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August 29, 2022

What’s New with the Grants Product for GR12?

The last Grants Round of 2021 is here! As we mentioned in the Grants Round 12 announcement post, the event runs from December 1st and running through December 16th, 2021. We’re excited for you to join us to build and fund public goods! With each quarterly Grants Round we learn a lot from the previous round. We’re always taking feedback and the team has been working hard to improve the product experience for Grants Round 12. Some new features are outlined below. As a theme, we’ve…

The last Grants Round of 2021 is here! As we mentioned in the Grants Round 12 announcement post, the event runs from December 1st and running through December 16th, 2021.

We’re excited for you to join us to build and fund public goods!

With each quarterly Grants Round we learn a lot from the previous round. We’re always taking feedback and the team has been working hard to improve the product experience for Grants Round 12. Some new features are outlined below. As a theme, we’ve focused on improved grants exploration to help grant funders easily find grants, grant owner management, and performance improvements to ensure site uptime and responsiveness.

Grant Creation

We have simplified the creation of new grants to ensure grant owners maximize their contribution matching opportunities and discoverability by grant funders. When grant owners select tags relevant to their grants, those tags will be used for considering matching pool eligibility and used in the grants explorer UI for discoverability. For example, if you want to be eligible for match funding in the Polygon matching round, simply select the Polygon tag and your grant will be reviewed for eligibility of the matching rounds. You can select multiple tags!

To view more details about the available matching rounds, simply click on the handy “Learn more about matching rounds” link on the Tags section.

Exploring Grants

To support the feedback during the GR11 Finale event Vitalik Buterin voiced an observation that the Quadratic Funding mechanism should function just as well without the use of Matching Pool Categories. In previous rounds, users were able to browse many categories such as infra tech, community, etc. Gitcoin is innovating on Quadratic Funding, in this round, with the recommendation from Vitalik, Dao stewards, and community, we’ll be combining this into one single match pool.

In GR11 we introduced Ecosystem Rounds aimed at rallying funding for and signaling sentiment within a particular project’s community. Since then, match pool funding partners have shown an increasing interest in collaboratively running Thematic Rounds in support of a particular “cause” or “theme”. For GR12 Gitcoin has worked with the DAO to choose three causes in GR12: Climate Change, Tech Advocacy, and Longevity.

To ensure the Grants experience would support browsing these match pools, we’ve grouped the rounds into a single dropdown for easy browsing between the main, ecosystem, and thematic rounds.


In addition to the ability to browse rounds, we’ve improved upon the functionalities of explorer filter, sort, search, and infinite scrolling based on GR11 feedback. Other browsing cleanup includes

  • When adding filters users no longer need to click apply!
  • We’ve upgraded the sort menu with additional sort options and a cleaner UI.
  • Search has been improved to return exact title matches.
  • Smoother infinite scrolling for a seamless browsing experience.

Grant Owner Experience

Grant owners told us that they wanted to have a single place to manage their grant and we listened! Beginning with GR12, there will be a new grant management panel.

If you own a grant, go to your grant detail page to view the new panel. Here are some of the things you’ll be able to do from the panel:

  • Check your grant’s approval status
  • Claim the available matching funds that your grant has received
  • Find out how to withdraw contributions on L2 (zkSync / Polygon)
  • Let your grant contributors know about your project and progress by updating your grant
  • If your grant is idle and hidden from the explorer, you can update it and make it visible again.
  • You’ll soon be able to see the history of the matching funds that you have claimed too.

Checkout

For Grants Round 12 we’ve streamlined the checkout into a single token checkout, moving to a two column layoutt allows users to have a clear sense of their total in view at all times. There are new tool tips throughout the experience that ensure users have the information they need to understand checkout methods and be successful.

In exciting news, users will nowbe able to fund the grants they care about in three different ways through standard checkout, zkSync, and the newest method on the Polygon/Matic checkout. The introduction of Polygon/Matic checkout on Gitcoin helps direct funding to where it matters the most. The Grantees. This method further reduces gas costs for users by allowing for bulk checkout of an unlimited number of grant contributions at one time!


Performance Improvements

Performance is an important but behind the scenes area of the application that we care deeply about at Gitcoin. The engineering team has been working hard to ensure that our application servers and databases can handle the traffic loads of Grants Round 12 as we prepare to expand the network of public goods.

Some areas of focus the last few months included optimizing our prediction algorithm to ensure we are able to predict the CLR matches more quickly and more accurately as grants are being funded. We’ve setup read replicas for our databases and retired smaller servers to ensure we have close to zero downtime during the grant round! Lastly, improving code performance to ensure users have a more responsive experience while using our product.

Decentralized Grants Experience

As we continue our journey to decentralize, we’re ready to publicly launch the first version of our decentralized grants protocol as a special “Gitcoin Building Gitcoin” matching pool, where users can experience the future of grants This is a separate decentralized application, dGrants, that will be linked from the main Gitcoin Grants application. Since data is not shared from the main grants product to decentralized grants, users will need to reconnect their wallet to fund grants. On the decentralized application, grants can be supported via Polygon Matic.

Users will be able to access and try out dGrants through a banner at the top of the Gitcoin Grants site or through a mini match pool banner on the Grants home page.

GR12 Kick-Off Livestream Event

Don’t forget to join us for the Livestream Kick-Off on Wednesday, December 1st at 10:00 am MST. The Gitcoin core team will be hosting the event along with the many contributors and Round Partners to celebrate the beginning of GR12 and to showcase all of the improvements made to the core Gitcoin product.

The Kick-Off Livestream event is a great opportunity to learn more about Gitcoin and how we’re paving the way for funding Public Goods outside of just the Grants program. There will be special guest speakers, in addition to a POAP distribution. More details to follow.

We’re excited to wrap up the year with our biggest and best grant round ever. Please join us to build and fund the open web together.

As always, we’re open to hearing about your experience. Feel free to hit us up in the #grants-support channel in the Gitcoin Discord Server.

– Gitcoin Product Team

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