Grant Ships: Weekly Dev Log

DAO Programs & Initiatives
21

Hello @TheMvp07, we got your application, thank you! We’ll be announcing the operator selections tomorrow morning and the selections will appear as on-chain transactions visible in the app as well.

22

DevLog: Week of Apr 1 2024

Development Progress

This week the app was deployed and applications began rolling in! https://app.grantships.fun

The app is now styled for mobile, and we’re working on minor bug fixes and features that will be needed for the beta round to run smoothly, among them an infinite scroll feature for the event feed.

Recruitment Progress

Lots of applications rolling in! We’re seeing a lot of different types of ships with many approaches to funding games on Arbitrum.

We’re also receiving game project applications already with room for more. If you’ve got a game project that could use some funding for building on Arbitrum, let us know!

Documentation Progress

Some changes to make the beta rules more clear, we’ll be taking feedback from operators and project applicants to make this a useful resource for them.

What we need

Your eyes on the beta test, and feedback about what it’s like for a user interacting with it.

Special Thanks for this week

All of our operator and project applicants!

23

DevLog: Week of Apr 8 2024

Development Progress

The app has had many minor updates this week.

This seems like a good time to point out that we have multiple repos:

Our UI App powered by React, Vite, Mantine

Our Contracts, forked from Allo-v2

Our Subgraph

This week we’re working on getting our open source licenses on all the repos, and adding infinite scrolling to the front page.

Recruitment Progress

We’re excited to announce our 3 Grant Ship Operators for the upcoming beta round!

We had a lot of great applications and it was a difficult decision to make. In the future, operators will be selected by a DAO vote, but this time we had to do our best to choose based on what’s best for Arbitrum Gaming and our beta test.

All applicants will receive a message from us on our reasoning as we finalize the selections onchain in the app.

In no particular order, here are the Ships and their applications (We will be asking them to re-apply so that we have a new profile page with consistent management fees. The fees for this round are 10% across the board):

Blue Moon - application
Green Pill Dev Ship - application
The Jade Shadow - application

Congratulations! We’ll be training them on the program and the application this week, and they will start allocating funds next week.

Project Applicants

We’re receiving gaming project applications already with room for more. If you’ve got a game project that could use some funding for building on Arbitrum, apply here: Grant Ships Projects

See the beta round parameters for more information on which sorts of projects will be funded.

Documentation Progress

We are continuing to improve the rulebook to make it a useful guide for new Operators. We also made some changes to the compliance policy, as it will be the core of the agreement made with the Operators and Arbitrum DAO.

Rule Book
Compliance Policy

What we need

Your eyes on the beta test as it progresses, and feedback about what it’s like for a user interacting with it.

Special Thanks for this week

All of our operator and project applicants! We hope to run additional rounds and will keep all applicants who didn’t make it in mind for future rounds.

1 Like
24

Congrats to the selected Ships… good vibes and like feedback could be interesting share the keys considered for ships applications =)

2 Likes
25

DevLog: Week of Apr 15 2024

Development Progress

Beta app is launched and live: https://app.grantships.fun

Infinite scroll on event feeds working on all screens with feeds
Open Source licenses and Readme created
Various bug fixes

The app is ready to go and the beta test will launch Apr 22!

Recruitment Progress

Now the the game has started, you can see all 3 Grant Ships on the Ships page:
https://app.grantships.fun/ships

Project applications are still open and we have a lot of good ones, check them out!
https://app.grantships.fun/projects

Documentation Progress

The RuleBook is receiving regular updates as we receive feedback from Grant Ship Operators.
Rule Book

The Compliance Policy is live and we’re having Operators attest to it using EAS
Compliance Policy

What we need

If you’re involved in the beta test, we would love your feedback.

Tune in on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @grantships
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantships

Special Thanks for this week

Our 3 Grant Ship Operators have already started giving us great feedback on the app, we’re very grateful and looking forward to making Grant Ships even better!

