# FAQ

## What is Grant Ships?

Grant Ships is a competitive grants framework styled as a game. Your Governing Entity (DAO, leadership council, or organization) makes a few key setup decisions, fills the funding pool, and the Grant Ships platform handles the rest.


### Competitive Evaluation
Selected grant programs, or "Ships", innovate and compete in a public arena, where they are evaluated by the community and/or designated judges.

### How It Works

#### Ship Operators Selection
The platform hosts an application and election process to help select multiple Ship operators (typically at least 3). Each Ship receives permission to allocate a portion of the funding pool as grants.

#### Project Applications
Selected Ships begin accepting applications for projects to fund through the Grant Ships app. Projects specify milestones and payout schedules.

#### Funding & Execution
As Ships negotiate with and accept projects, funds are earmarked and work begins. A public onchain record tracks all actions taken by Ships, projects, and game facilitators, including milestone events, payouts, updates, and facilitator activity.

#### Assessment and Iteration
At the end of each funding round, assessments by the governing body or voting community determine each Ship's starting position for the following funding round. Top performers are rewarded with a larger slice of the funding pool. Low performers may be eliminated, allowing new Ships to join. This iterative cycle drives continuous innovation, leading to improved strategies and outcomes.


## How Does the DAO Judge Ship Performance?

Grant Ships operates within funding cycles. For a period of time, Ship operators fund New Meta and then there is an assessment period for the DAO to rate and assess performance before the cycle repeats.

The needs of each community are different - so Grant Ships will include a custom assessment module configured specifically for Scroll.

This module is built with our versatile in-house voting protocol (Chews Protocol). The assessment module may include a combination of assessment tools we have used in the past including NFT-gated rubric-assessment votes, TCR-style votes for all or some token holders, elected assessment councils, metric analysis, and AI-assisted voter tools.

After learning your specific needs, the Grant Ships team will make recommendations for your decision-makers to finalize.

## What is "New Meta"?

A "meta" in gaming terminology is an optimal strategy generally agreed upon by the community. It works as an acronym: "most effective tactics available."

In our industry, 'meta' is a new experience that captures the ecosystem's attention. It redefines the blockchain ecosystem, driving activity and liquidity in one particular direction. For example, DeFi Summer in 2020 was New Meta.

Typically, New Meta comes in the form of new applications that transform how we experience the onchain ecosystem. Breakout applications like Aave, Uniswap V2, Compound, and Yearn were the key drivers of this exciting new wave of activity. These applications were the first movers, from which onchain activity, memes, and culture naturally followed.

When we say that Grant Ships is funding New Meta, we mean that we are funding new, original applications that capture attention, become memetic drivers, and draw people to bridge onto Scroll.

Most importantly, Grant Ships is agnostic about what the New Meta is. We choose to utilize the framework's natural evolutionary feedback loop to discover what the New Meta is, instead of deciding how Scroll differentiates in advance.

## What is a 'Scroll-First' Application?

This still needs to be established through conversations with key Scroll stakeholders. However, we see Scroll-first as projects that have an initial launch on Scroll.

We also recommend that apps funded and launched through this initiative should agree to a period of exclusivity. If this period were 2 months, then the application should only be exclusively offered on Scroll for two months following launch.

We do, however, recognize that Scroll may have different aims. The fine points of 'Scroll-First' should be defined after we are able to fully understand Scroll's needs.

## Why not offer incentives for impact instead?

Ecosystem incentive programs offer an exciting new direction for funding activity. However, we do not see them as a viable vehicle for creating exciting new products.

From our observations, incentive programs often fund where the funds and activity accumulate, not what drives them to the ecosystem to begin with. For example, Uniswap and Aave are evergreen leaders in terms of TVL and activity. However, I would never bridge to a new chain to use these products when they already exist on the chain that I use.

Offering incentives that only accumulate funds to the DeFi giants works better as a direct subsidy for network stimulus, not as a primer for innovation.

We are also not convinced that many of these early incentive programs are capable of funding 'organic' growth. The value of early-stage products is notoriously unquantifiable. This is why early-stage, angel, and seed funding often relies more on the allocator's perspective and intuitions than quantifiable metrics. We see no reason why the same rules wouldn't apply to early-stage funding in L2 ecosystems.

## Why Competition? Can't We All Just Cooperate?

We believe that competition drives efficiency, accountability, and innovation in capital allocation. Traditional grant programs typically rely on a single council of elected individuals who rarely form an exceptionally competent team.

By introducing competition across multiple teams, each naturally maintains higher standards and challenges themselves to improve. The system rewards successful teams with more resources while naturally phasing out underperformers — a more elegant solution than attempting to reform a monolithic grants council.

This plural approach prevents any single committee from controlling the entire process. Allocators must compete for talented builders, creating a more inviting environment for builders. Teams that offer comprehensive support beyond mere funding — providing guidance, promotion, and networking — consistently outperform those who simply review milestones. Over time, Ships learn from each other as they observe successful patterns emerge. Best practices evolve and permeate the culture.

In this competitive ecosystem, allocators have direct incentives to benefit the DAO. To secure additional funding in subsequent rounds, they must ensure their projects perform well. Their success depends on growing both their own slice and the overall pie.

Grant Ships allows each Ship to implement their own strategy, engaging each allocator's' unique vision and intuition -- a crucial element when funding early-stage products. We see Grant Ships as not just a capital allocation framework, but a fundamental innovation in distributed decision-making.

