What is this workstream?

Grants Stack (GS) is the product development group responsible for building the Grants Stack suite of dApps and for incubating the initial development of Allo Protocol.

Why the distinction between Grants Stack and Allo?

Gitcoin believes in the power of decentralized protocols and see an opportunity to contribute a valuable protocol to the world while also solving its own need. Specifically, we are building a tool for running community-oriented grants programs (Grants Stack) and want to enable faster experimentation in this space by simultaneously building a protocol for democratic capital allocation (Allo). Our goal is that Allo Protocol stabilizes and progressively decentralizes from workstream ownership to DAO/community ownership. Said another way, we see the long-term purpose of this group as building Grants Stack, and are building Allo v0 as a necessary requirement for that purpose.

What we’re building

Grants Stack

Gitcoin Grants Stack is a collection of dApps that enables program managers to create, manage and grow a successful grants program from start to finish. Running a grants program is hard, time-intensive work and the Stack aims to drastically streamline that process so that communities of any size can successfully distribute grants. Building Grants Stack on top of Allo Protocol also enables us to take advantage of the protocol’s modularity and the community’s experimentation with new mechanisms. The stack consists of:

For more on the “why” behind these tools, please check out our Strategy overview. (to be written)

Roadmap

(last updated 2/8/23)

As outlined in our Season 17 Budget, our workstream is focused on two key swimlanes of work, each with high-level Outcomes that the team is driving towards. The swimlanes and associated outcomes are summarized here, but can also be explored in more detail in the Outcomes and Opportunities tables below:

  1. Finish Protocol v0 — This initial iteration of Allo has effectively been built in private. In order to achieve our short-term goal of allowing developers to build on top of it, we need to first finalize our protocol interfaces and then begin building up our DevRel efforts.
  2. Productize Quadratic Funding on Grants Stack — We see Quadratic Funding rounds as the initial use case for Grants Stack, given Gitcoin’s deep experience with the mechanism and the general level of demand among values-aligned communities. This season we will focus on building past the bare-bones functionality, solving key pain points, and enabling program managers to easily run high-quality QF rounds with our self-serve tooling.