Aptos Grant DAO quarterly review of early quality projects worth noting

23-03-25 18:35

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Source: DoraHacks

Aptos Grant DAO, the long-term funding program for Aptos Ecological Early Stage Projects, completed its second round of funding on March 12. This is a funding plan jointly launched by DoraHacks team and Aptos for Aptos Ecological project, aiming to continue to provide funding assistance for high-quality projects of early startup teams or developers in the ecosystem, and further promote the flourishing development of the ecosystem.

The first round of the Aptos Grant DAO program was launched on November 7, 2022. As of press time, the second round of grants has been completed, and the third round of grants is in the window for project submission. Detailed funding for the first two rounds of the Scheme is reviewed below, as well as an exploration of some of the early quality projects that deserve attention under the Scheme.

Aptos Grant DAO 两轮资助回顾

In the Aptos Grant DAO, the bonus pool for each grant round consists of the BUIDLer bonus Pool + the Community quadratic Matching pool.

(1) The BUIDLer prize pool is 4,000 APT tokens, which will be allocated according to the results of the judging panel. The jury selected the project based on Aptos fit, public goods level, business model, innovation, technology, and cutting-edge blockchain or cryptography theoretical research and application.

(2) The community quadratic fund pool also contains 4,000 APT tokens, which will be allocated according to the quadratic algorithm. The amount of funding available for candidate projects is positively correlated with the number of votes received. The more popular the project, the higher the grant will be allocated.

In addition, funds funded by community votes will also enter the total prize pool, which has no upper or lower limit.

Based on this, the total bonus pool for Aptos Grant DAO in the first two rounds of funding is as follows:

Table 1: Details of the bonus pool of the first two rounds of Aptos Grant DAO

(All the above data are fromDoraHacks website)

如上表中所示，在前两轮资助中，包含 BUIDLer 资金池、二次方投票资金池以及社区投票资助在内，Aptos Grant DAO 为 Aptos 生态提供了资金规模总计为 24,137.1 枚 APT 的资助。

The program supports projects in several major disciplines, including NFT/Gaming, DeFi, Infrastructure Protocol or Tools, Move Native, and Community /DAO. Of these, a total of 139 projects submitted applications in the first round, and 18 projects were eventually awarded places; In the second round, 235 projects were submitted for funding, and 25 projects were selected. Another 8 projects were selected in the first round.

The Aptos Grant DAO program was designed to support early stage projects in the ecosystem to sustain ongoing development and operations. In the blockchain industry, when a project is at a very early stage, the future may be full of uncertainty, so there is a great need for early investment to survive the project. Aptos Grant DAO is dedicated to providing early quality projects with the necessary funding for project development. At the same time, for investors, the early stage of a project also means high risk and high return. Especially, Alpha players are more inclined to look for potential stocks, and Aptos Grant DAO has screened out good potential targets for them.

The following will explore which quality projects under the Aptos Grant DAO program are more worthy of our long-term attention in terms of their popularity in the community, frequency of ongoing development and renewal, and ecological needs.

Early Quality Project Inventory in Aptos Grant DAO

(a) What are the potential stocks in the first round of funding?

Aptin Finance:A decentralized lending platform based on Aptos. Perhaps because lending has evolved into an integral part of the DeFi ecosystem, the project received a high community vote in its first round of funding. GitHub was last updated three weeks ago, and the team members remain anonymous. Aptin Finance platform has launched lending and trading functions, and supports 6 kinds of assets including APT, WETH, USDC, etc. Users can not only lend and borrow on the platform, but also directly exchange and trade tokens.

Fewcha:A pure Move self-hosted crypto wallet that supports Aptos, tokens on the SUI chain, NFT, and DeFi, last updated by GitHub 2 days ago. Decentralized wallet as the maximum traffic entry of a chain, some projects in the Aptos ecosystem have enabled users to interact with Fewcha wallets.

Apass:A protocol that combines decentralized DID, GameFi, and SocialFi to mark the Galaxy Project in the Ethereum ecosystem. GitHub updates frequently, and social platforms like Twitter continue to operate.

OmniBTC:A multi-chain financial platform based on cross-chain interoperability protocol, mainly supports the asset cross-chain, trading and lending between the Aptos chain and the EVM chain.

(b) of the early quality projects in the second round of funding?

AptoScan:An on-chain NFT and asset data analysis tool developed for Layer1 in the Move ecosystem allows users to purchase NFT directly through the platform, in addition to real-time monitoring of on-chain trade and position data for NFT.

Oi! Network:This is a web3 revenue mobile App that allows users to monetize their activities on the social network through web2 social media and web3 connectivity, thereby creating the incentive layer and task layer of the Internet. Brands or project parties maximize traffic, impact, and engagement with their content through simple and standardized gigs and bonus pool systems.

