Overview

This update introduces three new grantees and shares more details about the upcoming ‘Aave & GHO Ecosystem Advancement QF Round’ commencing at the end of April.

Grants Summary

The total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below, starting mid-May of 2021 when the program began until the end of March 2024.

• Total Grant Applications Received: 2583

• Total Applications Approved: 274

• Acceptance Rate:

  • Written (Stage 1): 11%

  • Video Call (Stage 2): 66%

• Total Amount Disbursed: $5,654,796

• Complete Grant Payments: 89%

• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 11%

• Status of all grants:

  • Complete/Live - 55%

  • In-progress - 32%

  • Inactive/Sunset/Rugged - 13%

• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:

• Category - $cumulative cost - number approved

  • Applications and Integrations - $2,956,766 - 127 grants

  • Code Audits - $130,000 - 5 grants

  • Committees & DAOs that Serve Aave’s Ecosystem - $703,780 - 20 grants

  • Community (Marketing and Educational) - $701,050 - 54 grants

  • Developer Tooling - $427,000 - 17 grants

  • Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships - $186,000 - 14 grants

  • Other - $294,900 - 12 grants

  • Protocol Development - $446,200 - 21 grants

Approved Grants

This past March we received 35 grant applications and sent out funds for three new grants. The three new grants spanned two of our eight standard grant categories and ranged between $10,500 and $20,000. Learn more about what each grantee is building below.

• Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant type

  • grant description

  • use of funds

• Notional Finance - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations

  • Notional’s $GHO leveraged vault will increase demand and liquidity for $GHO by increasing $USDC deposits in the $GHO/$USDC/$USDT liquidity pool on Balancer / Aura.Users can earn leveraged returns by borrowing $USDC from Notional and depositing into the pool to harvest yield. Notional’s Leveraged GHO LP vault went live at the beginning of April and already has over $750k in deposits.

  • Use of funds: conducting risk assessment, deploying vaults to mainnet, and the ongoing gas costs related to harvesting + reinvesting vault incentives earned

• Swaap - $20,000(full) - code audits

  • Swaap is building Swaap Earn, the next version of their DeFi supercharging product. Earn allocates idle capital to blue chip protocols such as Aave or LRTs, maximizing yields with better capital efficiency.

  • Use of funds: code audit of the Swaap Earn contracts

• GhoShare - $10,500(full) - applications and integrations

  • GhoShare is an iOS app created to address the shortcoming in current expense-splitting apps by enabling decentralized direct in-app settlements of payments by leveraging GHO, credit delegation, token swapping, and cross-network transactions.

  • Use of funds: development costs of the redesigned iOS app along with the QA of smart contracts

Ongoing Updates

The ‘Aave & GHO Ecosystem Advancement QF Round’ will open for applications starting next week with donations being accepted for two weeks starting on May 14. We hope all Aave builders, contributors, and community members will take part!

The strategic funding round aims to provide funding to projects contributing to the growth, development, and enhancement of the Aave and GHO Ecosystems. The round includes a $50,000 match pool, funded evenly by us and Gitcoin.

Projects can apply to be included in the round 2 starting on March 23. Applications will be open until May 7th. Anyone will then be able to donate between May 14 - 28 with the matching pool split accordingly between the projects that receive funding. Look out for more details and an official announcement from Gitcoin coming soon.

Thanks for reading our March update and keeping up with the new teams building on Aave.