Grant Ships: Accelerating ApeCoin's Ecosystem Evolution

Active Proposals AIP Ideas
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Dear Ape Coin DAO Friends,
I would like to resurrect our AIP Idea proposal for Grant Ships. Our original proposal is linked below. We were almost ready to roll with the last step, but took a step back to make sure the proposal makes the most sense for ApeCoin DAO. Thus, the proposal has been redone. Hope you like it.

Original AIP Idea

PROPOSAL NAME:

Grant Ships: Accelerating ApeCoin’s Ecosystem Evolution

PROPOSAL CATEGORY:

Ecosystem Fund Allocation

TEAM DESCRIPTION:

Our team, the DAO Masons, is composed of seasoned Web3 professionals dedicated to advancing decentralized ecosystems. Our collective expertise spans project management, software engineering, UI/UX design, and computer science.

We originally met as core members of DAOhaus, driven by a passion for DAOs and effective governance design.

Our mission at DAO Masons is to “help DAOs win”. Like many in our space, we are eager to onboard the next billion crypto users and ensure the infrastructure is in place to support this growth.

  • Chris (Project Manager & Outreach Manager, Research, Documentation): Spearheads project coordination and community engagement initiatives.
  • Jord (Product Manager, Engineering Lead): Drives the technical development, ensuring robust and secure smart contract functionality.
  • Matt (Game Design & UI/UX Lead, Documentation Lead): Focuses on operations, product strategy, QA and delivering intuitive user experiences.

ABSTRACT:

Grant Ships: Accelerating ApeCoin Ecosystem Evolution aka “Ape Ships” is a proposed grants funding game specifically for ApeCoin DAO in support of ApeChain ecosystem development. The Grant Ships game is an “evolutionary grants meta-framework” that lets a DAO choose multiple teams of grant allocators (aka ‘Grant Ship Operators’) who compete to best allocate funds within a given domain.

This proposal is to fund 1 round of the Grant Ships game with the option to fund future rounds if you like it :smiley: The Grant Ships platform provides a dynamic, transparent, onchain and community-driven funding initiative customized for the ApeCoin ecosystem to strategically fund sectors critical for the growth of ApeChain. This process will help ApeCoin DAO discover and empower the best allocators and the best projects aligned with their mission.

The Grant Ships game is at its heart a smart-contract-enforced governance system for grants programs. This means that the Grant Ships game has a clear ruleset and governance pathway where every in-game interaction is backed by an onchain transaction.

ApeCoin holders are involved at key junctures to insure appropriate voter influence on outcomes without creating voter overwhelm or fatigue. DAO Voters influence funding direction primarily through Ship Operator and Game Facilitator elections and periodic TCR-gated Ship Operator portfolio reviews — the results of which determine relative Ship funding levels going forward.

Under the hood, Grant Ships uses Allo Protocol and Hats Protocol to provide reliable and flexible funding with revokable permissions — ensuring the DAO maintains control of the funds earmarked for grant allocation. All transactions and governance actions are recorded on-chain and presented publicly, fostering an environment of transparency, accountability and trust.

Grant Ships: Accelerating ApeCoin’s Ecosystem Evolution aims to create a sustainable and scalable funding model that grows with ApeChain, supporting its development into a premier blockchain ecosystem.

BENEFIT TO APECOIN ECOSYSTEM:

  • Enhanced Community Governance:

    • Voter Engagement: One of the goals of Grant Ships is to identify skilled allocators and empower them with the necessary tools to make effective funding decisions. The DAO has the opportunity to elect individuals or teams they believe will excel in these roles. A DAO vote also determines relative Ship funding levels for subsequent rounds.
    • Feedback: Every in-game action is recorded onchain and can be verified by any member of the DAO. This data provides the DAO with all the information needed to make informed decisions about how to run the game (e.g. ship funding and administrator elections).

  • Targeted Ecosystem Growth:

    • Focused Funding Rounds: This proposal describes a funding round description that instructs Ship Operators and Grant Applicants to support the growth of ApeChain by funding and creating projects that fall the following categories:
      • Infrastructure - ApeChain tools, protocols, frameworks, etc.
      • DeFi - Financial platforms and initiatives
      • Gaming - onchain game loops, NFT collections, etc.
      • Other - the unexpected and creative
    • Adaptive Domain Allocation: The DAO retains the flexibility to adjust the focus of future funding rounds based on emerging strategic needs.
    • Community Driven: The Grant Ships framework allows every DAO member to influence funding decisions without frequent votes or the need to gain massive context before every voting.

