Space Summary
The Twitter Space LUKSO Community Grants Round Kickoff hosted by gitcoin. The LUKSO Community Grants Round Kickoff space provided valuable insights into the pivotal role of grants in fostering community growth and project development. Emphasizing collaborations with platforms like Gitcoin Grants Program and @GrantsStack, the space highlighted the importance of community involvement and strategic partnerships. Discussions revolved around innovative grant structures, community engagement, and the impact of partnerships with entities such as GitcoinPassport and Allo Protocol. The session underscored the significance of grants in incentivizing creativity, driving innovation, and creating a supportive ecosystem for project initiatives.
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Questions
Q: How do grants contribute to the growth of communities and projects?
A: Grants provide essential funding and resources that fuel community initiatives and project development.
Q: What are the benefits of collaborating with platforms like Gitcoin Grants Program?
A: Collaborating with platforms like Gitcoin Grants Program offers exposure, funding opportunities, and access to a broader community.
Q: How can community involvement enhance the effectiveness of grant programs?
A: Community involvement leads to diverse perspectives, increased engagement, and better alignment with the needs of stakeholders.
Q: What role do partnerships with entities like Allo Protocol play in grant ecosystems?
A: Partnerships with entities like Allo Protocol bring expertise, resources, and support, enhancing the overall impact of grant initiatives.
Highlights
Time: 00:15:42
Importance of Grants for Community Growth Exploring how grants drive innovation, collaboration, and growth within communities.
Time: 00:23:18
Collaboration with Gitcoin Grants Program Discussing the benefits of partnering with Gitcoin Grants Program for project funding and visibility.
Time: 00:31:50
Community Engagement in Grant Initiatives Emphasizing the significance of community involvement in shaping successful grant programs.
Time: 00:42:12
Partnerships for Grant Program Expansion Examining the role of partnerships with entities like Allo Protocol in expanding the reach and impact of grant initiatives.
Key Takeaways
- Grants play a vital role in supporting community growth and project development.
- Collaborations with platforms like Gitcoin Grants Program and @GrantsStack are beneficial for project funding and visibility.
- Community involvement is crucial for the success and sustainability of grants initiatives.
- Partnerships with entities such as GitcoinPassport and Allo Protocol enhance the reach and impact of grant programs.
- Innovative grant structures can incentivize participation and drive creativity in project proposals.
Behind the Mic
Opening Remarks
Close. GMGM. Hello and welcome, everyone. How are you doing today? Hey, how are you? Good, good. Hello, Jonathan. Hello, everyone. Thanks for having us. How are you? Yeah, doing really good. It is a beautiful day here where I am in Cape Town, so, yeah, doing really well. Super excited about the space. Yeah, we are waiting for Saav. Sav is running a little late, but we can get started. In the meantime, just a reminder that if you are on the space right now, please, like, share, retweet, whatever you got to do to get more people in the space, it is also going to be recorded. So if anyone misses Out landen on being here, there will be a chance to catch up later. So I will just. We'll start with a round of intros and also what we're going to be discussing here today and then we'll get into the. Into the exciting parts of learning more about this really awesome round that just launched this week.
Introductions Begin
So, yeah, why don't we start with a round of intros, because I'm talking already. I'll go first. My name is Matala Hilda. I'm the grants program lead at Gitcoin. Yeah, super excited to be here. I'll throw it over to you first, Lara. Hey, thank you. Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Clara and I've been with Laxo and its growth team for over two and a half years now, working across areas like partnerships, hackathons and business development. And currently I lead our ecosystem funding initiatives at the foundation, including the grants program we launched this year. And, yeah, that's it from my side. Thanks so much for having us, Mathilda. Hey, everyone, this is Jonathan. I've been with Luxo for just over three years now. Yeah, working closely with Clara for the last couple of years on the growth side and happy to be here today. Amazing.
