2021 Dora helps Harmony devs get grants
Harmony and Dora’s connection could be traced back to 2018, and 2021 is the milestone of Harmony and Dora, since we hosted the Harmony Grant 1.
Besides Harmony, DoraHacks also actively supports main Web3 ecosystems like Solana, BSC and Filecoin. In the year 2021, Dora has curated 2000+ Web3 startups and attracted $20MM+ donations from the global community via Dora’s on-chain Quadratic Funding.
Here are some examples:
The results from this partnership were quite fruitful, yet, how can we improve? One question that our devs had was they want to know if they will be constantly supported. A better grant program is needed.
Also for Dora, we want to make sure that in 2022, Dora and Harmony can fund more brilliant projects, continue to nurture innovation in the Harmony ecosystem. The goal here is to build a year-round plan and long-term program for our teams to work better to make Harmony great.
How can we do better?
Among all competing L1s and L2s, Ethereum has remained the leading position as the cradle for most original innovations. Dora’s core team summarized why and would love to share here what we may learn from their successful experience.
In the past 3 years, Gitcoin has been playing a more important role in the success of the Ethereum ecosystem. (Similarly, Dora in other Web3 ecosystems like Harmony.) A few reasons to share here are:
- Continuous Funding. It takes a hackathon for a team to finish ideation and build a tiny MVP, but it takes roughly 6 months to 2-3 years for a project to grow from hackathon MVP to a product that can survive product-market fit. In this post-hackathon-pre-investment stage, continuous grants and funding are crucial. This is a problem that can’t be solved by hackathon prize money(ETHGlobal) or one-time grant(EF), but can be solved by Gitcoin(With Gitcoin Rounds 1-12) or Dora(Once we have Harmony GrantDAO). Projects can participate in each grant round with new milestones achieved and get grants and funding long-term.
- Community Participation. For many reasons, the traditional centralized grant process has been proved limited and inefficient. Who said the elites in the foundation have to know more than the community? With quadratic funding, for the 1st time, the longtail projects can survive the ideation stage(from the Uniswap in 2018 to 2020, from ETHLend to Aave), and the community can participate in supporting projects from day 1. This is a tribute to the revolution and natural course in the development of Web3. In Gitcoin and Dora’s grants, projects can leverage the grant events to promote themselves to the larger community(token holders, VCs, mature startups, DAOs, global media) that closely follows the new trends and get grants and support from many aspects, truly accelerating the growth of the project to a great scale.
If Dora and Harmony can normalize our partnership to regular seasonal Harmony grant rounds, so that it’s made sure that there will be 3-4 Harmony Grants happening each year where devs can join in the rounds to raise grants, funding, and awareness, we are not so far from a greater Harmony ecosystem.
2022 - Upgrading Harmony Grants to Harmony GrantDAO
What is Harmony Grant?
The Harmony Grant is a series of quadratic funding grants powered by Dora. In a 3-month grant process, projects building in the Harmony ecosystem can raise grants from the Harmony global community.
For a Harmony grant that can be launched in March 2022, please see a sketched overview here.
What is Harmony GrantDAO?
Harmony GrantDAO is a DAO aiming to continuously support key innovations and public goods in the Harmony ecosystem.
The DAO treasury will be kept in a Gnosis Safe (on Harmony network) and donated by Harmony Foundation, ecosystem partners, VCs, and Harmony Grants alumni.
With funding from Harmony GrantDAO, Dora and Harmony can run 2-3 Harmony grant rounds annually. We can turn Harmony grants into regular events that developers can refer to when they need support from the Harmony community.
In 2022, we can run 2 major Harmony grants in April and September respectively. Each grant has its own unique tracks(ZK, Frontier tech, infra, NFT, Gamefi, Defi, and more ) and lasts for 2-3 months.
Also, Dora wants to introduce a long-term grant structure: every month, we can select 5-10 teams that’s been building on Harmony from the DoraHacks platform to provide a small grant to them with $1000 - $2000. The projects will be recommended by the DoraHacks team that has been selected by Harmony and Dora team together. We target to help Harmony curate 60 -120 brilliant projects annually.
Why do we need a DAO?
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Funded by the community, owned by the community
- We believe there are talents in the community who can share more insights on how we can grow Harmony better. With the Harmony and Dora team as the founding members of the DAO, we can involve more partners and individuals as core contributors of the DAO to better fund Harmony developers.
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Expand the Harmony alumni network
- Key donors of the DAO in the future, in Dora’s eyes, will be Harmony grant alumni. Many previous Harmony grantees in the Dora ecosystem have reached out to us to see if they can donate to our grants and hackathons to support new projects and ideas, even building partnerships with them. We think that in the future, they can all contribute to the Harmony GrantDAO so that we can fund Harmony projects in a more sustainable manner.
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Build a Harmony Funders League
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Another group of key donors and supporters of the DAO will be Harmony ecosystem partners, say middlewares like Chainlink, the Graph, Biconomy, and more. Others may be VCs that are keen to support new Harmony ecosystem projects. We can build a Funders League for them to continuously contribute to the Harmony ecosystem. For our previous experience of Funders League, please see:
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How to kick off?
- Harmony Foundation to donate $300,000 worth of $ONE or USDT/USDC/DAI to the DAO. For each grant round, based on our experience, we could use a $150K prize pool to kick off. (Usually can fund around 100+ projects) $75K will be used for the quadratic funding prize pool and another $750K for the Judge Prize pool. This $300,000 can largely support all Harmony grants in 2022.
- Dora will help set up the Gnosis Safe for collection and custody of the DAO treasury.
- Joint promotion of the Harmony GrantDAO. The goal is to let the global community know that the Harmony GrantDAO will be one of the most influential Grant DAOs in the crypto landscape.
- Collection of 1st batch of donations. We have a series of potential sponsors and donors to this DAO. We can invite our partners to donate to the DAO as Harmony alumni and funders.
Whereas,
DoraHacks is a global Web3 developer community of 100,000+ blockchain devs and open source venture builders. We’re specialized in organizing hackathons, quadratic funding grants, workshops with leading Web3 ecosystems, including Polygon, Solana, Filecoin, Flow, Celo, Harmony, Avalanche, and more. In 2021, DoraHacks helped more than 2000 Web3 startups raise $20+ million in grants and donations.