Karma GAP - Grantee Accountability and reputation protocol

Public Good Projects Discussion
1

Project Name

Karma GAP (Grantee Accountability Protoco)

Summary

Karma GAP (Grantee Accountability Protocol) is an onchain protocol and application for
grantee progress monitoring, reputation building and impact measurement. Grantees use our
protocol/application to keep their communities updated on their progress and build reputation (and attract more funding). Communities can stay upto date on grantee progress, review the grants and provide feedback and measure outcome and impact of the grants through decentralized reviews.

I believe our project can be qualified as Public Good because all our code is open source, data is onchain (except reviews that we are iterating and then will write to chain) and we don’t charge grantees
or communities.

Problem

Grant programs in the crypto ecosystem lack a standardized method for grantees to publish progress updates and milestones, leading to several issues:

Limited Accessibility: Currently, it is challenging for grant teams and the community to easily access and track project progress and milestones, as information is scattered across forums and external links.

Reputation Portability: Grantees who apply for grants from multiple organizations struggle to establish and carry their reputation consistently across the ecosystem. This is particularly difficult for individuals who are new to the ecosystem and need opportunities to showcase their work and build their reputation.

Inadequate Data Structure: The absence of structured data that can be accessed in a permissionless manner hampers the development of applications and analytical tools for evaluating grant impact and builder reputation.

Solution

To address the aforementioned problems, we built Grantee Accountability Protocol where grant teams can post information about the grant and grantees can post milestones and progress updates onchain. This solves a number of problems explained below

Onchain Reporting: Grantees will utilize the protocol to self-report their progress and milestones directly on the blockchain through EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service). Leveraging the existing support for EAS schemas, we will define schemas tailored to various reporting needs.

Universal data access: By storing all grant-related data onchain, we eliminate the need for manual searching and external links. We will build an interface for grantees and grant teams to interact with the protocol. Communities are not obligated to use this interface but are welcome to build their own interface to present this information in interesting ways.

Enhanced Reputation Building: Our protocol will enable the linking of team member profiles to specific projects. This feature empowers team members to build and showcase their reputation for their contributions. Additionally, this reputation can be carried over to other DAOs, opening opportunities for involvement in various areas of DAO governance or similar initiatives.

Grant Farming: It is well known in the ecosystem that there are teams who simply try to get grants and either don’t fully execute or do it with no goal of making the project a success. Having better visibility can help community and grant admins evaluate teams before issuing grants.

Facilitating Novel Applications: With comprehensive on-chain data available, the protocol encourages the development of innovative applications. Few applications we can think of that can be built on top of this protocol are:

  • Grantee reputation systems
  • Project impact analysis tools
  • Signaling for future grants
  • Auto monitor milestones and progress updates and alert the community
  • Endorsing teams and team members working on projects

Current Progress

We launched the protocol about 4 months ago. Since then we have accomplished the
following:

  1. We have onboarded Optimism, Arbitrum, Gitcoin, Public Nouns and Pokt on to the
    protocol.
  2. We made the protocol multichain. It is currently deployed on Optimism and
    Arbitrum networks. It can easily be deployed to any EVM chain.
  3. We have about 650 grants being tracked across various communities.
  4. We implemented decentralized reviews for grants. Community admin can choose the questions to ask and community can review the grant by answering those questions.

Project Roadmap

All our milestones we want to achieve are listed in our roadmap. They are:

  1. RetroPGF feature
  2. Grant programs onchain with reviews
  3. Auto load grants from various ecosystems
  4. Gamification/Points for incentivization to drive more grantees to post updates.
  5. Features to promote high quality projects

We are especially excited to build Grant Programs onchain with zkreviews. This will enable Octant to receive anonymous reviews from just addresses/users involved in Octant ecosystem. Our hope is the program will receive honest reviews which will help the program improve.

Current funding

For GAP, to date we have received a grant from Optimism (50K still locked) and Arbitrum (45K ARB).

Request

We would like to raise 10 ETH. The entire amount will be used towards development work for building everything listed in the roadmap.

Team

Karma has been building reputation tools in DAO space for about two years. Our team
members are:

  1. Mahesh Murthy - Founder: By background, he is a software engineer. He has
    experience building highly scalable systems for over a decade. His expertise is in turning ideas
    into user centric products. Prior to Karma, he was CTO/Cofounder and successfully built a
    startup with successful exit. https://twitter.com/mvmurthy
  2. Arthur Ulhoa: He is a backend engineer with number of years of experience building blockchain applications https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurulhoa/
  3. Fabian Ferno: Full stack developer with vast experience building blockchain applications. He has built an NFT analytics company in the past. He regularly participates in hackathons and has won a number of awards. https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabianferno/
  4. Paula Kennedy: Designer at Karma who is responsible for our incredibly looking website.
    Paula Kennedy - Graphite | LinkedIn
  5. Amaury Maghales: Frontend developer at Karma, expert in React and NextJS. https:/www.linkedin.com/in/Oxamaury/

Contact

You can reach out to me on Discord at mmurthy with any questions.

