications done so that you can achieve the maximum contribution benefit for the grants you wish to support!
If you’re having issues with L2 or decentralized identity, don’t be deterred. This is just the beginning, and iterations here join a few other important items on our roadmap.
We’ll be hosting a variety of events during Gitcoin Grants Round 7 for contributors and grant creators to connect and get to know each other and to answer any questions you have for us. Here’s a starting point.
Each event will include leaders in the Ethereum community and will be centered around great conversations, rather than information. We look forward to seeing you at one of the events.
We hope Gitcoin Grants is the placeto help you connect with projects that you appreciate, that you want to give back to, and support. Let’s all grow open source, together. 