Saav's Arrival
And we just had Saav join us. Saav, welcome. Hello. Good morning. Evening. It is morning where you are. It is GM where I'm at. How's it going, everyone? Good to be here. I'm Saab. I do granted things at Gitcoin and I'm excited to be here with the team at Luxo and get things kicked off on this Qfron. And I'm outside right now as my car oil gets changed, so hopefully it's not too much background noise. I'm getting my money's worth out of these airpods with the noise canceling. So we'll see. So far so good. Amazing. Well, let's get into it. So let's first go into an introduction to Luxo.
Introduction to Luxo
I'm going to throw it over to you first, Jonathan. Yeah, happy to. So essentially we see the next wave of applications in web three to be around social, cultural and creative use cases such as decentralized social media, things around music, fashion, art and the like. And ultimately, in order to introduce this new technology to a more mainstream user, the core team at Luxo has spent the last four or five years building out a new set of core building blocks in which all of these use cases and applications could be built. On top of Luxo's, the blockchain is meant to be a place where developers now have the right foundations to build feature rich consumer dapps that are more human readable, more friendly to use than what's available in the space today.
The Future of Universal Profiles
And really, from a user perspective, we think the future of the Internet, web two, web three, is going to be around unifying profiles. So profiles that are not created on five different platforms, five different data silos, where you have to enter the same information over and over again, but instead on universal profiles, which we've created that act as kind of like the central source of truth, where your reputation and identity is self sovereign and can be brought across different environments in the digital world and across the apps in web three.
Luxo Grants Program and Community Approach
Yes, for sure. I already mentioned that we launched Lakso Grants program this year, which offers direct grants in regular ways to support projects, developers and founders. And yeah, this has been a very exciting milestone for us, but from the start it was important to our team to create a more decentralized and kind of community led approach alongside these direct groundwaves. So yeah, we are really excited to run this first Luxo community grants round in partnership with Gitcoin and where we will be using project funding to create a more democratic and community led process for distributing funds. And yeah, also I think this round on Gitcoin has been a long time coming. We've worked with the Gitcoin team and related projects for quite some time. Our first ever large hackathon was actually hosted on Gitcoin's Legacy Hackathon platform, and the one after that was hosted on Builderbox, which is a project created by former Gitcoin team members, as you know.
Community Engagement Through Hackathons
And yeah, I think all these hackathons were great initiatives for our developer community to grow, to collaborate and get support and yeah, and then actually in that very first hackathon, we introduced a community award based on credit voting, where our community could vote for their favorite submissions. And I think it was, yeah. Quite a positive and very engaging experience for both the builders that participated in the hackathon and then the community members who voted and kind of cheered them on. Nice. And just to jump in here, this is something that I personally have been working on with the Luxo team for some time. Jonathan and I actually started conversations when I was at a different organization and have been keeping in touch over time. So I'm super excited to see this kicking off.
Preparation for the Grants Round
I've been working a lot with Clara and the Luxo team to put together the eligibility criteria. We're going, we're going to leave about painting September pink with Luxo. So here it finally is. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'd love for you to also chat about what excites you about this round specifically for your builder community. Yeah, I can take that one. Also, I think one of the things that excites me or I think our team most about this round is the exposure our builders will gain through Gitcoin's community, your public forums and the grants stack itself. And I think it's an amazing opportunity to connect with a broader audience.
Insights from Community Interaction
And also what's really interesting is how this round will give us valuable insights and information into what the community values most based on how they choose to signal by allocating the matching pool with their direct donations. And yeah, I think another point also is that for anyone who unfortunately didn't make it for the very first round of our direct grants program, this is a fantastic opportunity to still get first support in funding their project. And yeah, I think overall I'm just super excited to see how this round evolves and see a deeper collaboration between the Luxo builder community and the Gitcoin community, especially since Gitcoin plays such a central role in the web three grants and developer space.
Quadratic Funding Round Insights
Yeah, that's it from my side. Yeah. And then I'll throw over to Jonathan. Yeah, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I'm curious. I mean, this is the first quadratic funding round you are running. Correct. And you've chosen grantstack to do that. So I'd love for you to dig more into. Yeah, into that. What inspired that as well? Yeah. As Clara had mentioned before, we've been working closely and following the developments of Gitcoin over the last two years and definitely a very passionate team approaching the space in the right mind and really pushing the limits of innovation when it comes to building out the required tools, very required tools within the space to help fund open source projects.
