After the first quarter of 2021, the UNI community has made it abundantly clear that it's a force to be reckoned with. The governance discussions are increasingly active, more delegates are being verified on sybil, the total number of token lists continues to grow, and all the while, new community members are applying to the UNI Grants Program on a daily basis!
Over the span of just seven short weeks, the UNI Grants Program has received 140 total applications, logging over 60 applicant interviews, and all this even with a deliberately narrow scope for submissions. As stated in the governance proposal, UGP is meant to explore whether an agile Grants Program could activate the community in helping to build the future of the protocol. We are grateful and had high hopes but we never could have anticipated this much overwhelming interest from builders and multipliers this quickly.
Without further ado, we are extremely pleased to announce that the UNI Grants Program will be awarding the full budget of $750,000 in grants to 23 teams across the UNI community! These grantees represent various parts of the protocol from support team within the UNI Discord sever to a ragequit mechanism for governance-funded multisigs.
The applications came sporadically in bunches but were evenly spread across the initial focus areas, with the least amount of applications coming in for RFPs & Challenges, which was an ancillary supplement for high priority areas. There were so many high quality project submissions, that although Wave 1 is now closed, some applications are still in the running to be funded for the next wave, so if you haven't heard back yet, don't worry!
The categorical breakdown for Wave 1 applications are as follows: