The Unseen Tax of Grant Application Churn

The problem: Running a grants program is a full-time job requiring custom tech, manual review, and fraud detection. The solution: A modular, open-source stack for program managers. It automates application intake, review, and quadratic funding distribution.

• Program-as-a-Service: Launch a custom grants round in days, not months.
• Sybil Resistance: Integrates with Passport and BrightID to filter bots.
• On-Chain Payouts: Automates multi-chain disbursement to ~1000+ recipients per round.

The problem: Traditional quadratic funding leaks information, enabling collusion and voter coercion. The solution: Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) enables private, coercion-resistant voting on grants.

• Cryptographic Privacy: Voter choices are hidden, preventing bribery.
• On-Chain Verifiability: All steps are provably correct without revealing data.
• Radical Trust Minimization: Eliminates the need for a trusted tallying committee.

The problem: Grant funding is a public good with no sustainable yield, relying on volatile treasury donations. The solution: Directs restaked ETH yield from EigenLayer operators into a community-governed grants pool.

• Sustainable Treasury: Generates ~3-5% APY from cryptoeconomic security.
• Programmable Yield: Community votes to allocate staking rewards to selected grantees.
• Capital Efficiency: Unlocks productive yield from otherwise idle protocol-owned assets.

The problem: Over-engineered governance leads to voter apathy and proposal paralysis. The solution: A brutalist, gas-optimized smart contract framework for small, focused grant committees.

• Ragequit: Members can exit with proportional funds if they disagree with a grant, preventing forks.
• Streaming Funds: Approved grants disburse over time, enabling milestone-based accountability.
• Low-Friction Voting: ~$5 gas cost per proposal vote versus $100+ in generic DAO tooling.

Researchers spend 30-50% of their time on grant administration, not research. The current system is a winner-take-most lottery where >90% of proposals fail, wasting thousands of collective hours. This churn creates a massive, unaccounted-for tax on innovation.

• Opportunity Cost: Lost R&D cycles on speculative paperwork.
• Centralized Gatekeeping: Funding decisions bottlenecked by small committees.
• Misaligned Incentives: Grants reward proposal writing, not reproducible results.

Flip the model: fund what has already proven its value. Protocols like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Gitcoin allocate capital to projects after they deliver public goods. This eliminates grant writing churn and aligns incentives with tangible outcomes.

• Efficiency: Capital flows to proven utility, not promises.
• Meritocracy: The market of users and builders signals value.
• Scalability: $100M+ already allocated across major RPGF rounds.

Pioneered by Moloch DAO, this model uses ragequit and guild-kick mechanisms to create fluid, low-friction funding collectives. Members can exit with their share of funds if they disagree with a grant, forcing consensus on value. This is the antithesis of rigid, bureaucratic grant foundations.

• Radical Accountability: Capital follows conviction via ragequit.
• Fast Iteration: Proposals are voted on in days, not months.
• Proven Model: Spawned $1B+ ecosystem including The LAO and Venture DAOs.

Projects like Hypercerts create non-fungible tokens representing a unit of impact (e.g., "CO2 sequestered"). Researchers can mint these for verifiable work, creating a liquid, tradeable asset for future RPGF rounds or direct market sales. This turns research output into a fundable primitive.

• Verifiable Proof: On-chain attestation of work and impact.
• Secondary Markets: Impact certificates can be traded or fractionalized.
• Composability: Integrates directly with RPGF and DAO tooling.

The future is small, fast, iterative grants. Platforms like clr.fund and Gitcoin Grants use quadratic funding to match community donations, validating ideas with micro-grants first. This creates a high-throughput funnel where many small experiments can be funded to find the few breakthrough projects.

• Low Friction: Application is often a short form and a video.
• Community Signal: Quadratic funding surfaces broadly supported work.
• Scalable Discovery: 10,000+ projects funded via this model to date.

The final barrier is converting research into sustainable revenue. DeSci platforms like VitaDAO (biotech) and LabDAO tokenize intellectual property and research data, creating a direct path for capital to fund and own a stake in early-stage science. This merges grant funding with venture capital efficiency.

• Assetization: IP and data become liquid, tradable assets.
• Global Capital Pool: Unlocks specialized investment at scale.
• Alignment: Researchers, funders, and token holders share in success.