  • Competitive Excellence:

    • Performance-Based Funding: Our model incentivizes high performance among grant allocators by directly linking their funding to demonstrated impact of their grants. This meritocratic approach encourages each Ship to strive for excellence. The better the results they deliver relative to the other Ships, the more funding they receive. This encourages a continuous drive for improvement and innovation.
    • Impact Measurement: Grant Ships does not evaluate impact directly, instead providing numerous onchain events detailing all activity within the grants program, which can be fed into external impact evaluation systems.
    • Accountability Mechanisms: While encouraging excellence and freedom to run a Ship how operators choose, our system also has strong accountability mechanisms in place.
      • Underperformance: In cases where a Ship repeatedly underperforms or fails to meet the community’s standards of integrity and impact, the DAO has the authority to defund them completely or revoke their ability to allocate funds. There is also a “flag” system in place which allows the game facilitator to take immediate action if a Ship’s actions are outside of compliance.
      • Graduated Consequences: A yellow flag can be issued by Game Facilitators which acts as additional context to voters during TCR votes. A red flag is issued for obvious, repeated or intentional violations by a Grant Ship. A red flag suspends a Ship’s ability to distribute funding, until and only if, the DAO reinstates the Ship’s permissions through a TCR vote.

  • Cultural Reinforcement: By tying funding to performance and making the outcomes publicly available, we foster a culture of accountability and excellence within the DAO ecosystem. Operators are motivated not only by potential funding but also by the prestige and recognition that come from being a top-performing Ship.

  • Competitive and Collaborative: The competitive environment provided by the Grant Ships game will attract high-quality projects and allocators who are committed to the success of ApeChain. We also anticipate patterns of cooperation, skill-sharing and seeking of win/wins among ships and builders in the interest of creating something awesome as a community.

  • Documentation and Reporting: Feeds generated from smart contract data are accessible through the Grant Ships app. These feeds detail funding activities providing key metrics and insights for voters to use during decision making.

    • Compliance Policy and Attestation: Fund allocations must be approved by a Game Faciltator before they can be distributed by a Grant Ship. This provides the DAO with the option to implement policies and prerequisites for grant recipients (e.g. KYC compliance, AML procedures, etc.). This takes the responsibility and potential conflict of interest from the Grant Ship operators and lets them focus on making wise allocation decisions.

KEY TERMS:

  • Allocation: The act of setting money aside for a particular recipient, before distribution. Occurs in 3 places within the game: the allocation of funds made to the game as a whole, the split allocation made to each Grant Ship and the allocations made by the Ships for individual grant recipients.
  • Allo Protocol: A strategic allocation tool used for managing funds within the Grant Ships framework. Learn more about Allo Protocol.
  • Community Voting Mechanism: Grant Ships uses a Token Curated Registry for most community decisions. We currently use Jokerace for this task and plan to integrate our own custom TCR capabilities directly within our dApp.
  • Distribution: The process of distributing funds to projects, carried out by Ships to Grantees from their allocated resources.
  • Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): EAS allows users to make attestation on or off chain, about anything.
  • Facilitators: Central role within the game charged with daily oversight and operational tasks, including approving milestones by grantees and releasing funds.
  • Flags: A system in which a game facilitator can issue warnings to a ship or halt its activities altogether.
  • Grant Ship: A “subDAO” of Ship Operators, ideally comprised of ApeCoin DAO members who are most closely connected to the DAO’s requirements and culture.
  • Grant Ships: A decentralized, competitive framework for grant distribution.
  • Hats Protocol: A protocol that employs NFTs for role management, enhancing security and flexibility in governance.
  • IPFS: Interplanetary File System is a decentralized data storage system.
  • KYC, KYB, KYT: Know Your Customer, Know Your Business and Know Your Transaction refers to processes that identify individuals using official identification documents and photos, to help with anti-sybil defense and legal compliance (e.g. anti-money laundering laws, sanctions lists, tax compliance, etc).
  • Milestone: A system used by Grant Ships, where grant applicants must submit proposals with clearly defined development milestones. Funds are released upon completion of these milestones, adding a layer of security for the DAO.
  • Ship Operators: Selected teams or individuals responsible for “manning a Grant Ship” - responsibile for distributing grants to projects within the Grant Ships program.
  • subDAO: A sub DAO refers to a semi-soveriegn entity within a DAO charged with making decisions within their area of expertise. In Grant Ships, a Grant Ship is a subDAO, comprised of members of ApeCoin DAO charged with awarding grants.
  • Token Curated Registry (TCR): A Token Curated Registry (TCR) is a mechanism that leverages token-based incentives to maintain a list of curated items or entries. In a TCR, token holders vote on a list of items and balance their votes based on preference of choice.

