DAO Drops is a retroactive public goods funding mechanism that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to distribute a funding pool to a range of projects and individuals in the Ethereum ecosystem.
DAO Drops takes retroPGF one step further by assigning the responsibility of impact evaluation to thousands of pseudonymous addresses based on past on-chain activity, using data on governance participation. Round 1’s data came from Deep DAO, smart contract deployments from Galxe, and ecosystem event attendance from POAP to assign voting power to over 30,000 addresses. Round 2 will include on-chain activity from more projects based on recommendations from participants and supporters in Round 1, for example, addresses that have proven personhood, participation in commons-focused DAOs, contributors to RossDAO, AssangeDAO, and POAPs from a wider range of events.
The UI looks like a fun video game, to increase participation and accessibility. Outreach for project/individual nominations reached to diverse geographic areas and pockets of the ecosystem that might be lesser known.
By giving power to a diverse range of ecosystem participants, our aim is to do a better job of targeting areas of the ecosystem that are often overlooked by centralized allocation bodies. Our first round dropped $250,000 to 57 projects, with a median grant size of $3,056 and the largest grant being $18,185. We’ve also received inquiries about using DAO Drops for other decentralized funding use-cases such as clean energy and regenerative agriculture projects.