Overview

Aave Grants DAO (AGD) aims to empower Aave’s future growth by serving as today’s gateway for onchain contributors.

This update introduces six new grantees, highlights the LFGHO hackathon prize winners, and provides updates from AGD including an upcoming Gitcoin round for Aave builders.

Grants Summary

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

• Total Grant Applications Received: 2547

• Total Applications Approved: 268

• Acceptance Rate:

  • Written (Stage 1): 10%

  • Video Call (Stage 2): 65%

• Total Amount Disbursed: $5,654,796

• Complete Grant Payments: 88%

• In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 12%

• Status of all grants:

  • Complete/Live - 53%

  • In-progress - 33%

  • Inactive/Sunset/Rugged - 13%

• Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:

  • Category - $cumulative cost - number approved

  • Applications and Integrations - $2,899,866 - 123 grants

  • Code Audits - $110,000 - 4 grants

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

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

  • Developer Tooling - $422,000 - 15 grants

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

  • Other - $294,900 - 12 grants

  • Protocol Development - $446,200 - 21 grants

Approved Grants

Throughout January and February 2024, we received 103 grant applications and sent out funds for six new grants. The six new grants spanned two of our eight standard grant categories and ranged between $2,000 and $20,000. Learn more about them and the impact we believe they will bring below.

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

  • grant description - “grantee self-description”

  • use of funds

• FTL Labs (developer of Gyroscope) - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations

  • FTL Labs is receiving a grant to develop Boosted elliptic concentrated liquidity pools (E-CLPs). E-CLPs are a novel liquidity pool type that enables the asymmetric concentration of liquidity by focalizing the trading of assets along the curve of an ellipse. Boosted E-CLPs will build Aave deposits and yield into a new flagship line of stable pools on Balancer. These pools will combine the capital efficiency of E-CLPs (asymmetric concentrated liquidity on Balancer) with the capital efficiency of rehypothecating Aave deposits.

  • funds will go primarily toward development and support costs with any surplus being spent on BD support for the developed pools

• Woosh - $10,000(full) - applications and integrations

  • Woosh is a payments dApp that aims to onboard millions of users in Latin America by offering primarily GHO-based stablecoin payments for Mexican users.

  • funds will cover the time spent on integrating GHO payments and optional Aave yield for Woosh users.

• Keybox.ai Smart Contract Monitor Analytics - $5,000(full) - developer tooling

  • Keybox.ai is building a comprehensive and user-friendly dashboard that provides real-time analytics and insights into Aave. Its target benefits are enhanced protocol security, increased operational transparency, improved decision-making, and assistance in adhering to the constantly evolving regulatory landscape.

  • funds will go toward developing the smart contract monitoring analytics dashboard, along with feedback collection/analysis, alert system development, and project management

• react-aave-sdk - $5,000(full) - developer tooling

  • A new library that will dramatically reduce the time needed to create a react or react-native dapp on top of the Aave protocol. It will be a full-tested and type-safe suite of hooks, providers, and wrappers that will make the creation of a new Aave-based dapp as easy as importing the hooks you need in your components.

  • funds will pay for the development costs of the library allowing for easier and more creative integrations

• MirrorTable - $2,000(full) - applications and integrations

  • LFGHO hackathon winners for the project Ghothique will further develop their onchain mirror tables concept, aiming to onboard startups raising angle rounds into the GHO ecosystem.

  • funds will go to building costs for the development team

• GhoFund - $2,000(full) - applications and integrations

  • LFGHO hackathon winner GHOFund is a treasury management tool designed for DAOs, enabling them to connect their treasuries with DeFi opportunities and facilitate GHO streaming for DAO contributors.

  • funds will go to kickstarting further development of GhoFund

Events Summary

The anticipated LFGHO hackathon took place in January from the 12th - 24th. Over 800 hackers showed up resulting in 254 teams participating for the full two weeks of hacking. @AaveLabs spearheaded the planning efforts with ETH Global and did an incredible job supporting hackers (s/o especially to @DefiSpartan), leading top-tier workshops, and everything else that went into LFGHO being a success.

LFGHO was originally outlined and funded in AGD’s Jan 2023 proposal. In line with Aave Labs’ successful proposal and what we heard from the community during our most recent proposal, events and marketing for Aave are no longer within AGD’s scope.

Below is a list of the LFGHO bounty winners along with a link to what they built.

Payments:

• 1st place - GHOShare - GhoShare is an iOS app created to address the specific shortcoming in current expense-splitting apps by enabling decentralized direct in-app settlements of payments using credit delegation, token swapping, and cross-network transactions, secured by biometric authentication and EIP 4337 smart accounts.

• 2nd place - Tap - Send and receive payments fast and easy with GHO, gas-free, and with a great focus on User Experience

Vaults:

• 1st place - Spectre Protocol - Spectre Protocol is a p2p platform for collateralized loans using NFTs. Another user can give you the supply needed to borrow GHO through AAVE👻

• if you have no debt at the end of the loan, the supplier will receive the supply plus the APY earned in AAVE and a GHO reward!

• 2nd place - GHO Yearn v3 Vault - A Yearn multi-strategy V3 vault that uses the ERC 4626 Standard to aggregate current yield sources available for GHO

Facilitators:

• 1st place - Fragola - FRAGOLA is a framework to create cross-chain GHO facilitators, allowing for the secure minting/burning of GHO on Ethereum while depositing the collateral on a different chain.

• 2nd place - Boo! The Facilitator - BOO! is an innovative Native Bitcoin GHO Facilitator, a trustless mechanism where BTC transactions verifying via its BTC LightClient(spv) and minting GHO on Ethereum, with user ETH addresses tagged in OP_RETURN parsed by a specialized contract.

Integration Prize: Exorcise Your GHO, GhoWoo, GHOst, ghooey, ghothique, GhoBox, Esprit, Boo, DeCredit Wallet, GHOAlert

Ongoing Updates

At the beginning of the year, @corbpage stepped down from AGD’s review committee. Corbin has been a dedicated and passionate core contributor since AGD’s inception in 2021. We’re thankful for his time helping to grow Aave and AGD.

AGD is teaming up with Gitcoin to host a grant funding round soon! The round will target supporting Aave builders and includes matching funding from Gitcoin. You can learn more about the upcoming event here 2.

Thanks for reading our January & February update and continuing to keep up with the new teams building on Aave.