PLATFORMS & TECHNOLOGIES:

Grant Ships integrates Allo Protocol for fund management and Hats Protocol for dynamic role governance, alongside custom smart contracts to ensure security, transparency, and efficacy in grant allocation.

  • Allo Protocol: developed by Gitcoin, Allo allows for secure fund allocation and distribution. Individual Ships are allocated funding for a particular grants season. These funds are redistributed as Grants, based on a Ship’s allocation decisions. Ship operators do not have direct access to funds after they are deposited into our custom Allo contract. When a Ship chooses to award a grant a Game Facilitator finalizes the allocation, and then Grant Ships are free to make distributions after successful completion of milestones.

  • Hats Protocol: - Grant Ships has integrated Hats protocol into our allocation strategy contract to provide revocable, reassignable permissions to game participants in the form of an ERC1155 NFT known as a “Hat”. This mechanism allows the DAO itself to hold something called a “Top Hat” which grants it the right to revoke or reassign all roles beneath it. Game Facilitators and Grant Ship Operators are granted permission to allocate and distribute funds by their Hats, and those Hats are in turn managed by the DAO.

Other technologies that we have implemented and/or plan to integrate to improve the game include:

  • Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): Used to attest that Grant Ship operators agree not to fund projects aimed at avoiding legal sanctions or engaging in other criminal activities. Learn more about EAS
  • IPFS: Some vital metadata from the game is stored on IPFS. Learn more about IPFS
  • Impact Evaluation: Grant Ships provides numerous onchain events detailing all activity within the grants program, which can be fed into external impact evaluation programs. This is a conscious decision to not directly implement impact evaluation and instead operate as a data source for whichever evaluation mechanism the DAO chooses to use.
  • JokeRace: We use JokeRace for our token curated voting and we are currently designing an integrated voting mechanism for the future. Learn more about JokeRace
  • The Graph and/or GoldSky: - We currently use the Graph and GoldSky for our Data indexing services switching between them based on which is working better at the moment.
    Used for data indexing services. Learn more about The Graph

STEPS TO IMPLEMENT & TIMELINE:

  1. Smart Contract Development & Audit: (Week 1-4) We are working on our live beta test now (starting Apr 22) sponsored by Arbitrum DAO. We anticipate some needed changes to the core contracts after the test. This is also an opportunity to make minor customizations needed for the ApeCoin round and to perform a final audit before launch.
  2. Community Engagement: (Week 1-3 concurrent) Engage the community and recruit initial Ship operators.
  3. Ship Operator Voting: (Week 4-5) We learned during our pilot program with Arbitrum DAO that it is best for the DAO to determine who will be Ship Operators. We suggest one week for applicants to make their proposals and one week for voting.
  4. Ship Operator Training: (Week 6) We require about 3 days to show operators how to use the App and what functions they will be required to perform.
  5. Facilitator Training:(Week 6-20 - 15 weeks) We will operate as Game Facilitators and would like to train 1-2 ApeCoin members to operate as Game Facilitators, so that ApeCoin can choose to autonomously run Grant Ship rounds in the future if it chooses. It is not the intention of DAO Masons to have our involvement be a requirement to play, in fact it is our goal to create a decentralized game, able to stand on its own.
  6. Game Round Begins: (Week 7-18 - 12 weeks): After Ship Operators are selected and trained, we suggest a 3 month funding round. This round would be broken down as follows:
    • Week 7: Ships marketing for the upcoming round and soliciting project applications.
    • Weeks 8-9: Grant applications, recipient selections and initial allocations
    • Week 10-18: Project work, milestone submissions and fund distributions
    • Week 19: DAO Vote on relative performance of Grant Ships
  7. Program Evaluation (Week 19-20 2 weeks): Assess program impact and consider running a second round, using the DAO’s vote to determine relative funding levels of Ships.