Cetus Protocol:DeFi Liquidity Protocol, which focuses on Move ecology, supports token trading, cross-chain assets between different chains, and liquidity pools. The project has the opportunity to develop into a large DeFi agreement for Aptos Ecology.

Bridgers.xyz:Decentralized cross-chain bridge, which mainly supports users to transact assets between different chains. Genie is currently in its very early stages, with no demo.

Genie:A decentralized DID protocol that provides a unified identity for users.

(Note: The Aptos Grant DAO has many excellent early projects, even the final list is as many as dozens. The above only represents the projects that I personally believe are hot in the community and have the potential to be continuously developed and operated, and does not include all the projects on the funding list.)

Judging from the funding list, the selected projects are mainly concentrated in three tracks: infrastructure construction/tools, DeFi and NFT. On the one hand, ecological development requires some essential infrastructure tools, such as wallets, browsers, etc. On the other hand, it may be because of the ecological development of other chains such as Ethereum, which has given valuable experience needed for the development of tracks such as DeFi and NFT. As the most basic protocols in the DeFi field, such as lending and Dex will certainly attract extensive attention. At the same time, community users also have a relatively basic cognition and path dependence on this series of projects, so it is difficult to avoid the future development of new public chain ecology is always benchmarking Ethereum ecology.

From the perspective of community participation, compared with 42,281 community votes and 6241.8 APT community funding pool in the first round, the scale of community votes and funding pool in the second round is much lower than that in the first round. This indicates that the initial community user Aptos Grant DAO was very optimistic about the funding program, probably because many members thought there might be some profit in it, such as air drops, which made them willing to actively participate in it. However, the Aptos Grant DAO is a very long term project, and if you want to drive more community members to actively participate in the project, a more simple and effective way may be to have one or two grants under the project.

二次方投票和 vcDORA 投票信用相结合的治理机制

As an open community funded DAO, Aptos Grant DAO's long-term sustainability mainly relies on community voting governance. In this funding activity, voting governance not only adopted DoraHacks' quadratic voting mechanism, but also combined with vcDORA weighted voting scheme to achieve a more equitable allocation of funds.

Originally, Dora was throughQuadratic voting mechanismTo determine the allocation of funds, quadratic voting means that as the number of votes cast by a single voter increases, his or her vote will have less and less impact on the allocation of funds. The mechanism is designed to address the impact of "one dollar, one vote" and "one address, one vote". Under the quadratic mechanism, the amount of money matched would increase as the number of votes received, but the growth curve would slow rapidly. The quadratic mechanism inevitably has hidden dangers such as witch attack and identity attack. To address these risks, the team introduced a new vote weighting mechanism: vcDORA.

vcDORAIt acts as a permissionless voting credit, which is provided by community usersPledge DORA tokensGenerate a corresponding number of vcDORA tokens, which represent non-transferable governance credits in the Dora community and are also vote weight amplifiers for users to participate in community governance. The number of vcDORA tokens generated by a user depends on the number of DORA tokens pledged and the time period pledged. In addition, the number of vcDORA tokens in the user's address will decay over time until it reaches zero at the expiration date, at which point the user will need to remortgage DORA tokens to generate a new vcDORA if he wants to continue participating in community governance.

Figure Source:DoraHacks

拉开第三轮资助活动的序幕

The Aptos Grant DAO is a long-term eco-grant program, and the entrance to Grant applications will be open to the community for a long time. Any early stage project or team in the Aptos ecosystem that wants to receive funding support can do so through the Aptos Grant DAO on DoraHackssubmit BUIDLFunction To submit grant applications, submit GitHUb links related to their projects. Although the official schedule for the third round has not yet been announced, the window for submitting applications for the third round of funding is currently open, and any BUIDL who submits an application before the project enters the review stage will automatically be selected for the third round.

For ordinary community members, a sufficient number of APT tokens and a small amount of Gas fees can be prepared in the wallet account, so as to vote for the favorite project in the community voting process (1 vote =0.1APT). In addition, if the user mortgaged DORA tokens to exchange vcDORA, its voting weight will be higher than that of ordinary voters, that is, under the same number of votes, the project that gets vcDORA votes can match higher bonuses.

Finally, it is worth noting that the third round of Aptos funding will increase targeted funding for key ecological directions, including decentralized Stablecoin, social payment middleware, and the Aptos ecosystem Prophet. Wait to see what creative projects come out of the third round.

About DoraHacks

DoraHacks is a worldwide geek movement, global hackathon organizer, and one of the most active multi-link Web3 developer platforms in the world. The DoraHacks.io platform enables hackers and open source developers around the world to collaborate and win funding through encrypted native protocols and infrastructure such as hackathons, Bounty, Grant, Grant DAO, and public goods Pledge. To date, more than 4,000 projects in the DoraHacks community have received more than $30 million in funding from industry supporters worldwide. Dora's infrastructure is being actively used by a large number of open source communities, DAOs, and more than 50 major blockchain ecosystems (DoraHacks.io) open source financing and community governance.