Configurations for Grant Stack
And so when it came to the grant stack and us doing more research and looking into it more, we really like the fact that it's a very modular system, allows us to customize the needs specific to our grant program through whether it's voting mechanisms or quadratic funding or unique allocation strategies. For us, it's essential for us to be able to support with a community driven approach where funding is allocated in a fair and democratic way. The Kikoin grantstack for this funding round enables us to do exactly that. It's been a long time coming, I have to say. You know, we're both really excited to start this journey together.
Launching Applications for Grants
Yeah, I love that. Super exciting to see this round launch. Yeah, I love it so much. Also, now that, you know, we have covered all the, you know, the background and what inspired this round, let's get into the meat of it. So applications have actually kicked off this week, I believe. Yeah, it was a few days ago. So now, for everyone listening, how can prospective grantees actually start getting involved in this round? Yeah, yeah, we kicked off the applications a few days ago and the first ones already trickled in and applications are open until September 10. But I'd recommend everyone checking out the link to our round on Gitcoin to get the exact deadline in your local time so you don't miss it.
Eligibility Criteria and Focus Areas
And on that same page you will find eligibility criteria we've set up in collaboration with SOF, as he mentioned, and we tailored these criteria to focus on our existing community for this first Gitcoin round. So just from a high level perspective, for technical projects, we are looking for those that leverage Lexus technology stacks. So having a working MVP that uses universal profiles and LSPs, so lots of standard proposals.
Eligibility Criteria for Non-Technical Projects
And then for non technical projects like community or educational initiatives, we are prioritizing applicants who've actively contributed to our ecosystem over the past three months at least. And yeah, this is to ensure that we are rewarding and kind of protecting our loyal community members. But we, of course, still want to encourage newcomers to our ecosystem for future rounds we will run. But yeah, these are just two of the core high level eligibility criteria, so I highly recommend reading through the full set of seven conditions we came up with before you submit your application.
Support and Communication Channels
And yeah, excuse me, I'm coughing, but yeah, for anyone that has questions, we've also set up a gitcoin round corner on our discord server. So yeah, you will find all the relevant links there. And we also have an open support channel where you can post questions and we will support you with any questions, you might have.
Quadratic Funding: A Collaborative Effort
Something I'd kind of jump in here, too, that I like to throw out there with any QF rounds that we're running, especially with communities that we're just kind of starting to run them with you. Definitely for any grantees entering into the round, you definitely want to look at this as not PvP. And what I mean by that is you're not, you don't want to look at it where you're competing against others in the round. I mean, obviously there's going to be someone who finishes first in terms of donations and who finishes last. Right? But really, with QF rounds, part of the opportunity that you have with them is like, if we can get a lot of participation for many different projects entering into the round, what we know based on running a lot of these rounds from the getcoin side of things is like, very rarely does a donor come in and donate to just one project. Typically they donate to multiple projects.
Activate Your Community
Actually, if they come in and donate to just one project, that's a great signal that is probably some sort of civil attack. And so what that means for all the grantees participating in the round is with quadratic funding, the onus is as much on you as it is on Luxo and Gitcoin to drive interest and awareness for the round. And so go out, activate your community, get people to come in, vote with their tokens or their dollars towards your cause, and then ultimately that's going to help benefit not just you, but everyone in the round that gets those donations. The more you can create this as a rising tide, I like to say, where if all the projects can get supporters to come in and, you know, help to contribute, help to donate, you know, that helps the round as a whole.
Impact of Participation
And it really starts to build the case back up to the team at Luxo to kind of show this round was worthwhile, this was something that the community stepped in and, you know, kind of fund our shared needs, you know, and it may be something that we can continue, you know, with future rounds, maybe with some, you know, updates and, you know, changes over time, kind of based on what we learned from this one, right. Very different from, say, direct grants wherever I. With direct grants, you know, you submit an application to an RFP and typically there's only, you know, one or two people or projects that are so. Right. Quadratic funding rounds really offer the potential for lots of different grantees to come into the round, lots of different people to participate.
