S18/S19 Allo Workstream Budget Request

Gitcoin Allo S18-S19 Workstream Budget Proposal

This is the integrated funding proposal for the Gitcoin Allo Workstream requesting funding for Season 18 and S19 (1 May 2023 through 31 October 2023), authored by @kevin.olsen, @nategosselin, and @Sor03. This budget request has been deeply reviewed by CSDO, as well as some of our top Stewards, including @griff, @lthrift, @annika, @epowell101. We invite you to offer feedback, ask questions and help us identify any blindspots we may have. Coordination starts at the governance layer, and we need you to make us better.

TL;DR This season the Gitcoin Allo workstream’s core focus is on establishing product-market fit for web3 grants programs. To get there, we will be executing against two key outcomes:

• Enabling web3 grants programs to run the majority of their funding through Grants Stack
• Empowering builders to create new software applications on top of Allo protocol

Outline Allo is a protocol for democratic resource allocation, which enables communities to easily pool and distribute capital to their needs — Fund What Matters. In order to meet this value proposition, Allo needs to support a wide range of community-oriented resource allocation mechanisms. Up until now, the team has been focused on laying Allo’s foundation and creating a flagship Quadratic Funding experience on the protocol. However, over the course of our Design Partner Program (55+ interviews with ~30 web3 grants programs) we’ve learned that web3 communities tend to employ a wide variety of grant types that are geared to specific use cases. Those partners told us that Quadratic Funding, while popular as a tactic for engaging their broader communities, is generally considered a fit for a minority of those use cases (typically <20% of overall funding). In most cases, the programs want to use higher-touch mechanisms (e.g. committee/expert approvals, milestone-based payments, RFP-style grants, etc) for the bulk of their fund distribution. If we want to truly achieve product-market fit for Allo among web3 communities we’ll need to build additional mechanisms so that we are a viable option for those higher-touch scenarios. Strategically, we feel that building a strong foothold within web3 will give us a foundation for bringing our public good to additional communities.

In Season 18 and 19 we are going to pursue a two-pronged approach to building this strategic base. The first is Grants Stack — our primary interface for using Allo today. We want to ensure that it’s offering web3 communities a delightful entry-point to running grant programs. Our work here will be focused on expanding the types of grant programs that can be run through our three dApps (i.e. hitting our 13-5-5 goal of 13 QF rounds, 5 QV rounds, and 5 Direct Grants programs by September 1), continuing to improve the user experience, and establishing the next wave of our strategy once 13-5-5 has been achieved. The second prong is core Allo protocol. We want Allo to be a truly decentralized public good, and the work in this swimlane will be focused on enabling other builders to create apps on top of Allo. Tactically, that will likely be things like advancing the core protocol’s capabilities and assisting other teams with their builds.

Amount Allo is requesting 2,031,127 GTC* = $3,229,491 for S18-19, assuming 1.59 USD/GTC, excluding reserves and rolled over amounts.

View 3: Total request including reserves & budget rollover Total [Workstream] Budgeted Spend S18-S19 $2,821,533 60 Day Reserves $940,511 S17 Treasury Balance, incl unspent * $538,874 Total S18-19 Request $3,223,170 *Any and all revenue generated during the past season will flow back to the DAO treasury or will be rolled over to the next season.

Details of this proposal can be found in the link below.