Making It Rain - The Daily Gwei #205
Sharing the love of the bull market one grant at a time.
The bull market has been kind to many of us who were loading up on various crypto-assets in 2018/19/20 and a lot of these gains are now being reinvested into the ecosystem via various means. On top of that, there are grants programs that popular DeFi projects are running that pay out grants from their enormous treasuries to various ecosystem projects.
The Uniswap “DAO” has a massive treasury with over $1 billion worth of UNI under management and more continuing to vest out over time (the remaining unvested amount is worth around $14 billion). To manage these funds, the ‘UNI Grants’ program was created which accepts applications for funding from time to time. Yesterday, the group announced that they had awarded $750,000 to 23 grantees which include things like event sponsorships (including Gitcoin Grants), community grants, usability grants and more. How awesome is that? A DAO giving back to the Ethereum community via treasury funds.
Now, Uniswap isn’t the only treasury that is doing this - there are plenty of other projects like Harvest Finance, BadgerDAO, Index Coop and more that pay out from their treasuries. Some have grants programs, some pay people to work for the DAO directly from the treasury and some will even yield farm or strategically allocate capital as their community sees fit. The best DAOs are the ones who do all of these things because these are pure community building tools - there is no better way to build a community than giving them skin in the game via ownership in the protocol (aka governance tokens).
Of course, DAOs/treasuries aren’t the only ones raining money down on the ecosystem - we have plenty of individuals giving back in their own way whether it’s becoming a matching partner (or donating on) Gitcoin Grants, donating to charities, investing in new projects and more. I’ve written about it before but this is the magic of “number go up” - higher prices > people have more money > that money gets reinvested into the ecosystem and amazing things continue to be built.
The flip side to all of this is that if we go into another bear market most of this funding will unfortunately dry up. Though I don’t think it’ll be as bad as the 18/19 bear market because the smarter DAOs are actually diversifying their treasuries and not just keeping it all in volatile crypto-assets - they can even yield farm with stablecoins and still grow their treasury!
We’ve come a long way since 2017.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
Friendly reminder: Gitcoin Grants Matching Round 9 is now live which means you can donate to your favorite projects and get those donations matched quadratically! If you’d like to support all of the work I do at The Daily Gwei (both this newsletter and the YouTube Channel) then you can donate here. Thank you to all who donate!
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.