The Future of Grant Accountability is On-Chain

The Problem: Public goods funding is a popularity contest with no accountability for long-term impact. The Solution: A recurring, community-voted rewards system that funds past contributions, creating a merit-based reputation graph.\n- $100M+ distributed across 3 rounds, creating a public ledger of value.\n- Badgeholder system uses on-chain identity (e.g., AttestationStation, Gitcoin Passport) to curate voters.

The Problem: Launching a transparent grant program requires rebuilding the wheel—from applications to voting to payouts. The Solution: A suite of composable, EVM-native smart contracts that let any DAO or community run its own grants program.\n- Programmable round managers enable quadratic funding, direct grants, and milestone-based streams.\n- Sybil resistance is baked in via integration with Gitcoin Passport and EAS attestations.

The Problem: Grant platforms are centralized bottlenecks with high operational overhead and fees. The Solution: A fully on-chain, protocol-native QF system that runs on a zk-SNARK-based MACI for privacy and anti-collusion.\n- Zero platform fees; all operations are trustless smart contract calls.\n- MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) ensures voter privacy and prevents bribery, a critical flaw in naive QF.

The Problem: Grants are given as lump sums, with no mechanism to ensure work is completed before full payment. The Solution: Ragequit-enabled funding through Moloch v2 and v3 frameworks, where funds are escrowed and released only upon milestone approval.\n- Grants become programmable streams with built-in accountability hooks.\n- Failed projects? Unused funds are ragequit back to the treasury, preventing capital lockup.

The Problem: Manually verifying grant milestones is slow, subjective, and doesn't scale. The Solution: A protocol that uses on-chain and off-chain verifiers (like Orao Network) to automatically validate deliverables and trigger payments.\n- Conditional payouts are triggered by verified GitHub commits, NFT mints, or smart contract deployments.\n- Integrates directly with Safe{Wallet} for automated, multi-sig enforced treasury management.

The Problem: Funding is retrospective, making it hard to fund ambitious, long-term R&D projects upfront. The Solution: An ERC-1155 standard for representing and funding future work, creating a tradable market for impact.\n- Impact certificates are minted for future goals, fractionally funded, and later retired upon proof of work.\n- Enables retroactive airdrops to early funders, aligning long-term incentives between builders and backers.

Traditional grant reporting is a manual, trust-based process. Funders see PDFs, not progress. Builders waste weeks on administrative overhead instead of building. This creates zero accountability loops and misaligned incentives.

• Key Benefit 1: Replace narrative reports with verifiable, on-chain KPIs (e.g., contract deployments, user growth, TVL).
• Key Benefit 2: Automate milestone verification using oracles like Chainlink or custom attestations, freeing up ~40% of operational overhead.

Move from upfront lump-sum grants to capital streams tied to objective, on-chain milestones. Use smart contract-based vesting (e.g., Sablier, Superfluid) that releases funds upon verification.

• Key Benefit 1: Drastically reduce grantee default risk by aligning payout with delivery.
• Key Benefit 2: Enable dynamic funding models where capital efficiency is transparently tracked, attracting follow-on funding from protocols like Optimism's RetroPGF or Arbitrum's STIP.

On-chain accountability requires a standard for proving real-world and on-chain work. Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Hypercerts provide the schema to issue, store, and verify attestations of grant progress.

• Key Benefit 1: Create a portable, composable reputation layer for grantees across ecosystems.
• Key Benefit 2: Enable retroactive funding models where funders like Gitcoin can allocate capital based on proven, attested impact, not promises.

Forget vanity metrics. The new KPI for funders is Return on Verified Impact—the on-chain measurable outcome per dollar deployed. This turns grant programs into data-driven portfolios.

• Key Benefit 1: Enable quantitative comparison between grant programs across Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos ecosystems.
• Key Benefit 2: Attract institutional capital by providing auditable, chain-analyzable proof of development velocity and ecosystem growth.

Builders who instrument their projects for automatic, on-chain reporting will have a structural advantage. Integrate milestone tracking natively into your dApp's logic or use middleware like Goldsky for subgraph analytics.

• Key Benefit 1: Reduce fundraising friction by providing funders with a live dashboard of your project's KPIs.
• Key Benefit 2: Qualify for automated, recurring grants from programs that use on-chain oracles for verification, creating a sustainable funding runway.

Major ecosystem funds like Polygon, Base, and Avalanche must fund the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) infrastructure itself. This means grants for attestation oracles, milestone automation platforms, and ROVI analytics dashboards.

• Key Benefit 1: Compoundable accountability—each grant to the M&E stack improves transparency for all future grants.
• Key Benefit 2: Create a defensible moat by establishing your chain as the most transparent and efficient capital allocator in the space.