The Grant Innovation Lab (GIL) is a collective dedicated to advancing the effectiveness of grant programs, exploring topics such as operations, mechanisms, decentralization, transparency, and impact measurement, amongst others. The GIL team consists of grant managers independent researchers, and evaluation experts with extensive experience running and researching grant programs. Our ultimate goal is to produce as much shared knowledge, and to disseminate it, so that all grant programs can improve.

The GIL has produced research such as:

State of Web3 Grants Report 2023,
3 Retroactive Funding Program Case Studies,
Takeaways from the 2024 Web Grant Summit in Denver,
Takeaways from the 2024 Grant Operator Workshop in Denver,
Grant Maturity Index, and
State of Web3 Grants Report 2024.

For 2025, we are mainly prioritizing 2 projects:

State of Web3 Grants 2025, which will focus on mapping different mechanisms to desired outcomes to better understand which mechanisms support which results, and
the Impact Handbook, which will produce a series of comprehensive frameworks for operators to use to support the evaluation of different kinds of grant programs.

In addition to our research, the GIL also focuses on shared resources and on community building, which has included events such as:

a dinner at DevConnect Istanbul,
a Web3 Grant Summit in Denver,
co-hosted the Grant Funding Forum in Brussels,
host a monthly grant operator call, and
hosted a 2-day Grant Operator Workshop in Denver in Feb 2025.

Our partners and previous funders have included Gitcoin, Octant, Questbook, CharmVerse, DFINITY, ENS Public Goods Grants, Mantle, Rootstock, Manta, the Ethereum Foundation, and Optimism.

We are seeking additional funding in order to start working on better supporting grantees and to seed to new research efforts.