1 Like
26

DevLog: Week of Apr 22 2024

Development Progress

As we move out of the MVP phase, we’re working to get more explicit with project requirements and feature/bug fix completion. We’ll be including links to completed tickets each week, and working to have them be more clear and explicit for those who are following our development.

Features finished since last update:

Recruitment Progress

Project applications are still open and the operators have begun making selections:
https://app.grantships.fun/projects

Documentation Progress

Minor edits to rulebook to support project leads and operators.

What we need

If you’re involved in the beta test, we would love your feedback.

Tune in on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @grantships
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantships

Special Thanks for this week

Our growing community and all the great feedback we’re receiving during this beta test!

1 Like
27

DevLog: Week of Apr 29 & May 6 2024

Development Progress

The beta test continues, and we are getting valuable feedback from our testers.

Beacon Feature

Most development effort has been applied to a new “Beacon” feature, which will allow ship operators to invite projects to apply, and allow in-app communication between operators and project managers.

Application Objects

We’re also planning to turn the “Grant Application” entity into a first-class object in the app, giving it its own page and URLs pathing within the app. This is based on user feedback reporting confusion during the application process, we hope adding this piece will improve the grantee and operator experience significantly.

Features and bug fixes finished since last update:

Recruitment Progress

Most support is now happening through our telegram groups. Telegram: Contact @grantships

Operators are making allocation decisions presently, with over 10,000 ARB allocated and distributed through the app contracts already.

Grant Ships has a 2 step grant approval process, with Ship Operators starting the process by approving a grant application. Game Facilitators then handle any oversight and due diligence before approving the grant. In this case, we are verifying ownership of the X profile in the grant application, requiring completed KYC or KYB, and requiring attestation to the Grant Ships Compliance Policy.

See some sample announcement tweets:
https://twitter.com/grantships/status/1790090748442063196
https://twitter.com/grantships/status/1787969002893177272
https://twitter.com/grantships/status/1787737241609203918
https://twitter.com/grantships/status/1787732270402752651

Check out the full feed of all funding events here:
https://app.grantships.fun/

Documentation Progress

The most significant update to the docs was to add instructions for attesting to the Grant Ships compliance policy.

What we need

As round 1 draws to a close, we’ll be preparing to solicit feedback from the Arbitrum community on their perception of the Ships’ performances. Higher performing ships will have a greater portion of the funding pool to allocate next round. Between 5/27 and 6/9 we’ll be holding an Arbitrum token holder vote.

The schedule is as follows:

Schedule

  • Operator Applications Open: 3/29 - 4/3 @ 3EST (6 days)
  • Operator Onboarding: 3/30 - 4/14 (12 days)
  • Round 1 Allocation: 4/22 - 5/26 (35 days) - We are here
  • Round 1 Voting: 5/27 - 6/9 (14 days)
  • Round 2 Allocation: 6/10 - 6/30 (28 days)
  • Round 2 Voting: 7/1-7/14 (14 days)

Tune in on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @grantships
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantships

Special Thanks for this week

Our growing community and all the great feedback we’re receiving during this beta test! Especially 0xjunglepunk for the honest and helpful feedback last week!

