800 builders on Terra have lost their livelihood - in the last 1 week. Builders are losing trust on betting their careers on a chain. Terra’s collapse has downstream effects that will affect every ecosystem. Developers are leaving, leave alone attracting new developers. Now is the time to focus. If you don’t involve the community to build trust among developers - the grant program will be unfruitful.

We’ve studied various successful and unsuccessful grant programs. Below are our learnings that you should use to run your grant program.

How to involve community

To build trust, you need to go local - closer to the builder. There is no way for a centralized grant program to be close enough to the builder. The grant program itself needs to be decentralized.

You need to identify people who have trust and respect in their respective communities and domains. These could be geographies, technologies (defi, games, infrastructure), strategic themes (Integrations, Research, Women in Web3) etc.

You need to pick people who know their communities best. These capital allocators will run the grant program specific to this community. For the grant program to be really decentralized you need to empower the participants in the community. They should feel like it is their grant program.

The grant allocator calls the shots on whom to give grants to and how much. The community judges the allocator on their performance. If the allocator isn’t doing a good job, the community has the power to replace the allocator with one they believe is better.

The community has only one power, but a very powerful one - to replace the community grants allocator.

Another critical piece in winning the trust back is committing a large pool to builders. Showing the builders that they are a top priority. Showing the community that their future lies in the hands of developers & the community around them, and not the whales and VCs.

As long as the builder community is empowered, the chain is unruggable!

How others are doubling down on community

  • AAVE is doubling down — they have quadrupled their grants DAO budget to 6 million USD

    Screenshot 2022-05-14 at 4.22.51 PM.png

  • Polygon has set aside grants to attract more builders to their ecosystem
  • Kadena also joining the bandwagon.
  • Tezos

How you can use Questbook

Questbook provides the tools to empower you to run a minimal grants DAO with maximum community participation.

  • On-chain grant application and reviews - for maximum transparency and accountability.
  • Review milestones - for responsible allocation of capital based on progress
  • Dashboards - for the community to evaluate progress and make their judgment
  • Filters and credentials - filtering who can participate in the community (e.g only “true believers - people who have held the token for 3 years without selling”)
  • Voting - Incentives for the community to participate in voting