Future Quest Grant Pool Applications Update!
What’s next for the grant pool and Future Quest.
Dear friends and Regen Heroes, time for an update!
As per (extended) plan, last night we closed applications for the grant pool.
We received a whopping 330+ submissions from just as many incredible founders (far beyond our 100 target), majority of which are web3 projects for climate.
This just shows how thriving and incredible this space is! 💪💚
We are so excited seeing how many ideas, solutions, innovations and new start-ups there are and it makes us feel really hopeful for the future.
We cannot wait to start connecting the dots, collaborating and empowering these founders wherever we can. We will also seek ways to support many more applicants than the current pool can afford — we’ll seek further contributions and a larger budget in Q1!
This is the first time we are raising non-profit funds and it’s quite a learning curve. We’re taking notes (which we’ll share in our next post!) and we’ll be able to draw from this for the years to come.
Our team is now working hard to make sure that we thoroughly review all submissions, refine all the data and make it ready for our incredible Council to select the winners.
The grant council includes stellar members 👑:
- Stefan Renton — Polygon
- John Elisson — ReFiDAO
- Angela Bermudo — Future Horizon
- Gregory Landua — Regen Network
- Chad Frischmann — Regen Intel, Project Drawdown
- Lubomila Jordanova — Plan A
- Nick de la Forge — Planet A Ventures
- Chante Harris — SecondMuse
- Vera Futorjanski — WEF, UN
- Julia Zhou — Tidal Impact
- Xochitl Cazado — Celo Foundation
- Matt Cyrankiewicz — Future Quest
Our deepest gratitude to these great entrepreneurs, investors and trailblazers to have agreed to contribute their time to help us elect the best of the best! Watch our Twitter to learn more about the council members.
This grant pool wouldn’t be possible without our incredible partners who are contributing funds, helped us promote the power of web3 x climate as well as to those who are still in conversations as it has not been the easiest time to raise funds in web3!
These are, in order of commitment 🙏:
We also had a couple of partners help us spread the word:
We don’t stop here — we’ll be working closely with these and some incoming partners in the weeks and months ahead.
We’re especially thankful for everyone’s support given the overall sentiment in the web3 space. Only up from here!
Navigating Rough Seas 🏴☠️
When we started, things were off to an incredible start. We had around 80% of the target committed in just the first couple of weeks of the race to help ReFi (see an article with original motivation here), however, the day after we announced the initiative on stage at Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon… the FTX crash extinguished almost all our momentum. It became much harder to raise from that point. A couple of our incoming partners had to pull out entirely and many pushed their budgets to the new year.
For us it meant that we just need to try harder and work harder, as the lower the market, the less investing activity there is, the more this grant pool is needed. This was the whole point of it!
Things stretched in time and we had to talk to many more partners than expected, which is why currently we are not yet sure how much we raised in total, however we are very close to the goal and we’re confident we’ll cross it by the time distributions finish!
Looks like we’ll make it!
At the minimum we raised $750k, which, even if shy of $1M we believe will make a difference and is perhaps the largest ReFi pool being deployed at the depth of the bear market. But we’re still in talks for — let’s call it — a resupply mission by January which may increase the total past $1M. Fingers crossed!
We are just receiving funds from our partners and they are coming on different chains and in fiat, but once it’s all accounted for, we’ll also share a report and wallets for full transparency and traceability.
One thing for sure: we will be able to start distributing funds in December already.
It has not been easy this time around, but it feels so worth it! We can’t wait to start supporting the winners and their journey ahead, including some exciting communications activity we’re working on with our friends at Polygon :)
Again, huge thank you to our partners who weathered the storm with us and were able to stick to their commitments!
Next steps!
The time is coming to distribute the funds. We aim to do it as quickly as possible to help while the help is most needed — as per our plan — however we also need to make sure the projects are selected in a thoughtful, fair and clear manner.
The selection will have following steps:
- Initial rating for terms of acceptance and alignment with the categories
- Initial rating by key contributing partners (Celo and Polygon) for projects fitting their targets
- Full review by the Council members, working in groups
Wen results?
We anticipate the results to be announced in the 3rd week of December. We are not committing to an exact date as we received a lot more applications than expected and want to give our team a little extra space to make sure nothing was missed. We will start deploying funds almost immediately, as they come into our Climate Treasury.
We don’t stop there!
The App!
The applicants will be gradually invited to come test and set up our early dApp, where they will be able to find potential investors, collaborators and advisors — as well as gatherings and other quests.
The Forge!
What’s more, we’re releasing the first elements of Future Quest, the game.
We believe the future is millions of people working to solve climate problems to earn money and gain rewards in a new form of a distributed economy. Some call it the Future of Work.
We like to think of it as the first massively multiplayer online game for climate. We’re making it fun and rewarding. An exciting adventure towards a new regenerative future.
Our goal is to accelerate removal/reduction of 1Gt of carbon (CO2e) from the atmosphere.
The Ancient Future Forge will allow Dragon of Regen NFT holders to merge their NFTs into Artifacts that will provide special capabilities and powers in the game platform. These range from bonuses for gaining experience points (XP) or earning rewards to empowering holders to give a $5,000 — $10,000 donation to a project of their choice. There are more than 100 new Artifacts to be discovered with varying rarity. Many are just one-of-one.
You can merge 2–6 Dragons to receive an object, the more you merge, the higher the rarity and impact on the future “gameplay” for climate.
Merging will be free (just gas fees!).
Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord to learn when the drop opens.
We’re just getting started. So much is coming!
#WAGFI friends 💚