Links

Website: https://gap.karmahq.xyz
Twitter: https://twitter.com/karmahq_
Github: show-karma · GitHub
Discord: Karma

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Project Description:

Karma GAP (Grantee Accountability Protocol) is an onchain protocol and application for
grantee progress monitoring, reputation building and impact measurement. Grantees use our
protocol/application to keep their communities updated on their progress and build reputation (and attract more funding). Communities/Grant operators can get visibility into grantee’s historical grants, milestones they have completed, stay upto date on current grant progress, review the grants and provide feedback and measure outcome and impact of the grants.

Public Repository:
Website: https://gap.karmahq.xyz
Twitter: x.com
Github: show-karma · GitHub
Discord: Karma

Budget Breakdown

Milestone 1: [$20k/8ETH] Grantee project review tool for funders/voters/grant operators
In grant programs, depending on the mechanism, funding is allocated to projects by a committee, badgeholders, token holders etc. It is time consuming to evaluate a project’s health and progress. We have lot of subjective data (milestone details and completions) about projects in GAP. We would like to build a tool on top of this data and datasets offered by Open Source Observer to let anyone quickly evaluate projects in short time.

Outcome: If we successfully build this tool, funders will be able to make better funding decision in very short interval of time. Our goal is to cut the evaluation time in half in short term and more in the long run.

Milestone 2: [$10k/4ETH] Custom milestone templates for output/outcome measurement.
GAP is being used by wide range of communities funding research, digital public goods, Climate solutions and so on. The milestone reporting requirements are very different for each of those. Today it’s difficult to quantify the outputs of the grants. We would like to build a way for them to customize milestone reporting and enable grantees to input quantifiable data.

Expected outcome: This will help programs measure output and outcome of those grants and the overall grant program. This in turn will result in improving the effectiveness of the grant programs.

Plans should you fall below, reach or exceed funding goals:
If we fall below the goal, we will adjust the roadmap accordingly. If we exceed funding goals, we have many more features in the roadmap which we will build. Couple of them are listed below:

  • Matching builders with grant programs
  • Make GAP experience web2ish with seamless smart wallet creation and gasless txns

Impact Measurement and Reporting

Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Long Term Impact

Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):

If we build these features, grantees will be able to show their work in one place and build reputation. Funders/program managers can view all the historical output of a project and take actions (letting them in the round, funding them etc.)

Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):
If grantees and funders continue to use the platform actively, more data will go onchain through our platform. This will result in funders discovering more high quality projects and funding them. It will incentivize projects to share their work with their communities, receive support and ultimately succeed.

Long-term Impact (5+ years):
In the long run, we want to make it easy for anyone to start a public goods project, do the work, build good reputation and continue receiving funding for their work. We also want to see grant farming become a thing of the past with the help of our tool. With lots of data available onchain, we would like to see more independent interoperable tools built to efficiently discover and fund deserving projects.

Outcomes Measurement:

Below are the metrics we track to measure outcome:

  1. No. of communities utilizing GAP
  2. No. of WAUs
  3. No. of milestones and milestone completions

All of this data is onchain and can be verified by anyone. We also track these stats internally that we will share with the community.

Interim Reporting

Regular Updates:

  • We plan to provide updates atleast once a month.

Milestone Verification:

  • We will post all milestones and milestone updates along with proof on Karma GAP.

Sustainability Plan

We plan to offer advanced tools to grant program operators and charge for that service.

Case Studies and Testimonials

Gathering Feedback:

We work closely with grantees and operators and receive constant feedback. Most of the discussions happen on Telegram. We plan to continue that but also start running surveys to gather more structured feedback from our users.

Showcasing Success:

  • We will highlight success stories and endorsements received on social media (mostly Twitter)
  • We have an endorsement feature in GAP which we will start leveraging!

Supporting Decentralization

Our entire protocol and application is built onchain.

Team Information

  1. Mahesh Murthy - Founder: By background, he is a software engineer. He has
    experience building highly scalable systems for over a decade. His expertise is in turning ideas
    into user centric products. Prior to Karma, he was CTO/Cofounder and successfully built a
    startup with successful exit. x.com
  2. Arthur Ulhoa: He is a backend engineer with number of years of experience building blockchain applications https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurulhoa/
  3. Fabian Ferno: Full stack developer with vast experience building blockchain applications. He has built an NFT analytics company in the past. He regularly participates in hackathons and has won a number of awards. https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabianferno/
  4. Amaury Maghales: Frontend developer at Karma, expert in React and NextJS. https:/www.linkedin.com/in/Oxamaury/
  5. Paula Kennedy: Designer at Karma who is responsible for our incredibly looking website.
    Paula Kennedy | LinkedIn

Social Proof

We aggregated just a few social proof (on Twitter) in here. You can see operators collaborating with us, utilizing GAP for their communities and grantees appreciating the benefits of the tool.

Transparency

Should we receive funding from Octant it will primarily go towards developer salaries. Our internal procedure is to transfer any funding on-chain / sell on CEX to pay wages.

Other funding

  • We haven’t received any funding from Octant.
  • We have received funding from Optimism Builder Grants (30k OP), Plurality Labs Firestarter/Arbitrum grant ($45k) and Gitcoin Citizen Innovate ($40k). We have been part of a few Gitcoin rounds and have received ~$3k.
  • We raised $1.1M preseed round in Jan 2022.