Background:
This case study covers the first ever quadratic funding round of ETH LATAM BA (Buenos Aires) to ever be rolled out! This represented a milestone in the Argentine community and set a strong precedent within the community for the awareness, support and continued building of public goods initiatives.
ETH LATAM BA was the first major ETH event to run in the history of Argentina. The team running the local community got in touch with the Ethereum Foundation's Quadratic Funding team to collaborate to run a Quadratic Funding rounds for ETH LATAM Buenos Aires. The event was an opportunity to introduce event attendees to Quadratic Funding. The event concluded with more than 150 voters participating in the Quadratic Funding round, with $25,000 DAI in matched funds being distributed! 🥳
Info:
- Event website | QF website
- ETH LATAM event dates: August 11 - 13, 2022
- Number of event attendees: 4,000
- Match fund size: $25,000 pool
- 35 project applications received
- 13 projects applications accepted as these projects were confirmed as working on Public Goods
Voting process:
- Online, Polygon
- Get attendees’ email from Eventbrite → send MACI key to attendees
- Gas fee: Attendees have to cover by themselves, est. $0.10 - $1
Timelines:
Aug 3th: Announcement form for applicants
The team ran a 50 minute Twitter Live Spaces session to talk about what Quadratic Funding is and how projects can apply. 1,400 people tuned in to learn more.
Aug 5th: Educational initiative
Announcing the round in order to receive applications from interested projects started with an educational initiative. The community leads kickstarted the content by explaining what Quadratic Funding (QF), Quadratic Voting and Public Goods are, and the purpose of QF. Heightened understanding helps improve the rate of project applications from teams building on Public Goods.
Aug 10: QF ETH LATAM BA QF Web Announcement
Website launched on August 10th, with accepted projects reflected on the website . Community leads organised a Twitter Spaces session to heighten awareness of the website’s launch.
Aug 13: Event closing, 4,000 participants: Announcement of teams that were selected for this round This helped emphasise the importance of Quadratic Funding to event attendees
Aug 15: MACI key distribution
What are MACI keys? MACI keys are akin to an empty secret ballot that people use to cast their votes. The idea is there should only be one ballot (MACI key) per person and the moon math behind it is used to keep the way you vote hidden, in order to prevent collusion. During the event days, participants were informed about the QF round. Participants’ email addresses were collected to send them their unique MACI Key in order to vote. EthLatAm community leads also made a Twitter thread that explained how to vote.
Aug 22: Announcement of results
Community voted, results released!
Fund allocation:
All projects were contacted to inform them of the outcome (accepted or rejected). Approved projects were requested to double confirm their wallet address.
Once the wallet was confirmed, a test amount of 0.5 DAI was sent to them. If the beneficiary team responded confirming receipt of the test amount, the funds were sent in full.
The $25,000 pool was distributed in DAI via the Polygon network, the same network in which the projects were voted. The distribution was made chronologically according to the email responses received:
- The Badge: 286 $DAI
- Solow: 2792 $DAI
- L2 en Español: 2755 $DAI
- DeFi Argentina: 6228 $DAI
- CommNode: 1143 $DAI
- ExpedienteCripto: 286 $DAI
- Cafecrypto.app: 524 $DAI
- Mujeres en Crypto: 4775 $DAI
- DeFi LATAM: 5015 $DAI
- CriptoTributos: 492 $DAI
- Strigo: 143 $DAI
- Deep Ecosystem: 443 $DAI
- Podcast Bitcoin para Todxs: Waiting for an answer
Learnings:
The following section is aimed at anyone who is interested in knowing how we carry out the process of organizing as a team and coordinating with the EF QF team. The heart behind this section is to help community leaders from LATAM and the world who want to organiae an exclusive round in their country and do not know where to start. By documenting where our learnings were, we hope that other communities around the globe can learn from this and it helps them run their rounds easier. ❤️
- Understand that the technology already exists and simply needs to be cloned: We started calling for developers who wanted to volunteer for this round. However, we didn’t realise that the tech did not have to be built from scratch, and simply needed to be cloned from an existing QF repo!
- Team work makes the dream work
Our team consisted of: 1 team lead to oversee operations
2 semi-senior devs 1 marketing and comms POC 1 graphic designer
In small communities, it may be a challenge to find volunteers to join the initiative ad hoc. If you want to organise a round for your region, you can count on the support of ETH LATAM and the members who have gone through the experience of organising a funding round. You’re not alone 🤗❤️
What we learned: there are fundamental roles for good organisation of QF rounds, and teamwork is of utmost importance; the responsibility cannot fall on one or two members of a community.
- Deciding how to be Sybil resistant: We had to choose between issuing POAPs, printing out MACI Keys and distributing it to event participants, using protocols to validate digital identities. In the end, we decided to send emails containing MACI Keys, to event attendees.
What we’ve learned: The best thing to do is to simplify the process, taking into account which platform works best for your community. Every community works different.
- Find a suitable email marketing system (if applicable) The email previously used (hello@ethlatam.org) had been banned from 5 email marketing companies for mentioning words like "cryptocurrencies", "blockchain", "Ethereum". Upon finding an email provider that could accommodate us, the communication was re-worded to avoid being flagged as spam again.
- Ensure participants have given communication consent Communication consent wasn’t asked upfront of event attendees and thus, not every attendee could have been contacted.
🔨 BUIDL for the future - learnings we’d implement:
- Creation of multisig for the reception of funds destined for QF: For security and transparency reasons, we recommend creating and configuring a multisig wallet for the movement of funds -in case the local team is responsible for the final distribution of funds to the applicant teams.
- Creation of a protocol in case of non-response of teams who applied: How should we act with project teams that do not respond when it comes to allocating funds? Should we wait for a prudent deadline? How to determine this deadline? Who should have the decision? These are questions that the local team should try to answer before the rounds begin.
Addressing participant doubts: The team made a video consultation to address questions that project applicants and voters had. They also organised a Twitter Spaces session to explain the concept of Quadratic Funding.
Community projects helped create tutorials to explain how to vote for their favourite projects
Project applicants’ feedback:
0xJoxes from L2 en Español gave us his opinion about his experience in the application process for the round:
“The application process was relatively simple, since basically the purpose of the round and the requirements requested for the teams were a good fit for our organization. We are also satisfied with the voting system implemented. We were pleased with the support received from the community during the process. As our first funding, the funds received are important for the growth of L2 in Spanish and represent a turning point for our organization”.
Candu, co leader of Mujeres en Crypto gave us her opinion about her experience in the QF round in ETH LATAM BA:
“The Buenos Aires Quadratic Funding round was much simpler. It was the first time that MEC applied in a funding process and it helped us to structure what we have been doing.
The funds are very useful. Thanks to them, we are carrying out the trademark registration, our web page, covering the travel expenses for the volunteers who help us in the events (as an incentive) and it gave us the possibility of organizing a day of workshops in December.”