Opportunities and Visibility for Grantees
It can give signal, you know, to ecosystems like Luxo, who might be looking to provide more direct grants of, you know, more significant amounts, which projects were able to activate their community well, and which would be a good fit, you know, for follow on direct grants or other types of funding opportunities. It can also give you exposure to that wider Luxo community as many different projects bring their people in to help support the round. And it also helps to build a network of the different grantees that are all participating in the round. Because, as Clara mentioned intentionally, the grantees participating in this round are going to be a good representation of that wider Luxo ecosystem at a high level.
Collaborative Approach
Let's look at it that way. This should be collaborative across all the different grantees in the round. And, you know, everyone should really be participating, you know, that way.
Presenting Projects Effectively
Yeah, I love that. And then one other thing also that I wanted touch on is for the donation phase, it's important for projects to present their projects to the Gitcoin and Luxo community on Twitter. John, do you have any tips for grantees listening right now? Yeah, that's a good question.
Engagement with the Community
I mean, like, we have a really, within the Luxo community, a really eclectic group of community members, builders and creatives. You know, they're very keen to discover and contribute to projects at an early stage. I would definitely encourage all applicants, if you haven't already, to engage with our community, really take the time to explain on Twitter why you're participating in the round, what you're trying to build, what your platform offers to the ecosystem in the space more generally. Do remember to use the hashtag Luxo community grants.
Amplifying Your Projects
It's going to help you to get notice and be sure to tag our official accounts so that we can help amplify your projects. Ultimately, the more the community can better understand what you're hoping to contribute to the ecosystem, the easier it is for them to get involved and to align where their shared interests are. So those would be my recommendations.
Understanding Quadratic Funding
And I could probably jump in here too, just to kind of make sure, you know, everyone's understanding of quadratic funding, right? Like, you may have heard that term before, and this might be your first time participating in one of these kinds of rounds. You know, ultimately, quadratic funding presents a way that you can democratically allocate capital versus that being, you know, just a centralized decision. So, you know, at a high level, if we look at an example of direct grants in many ways that's similar to a QF round, you're still going to establish an eligibility criteria, you're still going to have people apply to the round, you know, someone's going to be making decisions on what grantees are approved or not.
Differences in Funding Rounds
In a QF round, all of that is the same. But what's different is once grantees are approved into the round, with the round opens up, it opens up almost kind of like a crowdfunding round. So if you're familiar with Kickstarter and GoFundMe, similar to that, people will come in and they'll vote with their tokens or dollars all on chain to the projects that they want to support. It's kind of a very basic shopping cart experience that they'll be able to see, you know, on Grantstack as they do that.
Voting System in Quadratic Funding
But what happens in the background is those donations count as votes. And so a very simple example of this is, let's say there's two projects. Project A gets one donation for $100, Project B gets ten donations for $10. Both of those projects received $100, but Project B received more votes. So they're going to get a higher proportional share of the matching pool that's put up. So really what this allows for is projects to see direct donations that'll be streamed to your wallet instantly as those come in.
Matching Pool Mechanics
And then there's a matching pool that Luxo has put up that at the end of the round will tally up the votes. We do some checks on our end to look for civil attacks, right? Because quadratic funding rounds are the susceptible if you don't have good, you know, controls in place, where someone could create a bunch of wallets or a bunch of bots to donate to their project and try and game the round.
Protection Measures Against Civil Attacks
And so there's certain protections we put in place, both from matching caps where no one project can receive more than a total percentage of the overall matching pool. And then there's data that Gitcoin has been building up over time that helps us to look at known civil rings, wallets that cluster together all types of information, that helps us kind of validate the credibility of the round and provide those results to the Luxo team and then ultimately release what those matching results are.
Payout Process for Grants
Once the matching results are approved, there'll be a payout that will happen where the matching funds will be allocated based on the matching amounts to all the wallets, right?
