Gitcoin Grants Round 6: Our DeFi Grant Recipients

Gitcoin has officially launched Round 6 of their coveted CLR Grant matching round with a $175k up for grabs.

Gitcoin Grants Round 6 is here.

📆 FINAL DATES: 6/15/2020 – 7/2/2020
🌟 SHINY FEATURES: Bulk Checkout (!), new Grants Explorer
💰 $175K in matching funds, including $25K alongside @CryptoForBLM

Let’s build community, together 🌳https://t.co/dWx2i1vwiR

— Gitcoin (@gitcoin) June 16, 2020

For those unaware, Gitcoin Grants leverages quadratic funding to match donations relative to the number of unique individual contributors, rather than the total sum of those donations. To this end, we’ve seen 1 DAI donations raise upwards of 100 DAI for different projects, making it a critical piece of funding infrastructure for grassroots projects.

Round 6’s $175,000 matching pool will be split as follows:

• $100k to Tech
• $50k to Community
• $25k to Black Live Matter

Beyond the matching pool, Round 6 also adds a number of new features to improve the donation experience including bulk check out – a way to add to all your grants to a shopping cart rather than having to process them one at a time.

If you like the new “add to cart” functionality in grants round 6, you should applaud/follow/hire @BenDiFrancesco @msolomon44 .

They made it happen.

They are the GOAT.

👏 👏 👏

— ΞWoki, GITer of Coins (@owocki) June 17, 2020

Lastly, Round 6 includes the ability to verify your identity using SMS verification. Seeing as many pointed out the potential risks in security and opsec with this, Gitcoin has chosen to make this feature optional and will likely reward those who verify their identity with more matching weight.

Now, while Round 6 is off to a bit of a slower start than normal, we want to take this article to highlight 5 projects we’re donating to!

Zapper

As a leading asset management tool, Zapper is a grassroots project which is entirely self-funded. Following the recent merger between DeFiZap and DeFiSnap, Zapper has deployed a suite of new features including Pool Piping and Balancer integrations. It’s said that funds from this round will be used to incubate a native governance token so we’re super keen to see that pan out!

DeFi Saver

Speaking of self-funded asset management tools, DeFi Saver has long solidified their value to the wider DeFi landscape through their Maker Vault protection features. Outside of saving dozens of Vault owners with Flash Loans on Black Thursday, the DeFi Saver team continues to display their unique insight into how to better protect DeFi users from unexpected risk through a novel dashboard. Check out their Grant here!

Umbra

As one of the winners of HackMoney, Umbra’s privacy-preserving product for stealth payment is a must-have for anyone freelancing in the Ethereum ecosystem. After hearing Vitalik say “I would use this” on the HackMoney finalist judging Q&A it’s obvious that this hackathon project needs to be turned into a full-time project. While it’s a small start, we believe seeding Umbra with a donation would go a long way in allowing the creators to further advance the project in a fully dedicated capacity.

Oya Protocol

On the HackMoney finalist front, we’ve also chosen to give a grant to Oya Protocol – a web3 based checkout solution that allows merchants to receive crypto as payment for goods and services. Geared at making a plug and play model for any eCommerce shop to quickly integrate the Oya SDK, the premise of using Ethereum’s immutable ledger to verify delivery through a smart contract-based escrow could be a huge win for buyer and sellers all around the globe. The hack also hinted at rolling out a native token – OYA – and is one we’ll definitely be watching as it continues to develop.

DeFi777

Geared at lowing barriers to entry, DeFi777 provides an intuitive way to interact with top DeFi protocols like Uniswap using ENS domains and the ERC777 token standard. Instead of having to navigate to a dApp using an in-app browser, users can simply send ETH to something like dai.uniswap777.eth and receive DAI in return. Given the ERC777 standard got a bad rep after the dForce and imBTC hacks, this project can be seen as a silver lining showing the power of receiving hooks and the capacity for meta transactions. With funds from this grant being directed to a security audit, we’re quite excited to see where this goes and are hopeful it can bring some new life to the ERC777 standard.

Closing Thoughts

Outside of the 5 projects we just mentioned, there’s a ton of hidden talent worth looking into. After spending just 30 minutes scrolling the DeFi category I was able to find a bunch of exciting ideas looking to get off the ground.

If one thing is for certain, 1 DAI goes an extremely long way in helping these projects find their footing. More so than the monetary element itself, the ability to add a comment and give the creator motivation that their hard work is recognized is perhaps more important than the money itself.

 

Regardless, we’d like to applaud Gitcoin for their continued improvement on the Grants process. If you’re a fan of Gitcoin Grants, please consider donating to the Grants Development Fund to keep the program running at full speed!

Are you a Grant Creator? Be sure to check out Gitcoin’s KERNEL incubator to join minds with the industry’s brightest rising talent!

In the meantime, be sure to follow Gitcoin on Twitter!