Meta Gamma Delta 2021 Recap
Polygon launch, MCON, $1M Funding Initiative, Developer Bootcamp Scholarships, $30k in grants, and more!
It feels like yesterday that we published the 2020 recap. This year flew by, and we want to take the time to look back at the things we’ve accomplished this year as a DAO.
Here are some highlights of what we’ve been up to in 2021…
Improved Onboarding
- 👹 Summoning on Polygon. Late last year, gas fees were becoming a barrier to entry into the DAO, making interested participants hesitant to pledge, and members hesitant to sponsor and vote on proposals. So in February we summoned our DAO on Polygon Network, which is now where the majority of activity is taking place. We grew from 51 to 98 members with Moloch shares in our DAOHaus. See the announcement here.
- 👾 Goodbye Slack, Hello Discord. Discord is the home of many web3 communities thanks to its suite of bots and integration that better serve our needs as we grow. Members will be able to claim roles, use bot commands to report their contributions, and be automatically notified when new proposals are submitted to the DAO. We are now at 780 members on Discord.
- 📺 Video Intros & Pledging Walkthroughs. The Onboarding Committee interviewed recently joined members about their pledging experience and how we could have made the process more seamless. As a result, in addition to a #start-here channel and written pledging instructions, we now have a video introduction of what MGD is about and a step by step walkthrough of how to pledge to our DAOHaus on Polygon. Check it out here:
Introducing MGD (video)
How to pledge (video)
- 🎤 MGD Speaker Series. Twice a month, we have guests from the community present their project, research findings, or a pertinent topic in web3. We ran 9 speaker sessions this year. Presented topics include L2 scaling, Quadratic Trust, Ethereum Cat Herders, Social Tokens, and crypto-native PR. Session recordings are available to DAO members.
Created a Framework to Track Engagement & Contributions
- 📈 Movement Model. This year, the Governance Committee worked closely with Govrn to create MGD’s Movement Model, which is a framework for evaluating different types of contributions for the DAO.
- 🤖 Kevin Malone Bot. We also integrated a Discord bot that allows members to self-report their weekly contributions. From this we are able to see weekly engagement growth as members go from passive observers, to occasional users, to active contributors and advocates!
💰 Raised Money
In Q4 we worked on a proposal to raise $1M from various allies to build out an end-to-end solution to recruit women from adjacent industries, provide educational opportunity and mentorship, and provide basic income for an onboarding period of 3–6 months. This is still an ongoing initiative but we are already over a quarter of the way there thanks to some early backers.
- $25k WDAI from MetaCartel
- $2k in DAI, PAN through Giveth
- $250k in ONE token from Harmony Foundation
- …and of course we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are without all our backers on Gitcoin Grants! 🙏🏼
💪🏼 Provided Ecosystem Support
- Consensys Academy Scholars. We collaborated with Consensys Academy to give 10 scholarship spots to women coders for their Blockchain Developer Bootcamp. This was an immersive 11-week online course that covered everything from blockchain basics, to smart contract security and how to develop full-fledged web3 application.
- Chainlink Hackathon. We sponsored the Women-Led Team Prize in the Chainlink Hackathon for $10k. This was split between Figura (a Decentralized Digital Game Store using ChainLink oracle nodes for game price pegging and on-chain purchase webhooks) and CricNFT (a curated platform for minting NFT’s of your favorite sports team).
💸 Gave out 30k in Grants
This year, the grants committee pivoted from time-boxed grants rounds to a rolling grants structure to give more flexibility to projects to apply throughout the year. The committee reviews applications biweekly and makes recommends to the DAO for a community-wide vote.
In addition to the 10k DAI for Chainlink Hackathon winners, we also gave 20k DAI this year to women-led initiatives in web3 through Grants. The recipients are…
- 🔎 MGD General Fund 10k DAI — Jovian Network
Jovian is an open research laboratory for DAO evolution. With this grant, Jovian will be building surveys, conducting data analysis, facilitating workshops, and designing new processes for DAOs to improve gender diversity.
The deliverables will be two comprehensive reports on how gender bias effects DAOs today and on proven strategies to overcome those biases and enable more women to succeed.
- 🌸 MGD General Fund 5k DAI— Le Crypto
Le Crypto’s mission is to build an army of women investing in crypto for social good by providing tokenized crypto education to help women build wealth and invest in meaningful projects.
Le Crypto will run a digital campaign to build their membership, including the use of targeted ads, email and web content, and hiring a digital consultant to scale their online community outreach.
They also plan to launch a new membership option using NFTs to unlock token-gated content and community access, using the funds to pay 4 female digital designers and artists to produce 100 Season 1 membership badges and create education content to help women who are new to NFT purchasing, purchase their first NFT to join the community.
A collaboration between Oxford Blockchain Society (OxBlox) and Oxford Women in Business (OxWIB) to increase inclusivity and crypto-nativity by forming a women-led investment DAO. This program will expose participants to novel use-cases of crypto-native applications and give them a hands-on experience assessing investment opportunities in web3.
Funds will be used for in-person learning and networking events, as well as education sessions led by SheFi which include: Intro to Blockchain, DeFi, User tooling in crypto (interactive sessions on wallets etc.), crypto safety, and 2 sessions on DAOs.
📆 MGD IRL
Despite the COVID situation still being touch-and-go, some of us still managed to finally hang out with each other in person.
- 🇫🇷 ETH CC.
- 🇺🇸 MCON. See the recap here
- 🇺🇸 WYOHackathon.
- 🇺🇸 Bitcoin Miami.
- 🇺🇸 Art Basel Miami.
- 🇵🇹 LISCON & ETH Lisbon.
🔥 Content
We have members from all around the world, doing cool things in all sectors of web3 whether that’d be DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, media, or policy. Naturally, there’s a wealth of knowledge in the group which has been shared through reports, talks, panels, and even books this year. Here are some highlights:
- [Marina] Global Report on Women, Cryptocurrency and Financial Independence — Article
- [Zayi & Kseniya] Can Decentralized Organizations Exist? — Video
- [Ann W] Talking DAOs w/ Ann Willmott of Meta Gamma Delta at MCON — Video
- [Nich] Organization Legos: The State of DAO Tooling — Article
- [Anne C] Bitcoin & The Future of Fundraising — Book
- [Simona] What Crypto Should be — Video
- [Mia] How to launch a Service DAO — Video
- [Sydney] The unexpected life of a DAO coordinator — Video
- [Cami] Bankless Layer Zero interview — Video
- [Alex] DeFi, Data & Risk: A Discussion with Aave — Video
- [Rachel] DeFi and Saving Made Fun with Good Ghosting — Video
- [Rafaella] Pods Finance- Decentralized Options Protocol on Ethereum — Video
- [Sparrow] NFT Artist: Sparrow — The Cryptowriter Podcast #28 — Video
What’s in store for 2022
- 🏕 MetaCamp. See proposal
- 💸 Continuing the raise towards our $1M Funding Initiative. Thanks to our early supporters MetaCartel, Harmony Foundation, and Giveth we are over a quarter of the way there!
- 📢 We’ll be moving our biweekly calls to Discord instead of Zoom. Subscribe to our calendar to stay up to date on upcoming events.
- 🤑 More grants to give out. If you’re building something in web3 we’d love to hear from you. See how to apply
- 📆 More IRL events. ETH Denver? Devcon? NFT Berlin? MCON 2? You bet some of us will be there!
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our members and supporters. Thank you for another great year and we look forward to continue slaying Moloch with you in 2022.