28

Grant Ships Milestone 3 Completion Report

  1. Complete Dashboard
    • Requirement 1: Dashboard App to be completed and tested.
      • The “Dashboard App” evolved into a full fledged front end during Milestone 1 when we discovered that a custom contract development would be necessary.
      • We did several rounds of QA. Bug fixes and features are listed here: Grant Ships Product Board · GitHub
    • Requirement 2: Live app deployed under Grant Ships Domain
    • Requirement 3: Request load testing
      • We did normal use load testing during our QA rounds. Everything works fine with our hosted app. We found SubGraph is often slow or nonfunctional for certain use cases - specifically timely IPFS data indexing. We added Goldsky as a backup for these cases, and are talking with Envio for potential custom solutions.
    • Requirement 4: Donation Voting allocation
      • We are intending to use JokeRace as our TCR solution for the Grant Ships beta test, with Game Facilitators responsible for translating the vote into relative funding levels during the deploy of round 2. This is an interim solution until such time we can develop our own integrated TCR.
      • We learned that developing a custom TCR solution is a huge task and was well outside of feasibility for this round of development.
  2. Complete Rule book
  3. Initial Teams Established and Trained
    • Requirement 6: Initial Referee Teams selected and trained on how to
      interact with the game. Referees will understand their roles and responsibilities in the game and understand how to interact with the app.
      • Referee role was renamed to “Game Facilitators” and the DAO Masons is serving as Game Facilitators for this round. We intend to bring in a “ridealong” facilitator for round 2 after we’ve worked out the kinks, and train them to run future rounds for Arbitrum if they so choose.
    • Requirement 7: Initial Grant Ships Teams established and trained. Teams that will be awarding Grants will be established and taught how to interact with the game. They will be given the tools they need to design their ships and start playing.
      • Three grant ship teams were selected and trained. They are viewable here: Grant Ships
  4. Requirement 8: Fund dispersal mechanism
    • For the beta test, since our contract is still unaudited, we created a “GSBT” token that will be distributed by the contracts when a project completes a milestone and the Operator approves it. We intend to manually swap these tokens for ARB to pay out grant recipients.
    • The funds dispersal mechanism in the contract is sound and meets this Requirement 8.
  5. Continue Promotion
    • Requirement 9: During this milestone, we plan to enact our promotion plan to the fullest, to maximize visibility. Output: Twitter, Spaces, Podcasts
29

DevLog: Week of May 13 & May 20 2024

Development Progress

Our current dev focus is on building out a voting protocol to handle in-house TCR voting. We found that existing solutions for TCR voting were difficult to integrate with an app, so we’re building our own - we’re calling it “Stem Protocol” and will have a tool called “Chews” to help people hold their own votes. More news on that soon.

We’re also experimenting with Envio as a replacement for the graph, and it looks promising! We’ve got multichain support running now so we’ll be ready to support those Arbitrum L3s as they pop up. ApeCoin & ApeChain I’m looking at you!

Beacon Feature & Application objects mentioned previously are still high on the list, and will be resumed once our upcoming vote is handled.

Recruitment Progress

Most support is now happening through our telegram groups. Telegram: Contact @grantships

We extended the first round of our pilot by 1 week, so this is the last week.

Check out the full feed of all funding events on Grant Ships here:
https://app.grantships.fun/

Documentation Progress

No updates.

What we need

ARBITRUM VOTERS

We will have a clear CTA soon, but we need you to look at the 3 Ship portfolios and signal which you think did best. Stay tuned!

Tune in on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @grantships
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantships

Special Thanks for this week

Shoutout to our Ship Operators!

30

DevLog: Week of May 27th & June 3 2024

Development Progress

We’ve been focused on adding Portfolio and TCR features, and guiding our operators through the last steps of ending the funding round.

We’ve finished the Portfolio features that allows Grant Ship Operators to add context to their portfolio.

We’ve also finished the TCR voting feature and will are ready to host an Arbitrum token holder vote.

What we need

Arbitrum Token holders! Please visit Grant Ships and signal which operators you feel made the best allocation decisions.

Tune in on Telegram: Telegram: Contact @grantships
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantships

Special Thanks for this week

Our Grant Ship operators for navigating shifting release schedules and continuing to give us feedback and allocating their funds. Check them out here: Grant Ships

1 Like
31

DevLog: Week of June 10 & 17

Development Progress

Milestone: Create a new TCR Voting Protocol

To support the Grant Ships project, we created a new voting protocol: Stem Protocol.

You can see the repository here: GitHub - DAOmasons/stem-voting

This is a versatile voting protocol that allows a token curated registry vote with any given token. The Choice module allows you set up any kind of vote including multiple choice, single selection and ranked choice voting. One or multiplerounds of voting can be held and tallied into a single result. The result is sent to an Execution module which can automatically perform an onchain action as a result of the vote.