Total Timeline: 20 Weeks

DAO Masons high-level deliverables

  • Pre-audit contract customizations
  • Contract Audit (outsourced)
  • Priority front-end feature request and bug fix service
  • Custom “Ape Ships” branded front end deploy (see ape.grantships.fun)
  • Game Facilitator and Operator training and onboarding
  • Ongoing support for 20 week program
  • Game Facilitator service including:
    • Grant Ships contract configuration & deploy
    • Game configuration & launch
    • Applicant screening w/KYB, KYC, AML, etc.
    • ApeCoin-specific policy compliance

OVERALL COST:

  • Grant Allocation: 450,000 $APE (150,000 $APE per Grant Ship).
  • Program Development, Training & Management by DAO Masons: 100,000 $APE.
  • Total Request: 550,000 $APE

Mini Linktree

@Facilitators

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This was our appearance on the Green Pill Podcaast!

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Hey Grant Ships team! :wave:

Thanks for putting this back up! I’m happy to see other teams proposing alternative platforms for funding quality ideas! I’ve long been of the position that we aren’t really a “DAO” until we democratize access to capital, and unfortunately (despite my best efforts) our AIP process became slower and even more burdensome for authors this year.

I hope Grant Ships can serve as a fun additional pathway for APEs with good ideas. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Hello, Matt here with the DAO Masons team. Thanks for the invite to continue the conversation, you guys have been great. I wanted to emphasize a few key points from the original post.

  1. Previous Thread: The previous forum post that Chris linked has a lot of great Q&A on it that is worth looking at for additional context.

  2. Primary Benefit to ApeCoin: The main benefit I see for ApeCoin DAO using Grant Ships is speed through delegation. You can use it to target multiple smaller projects without doing an AIP for each one. Grant Ships is a governance system for grants disguised as a game. So if you fund it and authorize this ruleset for handling grants, you’ll have trusted teams within your DAO distributing funds in no time - securely, transparently and with functional accountability.

  3. Beta Test: We are currently running our beta test, distributing 90,000 ARB for “Gaming in Arbitrum”. Scoping out our beta test (and potentially getting involved) would be a good way to understand what Grant Ships is offering. That 90K is available to anybody building games and game tooling on Arbitrum, so if that’s you… https://app.grantships.fun

  4. Ape Ships Test Container: We set up an “Ape Ships” instance of Grant Ships on Arb Sepolia testnet as a demo. Feel free to click around and submit whatever you want there. If you’d like Operator permissions just let me know and we’ll assign you a Hat so you can see how that part of the app works. https://ape.grantships.fun/

We’re excited about what we’ve built here because it really does solve a specific pain that we’ve felt in every DAO we’ve been in (How to give solid, quick, accountable grants?) and we’re getting good feedback and momentum from the community. It would be really awesome if this is a fit for ApeCoin and I hope we can find a win/win so you can put it to good use and have the support for ApeChain infra there when you need it.

Our proposal is here as a starting point, please share your questions/concerns and we’ll do our best to accomodate. Thank you!

1 Like
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Thanks for the comment @Amplify
I really want to emphasize that a major part of the funding in this proposal goes directly back into the community through projects that build on Ape Chain. The rest of the funding would be deployed to build a customized version of the Grant Ships dApp and in making the application as robust as possible.

1 Like
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Hi @boiler,

The community feedback period for your proposal would be ending in roughly 24 hours.

  • If you’re content with the feedback received, your next steps are to finalize your proposal using the AIP Draft Template.

  • A moderator will reach out to the author to finalize the AIP Draft. Upon receipt of the final Draft, we will review and provide instructions on the next steps.

  • Are you ready to proceed to the next phase or do you wish to extend community discussion for another 7 days?

We look forward to hearing from you.

-@Facilitators

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This topic was automatically closed after 7 days. New replies are no longer allowed.

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Hi @boiler,

Thank you for your ideas [and the ApeCoin DAO community for the insightful discussions].

A moderator will reach out to the author to finalize the AIP Draft using the appropriate template.

  • Once the AIP Draft is confirmed by the author and meets all DAO-approved guidelines, it will receive an AIP ID number and move forward for Draft Analysis Review.
  • @boiler please see your messages for the next steps.

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments. In accordance with DAO-approved guidelines, if the author does not respond within 30 days, the proposal will be automatically transferred to the Withdrawn category, and the author can re-submit the idea.

-@Facilitators