LlamaoGrants: Origins
LlamaoGrants started as a bear market project for me, Sov. IRL I have been Board President for an innovative food bank for a number of years and recent experiences with grants in the traditional sense got me thinking on how I would like to learn more about this topic from the crypto perspective. I saw many announcements around “Ecosystem Funds” and was curious as to how these programs work in comparison to some of the programs I have had personal experience with in a 501(c)(3).
The Common Good
I started out by making a list and just growing it from there. I created a simple site on Notion called The Common Good and kept my research public. I tried to find common pieces of information that made sense to collect across these programs and found that both collection and standardization of the information was challenging. My hope was that I could help to provide greater clarity into programs and try to develop some kind of standard for how information was collected. You can see a bit of my approach here and here with some reports I did on a couple of funds. I developed a basic methodology and have adapted it a bit over time. The information isn’t complicated and really anyone can collect it if they are talking to the right people at these funds (and they have the information available themselves.)
To be honest I found the project challenging and getting assistance from already busy people across all these programs would really never be possible by one person. I realized this and kept soldiering on building things out and creating my reports. Then, one day, there was a conversation by one Amplice and 0xngmi that I honestly couldn’t believe I suddenly found myself in the middle of. This is where the concept of LlamaoGrants formed.