We used this to implement our Grant Ships Vote feature, which can be seen here: Grant Ships

This vote let anybody with delegated Arbitrum tokens to split their vote across 3 Grant Ships, summing and tallying the total at the end. As Grant Ships matures, this module will be used to automatically allocate funds to ships in the following round based on the result of votes in the previous round.

Milestone: Refactor Indexing Solution

Grant Ships originally used The Graph as its indexing solution. We found it to be slow and unreliable at times, with a clumsy developer experience. For these readsons, we replaced The Graph with Envio, which provides a much more versatile and robust indexing solution. Response times in the app are now almost instantaneous in most cases, where before we had long delays.

It allows us to use a local indexer for development and then push configurations to a remote indexing server, drastically improving developer experience.

The configurable indexing mechanism that Envio provides allows us to trigger remote events as a result of onchain events, and we will eventually use this to create a Progressive Web App (PWA) that can alert users on their phone when an onchain action occurs.

The app with Envio indexing solution is live at https://app.grantships.fun

What we need

Leads on new grants! We’re past the end of our funding from Plurality and we need another boost to get this project out of MVP status (It’s a hell of an MVP! But still a first development with all the associated tech debt)

Special Thanks for this week

Everyone who voted in the Ship signal session, and all of our operators and projects for being such champs during this amazing ride.

1 Like
32

DevLog: Week of June 24 & July 1

Here is an update we gave to our community last week that covers everything we’re doing and planning in the short term:

:boom:Hey all, a few things to announce!:boom:

  1. :sob: A moment of silence for Jade Shadow, whose ship unfortunately crashed and burned out of the round by not receiving enough vote from Arbitrum token holders. The 2nd round will be head to head between Blue Moon vs Green Pill Dev, battling (or collabobattling?) it out for the last round.

  2. :balance_scale: A community vote will launch next week weighted 50/50 against the Arbitrum token vote to determine final funding levels for the remaining 2 ships. Ships and Projects will have an SBT token airdropped based on funding received and milestones completed, as well as up to 4 neutral judges we are recruiting from the community. This is partly an experiment and promotion opportunity, where we learn how a dual-token vote can work in the Grant Ships system.

  3. :spiral_calendar:Round 2 will launch Monday July 29th and run through Friday Aug 30 (Almost 5 full weeks). Blue Moon and Green Pill Dev, you can start preparing now so you have some extra time before the launch date.

  4. :rocket:We are stretching to add new features to the app before the launch date (including multimedia support on Project pages and improved grant application experience based on your feedback from round 1).

A side note - The voting protocol we built for Grant Ships (Stem Protocol) is getting some positive attention (and we received a Grant) so we’re building that module out in the form of a new project called “Ask Arb”. All of that work will support Grant Ships in the long run as we need a more robust voting solution to have it really shine.

:orange_heart:As always happy to answer any questions, and if anybody wants to chat on Friday at the normal time (11PST) LMK and I’ll hold office hours. Thank you all for your patience and support!

2 Likes
33

:balance_scale: Community Vote

Our community vote is live! We airdropped Soulbound Voting Tokens to 11 volunteer judges from Gitcoin, Haberdasher labs, PublicHaus, Thrive and Arbitrum Foundation. The judges, grantees and Ship Operators all have until July 27 to get their votes in. You can see the results at: app.grantships.fun/vote

  • Vote results will determine relative funding levels between Green Pill Dev Ship and Blue Moon

:fire: Starting a Fire

We’re pleased to announce that Grant Ships has been selected to receive a Firestarters grant to continue development on Grant Ships!

We are setting our milestones now and will report here when they are finalized. Here is a peek at what we’re planning:

  • Project homepage improvements w/Multimedia support
  • Improved grant negotiation process “beacon” feature
  • Upgrade indexer to Envio
  • Dual Token Voting system
  • Real-time notifications w/progressive web apps
  • In-app Stats/Info Tab or Page
  • Recurring Round process (eliminate the airgap)
  • Project, Operator and Facilitator dashboard reworks

We’re excited to be taking Grant Ships to the next level, and after the 2nd round of our pilot we’ll be ready to run first-class grants programs through this decentralized tool, all onchain.

