Context

This brief serves as an artifact for the early stages of the Grant Hub product domain. It documents initial goals, assumptions, and considerations so that the team can get started and further flesh out the vision/strategy for the product.

The Grants 2.0 Vision

GPC’s mission is to build protocols that enable communities to achieve sovereignty through the funding of their shared needs. Currently we are building three protocols: Passport, a Grants Protocol (aka Round Manager), and a Project Protocol (aka Grant Hub).

We believe that launching open-source, modular, and decentralized protocols creates permissionless core primitives and infrastructure for the ecosystem that allows other builders to move more quickly. Further, these protocols are public goods.

The Grant Hub

The Grant Hub’s purpose in the protocol is to provide the “deeply liquid registry of grants” to the Grants 2.0 system. Its primary strategies for serving that purpose are providing a valuable hub for grant owners to manage their grants across multiple rounds and a deep, flexible registry of grants for round managers to easily find and distribute their capital across relevant projects.

Core Users

As mentioned above, the Grant Hub domain will have two main user personas:

Genesis Projects

Gitcoin Product Collective aspires to use outcome-oriented roadmaps, but we acknowledge that this approach has a natural tension with a project that is designed to decentralize an existing platform. To navigate this we’re experimenting with the idea of genesis projects: deliverables that we know can plug in (and replace) core components of the current cGrants platform while also allowing the team to explore the design space and formulate a more tailored long-term vision and strategy for Grant Hub. As a balance, the team will be asked to take v1 of the Hub to market with a partner (so that we are validating a community need) and to deliver an outcome-oriented roadmap in parallel with the genesis projects.

1) Replace Grants registry in cPlatform

Currently, the cPlatform runs off a centralized, private database of grants. We want this team to figure out how to run cPlatform rounds entirely off a decentralized grants registry and deploy it in time for GR15. While thinking through this work, we want the team to optimize for grant owner privacy and ease — we want the switch to be as painless as possible for existing Gitcoin grant owners. Specifically, we want to make sure that we are protecting the grant owner’s data rights first (e.g. starting from an opt-in mindset) and then thinking through how to make the process easy. An early roll-out idea is to consider an opt-in CTA that’s wrapped in Grants 2.0 product marketing.

2) Replace the Grant Creation form

The existing Gitcoin.co site contains a form for creating grants in our private database. We assume that we will need to create a decentralized front end for creating grants in the registry outlined in #1, and our goal is that this front end replaces the private form (ideally in time for GR15).