## Why Not Just Have a Grants Council?

Grant Ships unbundles the functions of a traditional, centralized grants-giving committee and distributes power and responsibility among stakeholders within the system: the Ships themselves, game facilitators, the governing body, and the voting community. The smart contracts and UX design provide rails for an effective milestone-based grants program which greatly reduces overhead and spinup time.

The actors within a Grant Ships instance have all the power and responsibility of a grants council, but splitting up the authority ensures a broader representation of perspectives and mitigates the risk of undue influence. Because many of the relevant permissions and processes involved with grant-giving are explicitly defined by the Grant Ships platform, we remove the governance overhead that a grant-giving organization would normally be responsible for designing.

In essence, we aim to get the best of both worlds. We combine the capture-resistance of a decentralized organization with the efficiency and clarity of a more traditional structure.

## Who Ensures That Each Actor is Playing By the Rules?

Within each round of Grant Ships, we mint a Hats Protocol NFT for a role called 'Game Facilitator'. This role has special permissions within the Grant Ships smart contracts.

The Game Facilitator role is revocable. Either by the DAO, a higher-order council, or security multisig. The Game Facilitator role comes with a set of responsibilities. If a Game Facilitator is abusing their power or not performing according to the rules specified in the rulebook, their Hat must be revoked.

Their special abilities include:
- Ability to set up and manage the round (once certain conditions are met)
- Ability to claw back funds (requires permission from Ship Operator)
- Ability to 'Flag' ships.
- The yellow flag is a signal for voters. It indicates that the Ship Operator made a mistake in good faith.
- A red Flag signals malfeasance, and this shuts down the Ship's ability to distribute funds.
- Ability to approve a grantee. This is usually used for manual KYC checks. In future iterations, this will be optional.

The Game Facilitator ensures that Ships and Projects are playing by the rules of the game, DAO compliance obligations are being met (ex. KYC), and the funding is allocated to projects within the stated domain.

[](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/Sy7CuuSyee.png)

## How Does Grant Ships Incorporate Metrics?

The metrics collection strategy depends on the goals and aims of each Grant Ships round. For example:

### Previous Approaches
#### Arbitrum Gaming Pilot Round:
Metrics were loosely defined. Our voting interface displayed each Ship's portfolio of funded projects, completed milestones, and detailed retrospectives. Voters provided subjective analysis before submitting.

#### Gitcoin Implementation:
We utilized a mix of objective key metrics (e.g., Matching Donations) and subjective preferences (e.g., innovation in allocation strategies). To prevent information overload, we incorporated an LLM to help parse information. The LLM performed multi-variant searches based on user preferences and suggested votes while keeping voters in control of final decisions.

### Design Principles

When incorporating metrics, we maintain these principles:

#### Balance Objectivity:
Pure subjective or "beauty-contest" selection often favors name recognition and marketing prowess. Metrics should be a key factor in voting interfaces.

#### Acknowledge Limitations:
Quantifiable metrics have inherent limitations, especially when funding speculative initiatives.

#### Diversify Measurements:
A variety of metrics provides better insights than any single metric.
Align With Goals: Metrics should demonstrate clear links to the stated goals of the round.
#### Prevent Overload:
Overwhelming users with data can be as problematic as providing insufficient information. In these situations, aids (LLMs, preference rubrics) should assist decision-making.

#### Support Human Judgment:
In situations where voters are responsible for decisions (DAO TCR vote), metrics should serve as guides rather than final inputs.

## How do Ship Operators Get Paid?

We propose that Ship Operators are paid a fixed percentage of funds that they successfully distribute. In doing so we can ensure the following:

- Ship Operators are incentivized to increase the total amount of funds their Ship receives
- Ship Operators are incentivized to increase the total pool of funding available within Grant Ships
- Funding after distribution incentivizes Ship Operators to ensure project recipients complete their milestones

## How are Ship Operators Selected?

We prefer to let the use-case drive how ships are selected. For DAOs, we generally prefer to have the DAO elect Ship Operators through a pre-defined TCR voting strategy.

However, this is use-case-dependent, and we will ultimately implement what best serves the DAO's voter makeup and constitution.

## How Does this Program Reduce Sell Pressure from SCR?

Simply by not using SCR as a primary vehicle for ecosystem funding, we can reduce the amount of SCR being sold into the market. However, for this to be sustainable, the ecosystem needs to be aligned with the goal of increasing sequencer revenue as a whole -- which is why incentive alignment is key to this proposal.

## How Does this Program Add Utility For SCR?

The assessment module can include SCR signaling options, giving new options for SCR holders to influence capital allocation within Grant Ships.

This allows token holders to have input on the outcomes within Grant Ships. There are a variety of ways this can be configured, depending on your specific needs. This could incorporate staking, conviction voting, burn incentives, or simple TCR mechanics.

## This all seems complicated, why not do something simpler?

The more distributed and decentralized a system is, the more its rules must be explicitly defined. In centralized grant-giving solutions, the complexity is hidden in the internal political dynamics and decision-making processes of the responsible team.

By providing this structure for a pluralistic approach, we relieve teams of managing a major portion of the complexity by systematizing it, and then allowing them to focus on the equally complex problem domain which is "How to Give Grants Effectively."

## How can I learn more?

See the Grant Ships rulebook at https://grantships.fun
Follow us on X: https://www.x.com/grantships