:pray: Thank you to everyone who helped us get this far, and we’ll have more to report soon!

1 Like
34

DevLog: Week of July 8, 15 & 22

Development Progress

Pilot round 1 has ended and we are hard at work to implement the improved Profile Page and Grants Page features as requested by our testers.

The Profile page features will give projects more control over the look and content of their pages. This includes rich text editing for updates throughout the app and multimedia support including images and video embeds.

Grants Page features improve the grants negotiation process, and makes more of the interactions and key decisions between projects and grants happen “out front” in real-time on the app. This provides convenience for the Ship Operators and Project teams, and increases visibility and accountability.

Community Vote

We held a community vote and the results are in.

As mentioned previously, The Jade Shadow did not receive enough votes to continue, and his ship crashed and burned. The second round will be head to head between Blue Moon and Green Pill Dev Ship.

:balance_scale:Final split is: Blue Moon 39.5% and Green Pill Dev Ship: 60.5%

:money_with_wings:That means the 45000 grant fund will be split: 17775/27225
BM will have 15997.5 ARB to allocate and will collect a 1777.5 ARB fee.
and GPD will have 24502.5 ARB to allocate and will collect a 2722.5 ARB fee.

Pilot Report

We put together a retrospective for the Pilot round. It is available at https://grantships.fun - click the Pilot Report button at the bottom.

Round 2

Arbitrum Gaming Projects are free to apply for funding for round 2 using the current app. Profiles will be migrated to the updated app when we launch round 2 - we’re aiming for Thursday Aug 1.

Thank you!

Thank you to all who participated in our community vote, it really helped us get some good feedback to our Operators!

1 Like
35

Funding round 2 is live!

It’s head to head between Dev Pill Ship and Blue Moon.

See the action at app.grantships.fun

Development Update:

Major new features:

  • Project Profile Enhancements: We now allow projects to add multimedia, custom banner image and rich text profile text. We hope this leads to greater customization and investment in the project profile pages.
  • Grant Experience Rebuild: We added a dedicated grant page representing the application and negotiation process between projects and ship operators.
  • Matchmaking “Beacons”: Ship Operators can now send a beacon to a project, initiating the grant application process and inviting the project to continue.
  • Indexer Upgrade: Indexing is now 10x faster (with better developer experience) after dropping The Graph and switching to Envio.
  • Contract Updates: Improved the grants UX by adding more flexibility to the contract-enforced grant flow.
    • We now allow milestones to be submitted, approved, or rejected before or after facilitator review, allowing greater flexibility within the grant process.
    • We now allow funds to be clawed back from a project before distribution pending facilitator review.

New Voting System

Last round we added a Community Voting system. We airdropped soulbound tokens to community members (including projects, ship operators and select judges) and asked them to vote.

We’re adding some gamification to this voting system, renaming our token to WARP and adding “Warp Missions” to earn more. Participants and spectators can provide reviews, refer new projects, fill out their project profiles and more to earn additional WARP to gain more voting power. Learn more here: The Voting Round | Grant Ships Rule Book

Horizon

Context Voting Rewards System

Coming up we’re working on a Context Voting Rewards System where the DAO vote is weighted on a sliding scale based on turnout. If we get a quorum (based on average voting turnout for the DAO) then the DAO vote takes precedence. If not, then those with higher context (community voters) will have their influence on the outcome amplified.

We believe this mechanism will let us have a meaningful vote every cycle even without max participation from the DAO, but still allow the DAO the option to step and make the call when needed.

Points & Badges

This all leads into a badging system that we’ll start to add in soon. In-game activity will lead to badges, which will provide additional voting power and infuence.

Conclusion

That’s it for now, we’ll have more to report soon as we start showing off the post-MVP version of Grant Ships. If you’d like to use this tool to run a funding round for your community, let us know!

https///x.com/@grantships