Introducing Grant Ships

GM Cartelians!

I’d like to introduce an exciting new grants project: Grant Ships, a game designed by DAO Masons, focusing on innovative grant distribution for Arbitrum DAO. This isn’t a funding request, but rather an invitation to explore some new possibilities for Meta Cartel.

What is Grant Ships?

Grant Ships is a game where players, or Ship Operators, form grant giving sub-DAOs and compete to most effectively distribute funds.

Each Ship is given full autonomy in how to operate and distribute funds, with the exception of a few required levers in the Grant Ships smart contract that signal allocation decisions and publish outcomes. The contract acts as a registry for Ships and Grantees. Ship operators don’t even handle funds directly, instead acting as the arbiter of funding and allocation decisions.

Grants will be distributed using a game rounds format. At the end of an allocation round, each Ship will be evaluated for the impact they have provided, according to the grants they have distributed. An impact score for each ship will be generated. Ships that score well will be given increased funding for the following round.

The goal is incentivize grants teams to fund high impact projects and provide a good experience for the grant recipients.

Funding and Support

We’re proud to announce that our development and the grant funding for our beta round, starting in mid-February, are generously supported by Plurality Labs.

We currently have funding for a beta round of Grant Ships and we’re looking for teams and individuals to play the game.

If the program is a success, Grant Ships may become a permanent part of the Arbitrum ecosystem,

In the upcoming beta round, each ship will have approximately $30K in $Arb to distribute as grants. This is a unique opportunity for Ship Operators to make impactful decisions and supporting key initiatives for Arbitrum DAO, as laid out by Plurality Labs during GovMonth

How to Get Involved

We’re currently inviting people to participate by applying as Ship Operators. If you’re interested in being at the helm of a Grant Ship, guiding its journey, and making a difference, here’s how you can join:

  • Learn More: Visit our rules page for detailed information on the game mechanics and objectives. Please note that this site is still a work in progress and subject to change.

  • Apply: Ready to take command? Fill out the application form at forms.grantships.fun to get started.

Our Roadmap, is very quick in the immediate future. We are hoping to have our initial Ship operators chosen within the first week of the New Year. We will then have a training process to bring operators up to speed on the tools they need to use to interact with The Game.

It will then be up to the Ships to design and implement their Ship and begin awarding grants mid to late February.

Why Meta Cartel?

Well, foremost, although I’ve been relatively inactive, I am still a member and will always bring these sorts of things here, as such. Also, more importantly, there is a lot of experience in the Web3 grant space within the Cartel, so to me, the choice to bring this here is obvious.

While I certainly can’t promise anything, as I am a vote in a DAO, I do think a Meta Cartel Ship would be pretty dope and be able to provide high impact grants within Arbitrum.

Best,
Boiler

Here’s a little update on our progress:

Love this idea. Curious how you measure impact across different types of grants that might have different missions or impact measures?

Specifically, we’re planning on giving Karma a shot at impact scoring. We are working on an Allo strategy contract now and then Karma is going to read through it to see how it can integrate with them.
This is the new karma GAP program https://gap.karmahq.xyz/
The idea is to measure impact against the key initiatives raised in gov month. We hope to track how grants do with those initiatives, with Karma and then we’ll use that as signal for the DAO to make informed decisions. There is always a bit of a subjective nature as to what is impactful and what isn’t. The best we can hope for is providing good signal to the DAO.
We’ve also considered hypercerts, so if the Karma thing doesn’t work we can go in that direction.

Just a little update. Our App is live! We’re currently doing a beta grants round with 90K Arb we have to play with for such purposes. For the beta round we’re giving out grants that support the Arbitrum gaming ecosystem. Gaming is really starting to pop on Arbitrum. I have a blog post coming out shortly compiling some of the research I’ve been doing on the domain. There’s a 200M Arb proposal making it’s way through Arbitrum DAO rn to start a gaming incubator program. So it feels like a good place to be hanging out.

Here’s our announcement tweet if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

https://x.com/grantships/status/1774819257802473572?s=20

The app is https://app.grantships.fun
Some info on the grants round: April 2024: Grant Ships Beta | Grant Ships Rule Book