Setting Expectations for Grantees
And so just to set the expectation for grantees, you know, one, you want to bring people into the round, have them support your round, have them support others, right? Like I talked about before, as those donations come in, the donations will be streamed instantly, and then at the end of the round, that's when the final payout will occur. If you go to the Explorer dashboard, which I think we've linked here, you can see as projects are approved into the round, once donations start to come in and the round opens, you'll see the donation amounts and then at the end of the round we'll tally up and we'll release the matching results, which will also populate on that dashboard. So if there's ever any questions on this round or quadratic funding in general, feel free to ping me and DM's on Telegram.
Communication and Support Channels
Ping in the grant channel that Clara mentioned on the discord. I'm happy to hop in and help there as well, but it's part of the exciting thing. I'm probably biased because I contributed gitcoin, but, you know, QF rounds really offer the potential to allow a community to make decisions on how capital is allocated and participate in that process versus to be more centralized decision making. Yeah, couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you so much for that clarification, sav. I want to. Before we. I think we've pretty much covered everything. Before we open the floor up to questions, I just want to throw it over to any of our speakers to see if there's anything else that you wanted to add before we. Yeah, before we throw it over to anyone that has questions.
Key Dates and Application Deadlines
And then we'll also just remind everyone of key dates at the end of this round of the space. Not the round, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I think I just wanted to remind everyone once more that applications will be open until September 10, so make sure not to miss that deadline. And, yeah, I'm just super excited because I think this round is such a great opportunity for both builders and the community to get involved and help grow our ecosystem together. Whether you're a project that's looking for funding or community members supporting your favorite initiatives, I think, yeah, it's a great opportunity to see that everyone can participate collaboratively, also along the lines of what software mentioned to help shape.
Encouragement for Community Participation
Yeah. Luxo ecosystem, but also on a broader scale, the web three. The web three space. Amazing. Well, let's go over into questions. So I would recommend anyone that wants to come up on stage and ask a question, feel free. If you don't want to come up on stage, feel free to also just drop a comment below the space. I'll make sure to just keep an eye on that as well. If you do have a question for the gitcoin or the Luxo team. So we have one speaker coming up on stage now. Juergen, go ahead. Oh, are you there. Juergen? Maybe not. Okay, well, yeah, I think.
Final Thoughts and Resources
I don't see anyone else requesting. I think we've pretty much covered everything but yeah, I think that is it. I will hand it over to the speakers for any other last final thoughts and then, yeah, just maybe remind us, Clara, where people can go to get all the information of the round and yeah. Yes, for sure. I think the most convenient way. Besides having a look at all the announcement posts both Gitcoin and Luxo posted with the relevant links on Discord, you will find an overview of the round description, the round details and all relevant links and also links to dive deeper into credit funding so you can read up on also what Soph just explained so thoroughly.
Appreciation and Support Channels
And yeah, this is also just again, to mention it one more time, this is also where you have an open support channel where you can reach out to both our teams to get support if needed. And on my end, just want to say sincere thank you to the Gitcoin team. You know, Saav, Matilda, you know, Harry, Johanna, like, you guys have been awesome in supporting us throughout this whole process and, yeah, very excited for this and it's going to be a great start to our fruitful journey over time. So thank you. I guess I can round it off just by saying I see a lot of lyxs here in the chat and so I'd love to see those applications roll in, you know, from there's any questions, you know, again, I want to make this round successful so we can have future rounds, you know, at Gitcoin, we're all about spreading capital allocation and novel funding mechanisms and so, you know, we're excited to kind of embark on that path with the Luxo community, you know, starting here with QF.
Moving Forward Together
And let's make this the first but not the last QF round. And that's as much all of you as it is on us, you know, so let's work together to achieve that. Love it. Amazing. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for making the time and thank you for everyone that joined us today. Yeah, go get your applications in and I'm super excited for this round to keep, for donations to also kick off. Yeah, super excited. Amazing. Thank you so much. Amazing. Thank you so much for hosting, Matilda. Thanks, Matilda. Yep. Have a good rest of your day. You too.
