Abstract Summary: This AIP provides for $200,000 in APE to fund hackathons and grant programs for people building for ApeCoin. The funding will be distributed across three initiatives: Ethereum Foundation’s upcoming ETHOnline hackathon, a dedicated Gitcoin ApeCoin ecosystems grant program, and Gitcoin’s Change program.
Participating in these initiatives gets ApeCoin more visibility and encourages developers to build for this community. It also serves as a way for ApeCoin to support public goods and other communities.
This AIP requested $200k in APE to fund two public goods initiatives: sponsoring the ETHSF hackathon and sponsoring a Gitcoin grants program.
$45k of the budget was used to sponsor the ETHGlobal SF hackathon, which took place in November 2022. The event had over 1,700 hackers in attendance, 38% of whom were new to web3! This was also the first hackathon ApeCoin sponsored, and we received 36 project submissions and awarded $10k in prizes across 6 teams. MAYC-inspired game Another World won a top prize, and that team has continued to build on top of the hackathon project.
Unfortunately, the Gitcoin grants program did not get off the ground. This was due to a combination of (1) Gitcoin was moving fully on-chain, and put a pause on new programs in 1H 2023; and (2) running a dedicated ApeCoin grants program required significant time and resources to implement successfully, and my availability to run the program changed by the time we were ready to go live.
I spoke with many DAO members about helping me run the program, but ultimately was unable to find someone who could support the scope of work needed. Gitcoin was great and offered to support our efforts, but it was clear the program would be most successful with a dedicated ApeCoin stakeholder who could manage the end-to-end process.
Ultimately we decided to cancel the Gitcoin portion of the grant. The program was never funded, so the unused funds were released back to the DAO treasury.
I hope we can try another Gitcoin grants program at another time - it’s a great initiative and a great team. But really happy we were able to sponsor ETHGlobal SF with this AIP!