By Steve Ngok and Aaron Morales Shildrick.

Special thanks to Eric Zhang for feedback and review.

TL; DR

• Dora BNB GrantDAO will allow for continuous long-term support for early-stage open source Web3 projects with seasonal quadratic funding grant rounds and hackathons.
• Starting on March 21, the first round of the BNB quadratic funding grant round will offer USD 600,000 divided among six tracks.
• The BNB community can directly support and empower new BNB projects via DoraHacks.io.
• Previous BNB grantees and key projects will be involved in the Dora BNB GrantDAO funders league to support new BNB projects.
• In addition to the BNB GrantDAO, Dora GrantDAO offers microgrant and direct grants to multi-chain innovative ideas.

Starting March 21, 2022, DoraHacks is officially launching and curating the BNB GrantDAO. This GrantDAO is the start of a fundamental change in the approach taken by DoraHacks to fund developers to build genuinely innovative open-source web3 projects and beyond. Through the DAO, projects will be financed through quadratic funding rounds, microgrants, direct grants, and hackathon bounties. In partnership with Binance and the BNB Chain team, this DAO marks the stepping stone for continued funding of the BNB and multi-chain ecosystem developers.

DoraHacks has been curating community grants for all ecosystems, but this BNB GrantDAO will focus on projects built on the BNB ecosystem. Binance and Dora have had a fruitful and successful partnership for a couple of years now, funding over 300 brilliant projects with around 2.4 million USD in grants and rewards, showing the extent of the success of previous iterations of funding. However, reaching the next level was not going to be easy. Still, the answer became apparent: a better grant system is required for devs to get continuous support from both the ecosystem and the communities. The introduction of this GrantDAO is taking this to a new and higher level. Nurturing genuine innovation has always been in the mind of these grant programs, and now, that goal is about to become much more achievable in the long term. The new system will support early-stage projects on a longer-term basis. In addition, projects can participate in year-round grant rounds and have consistent access to events and competitions for networking with partners, meeting new developers, access to funding, and mentorship.

The GrantDAO system offers benefits such as community ownership, expanding the BNB chain alumni network, and the capacity to build a BNB funders league.

• Funded by the community, owned by the community
  • All BNB supporters will be able to support the projects they love in the BNB ecosystem by participating in the BNB quadratic funding grant rounds.
  • This allows for more knowledgeable partners and individuals as contributors to get involved in the ecosystem development of the BNB Chain.
• Expanding the BNB alumni network
  • Previous BNB grantees in the ecosystem can create a network for providing support to more early-stage projects and benefit from partnerships and help build a sustainable granting scheme.
• Building the BNB Funders League
  • A key group of donors and supporters will be prominent BNB ecosystem partners or VCs. Building this league for them can allow them to contribute to building the BNB chain ecosystem continuously.

How BNB GrantDAO works

As mentioned, the Grant will commence on March 21. Being a Binance and Dora partnership, Binance will be providing a large portion of the resources needed to carry this out. The DAO treasury will be kept in a Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet and donated by BNB Foundation, ecosystem partners, VCs, and BNB Grants alumni. The first round will go up until May 10 and consecutive rounds in the summer, autumn, and winter, creating year-round continuous access to grants for multi-chain developers. This would allow new projects to enter at almost any time and provide several funding rounds to successful projects.

This first round, also referred to as the Revelation Hackathon, will be carried out through on-chain quadratic funding rounds and judge voting to distribute the matching funding pools, allowing the BNB community to have a say and a role when deciding which projects get funded. For this round, USD 600,000 will be distributed equally along the following six tracks:

• Disruptive DeFi
• Innovative Infra
• MetaFi: GameFi, Metaverse, NFT
• Frontier Tech
• DAOs, dCommunities, and dMedia
• Blockchain for Good

This first-round offers a USD 10,000,000 seed funding opportunity for participating projects.

An important aspect is to unite all critical players from the Binance ecosystem. The involvement of these projects would be precious in contributing to supporting early-stage projects and getting a chance to give back to the community and ecosystem. Currently, track sponsors and partners included are Kardia, GuildFi, Ankr, HashKey, Blockrus/Nodereal, CertiK, Venus, Celer Network, SkyVision, GSR, Animoca Brands, WOO Network, Tranchess, BiSwap, DODO, Galaxy, IVCC, MathWallet, Apeswap, Wombat, NFTScan, EPNS, Multichain(AnySwap), and AWS. Beyond the opportunity to give back, all projects are encouraged to network and build new partnerships. A great example is CertiK, one of the current partners of the BNB GrantDAO. CertiK is a blockchain security and auditing project, securing and monitoring blockchains, smart contracts, and Web3 apps. Joining the GrantDAO as a partner, the company will offer its auditing capacity to support all projects that enter the grant round. In addition, all vital BNB projects can connect with early-stage projects to scale and leverage this partnership as an opportunity to grow their network while helping early-stage projects grow.

The Dora GrantDAO Ecosystem

In addition to the BNB GrantDAO, DoraHacks also hosts a Dora GrantDAO, built to be more focused on supporting genuine innovations from the blockchain space and beyond. Similarly, the Dora GrantDAO is made neutral, incentivizing devs from all backgrounds with different grant types offered through Dora GrantDAO. The potential for genuine grassroots innovation will be invaluable with an ever-growing hacker movement that DoraHacks is creating. Supporting developers and hackers is one of the best ways to help novel ideas that matter to the future of humanity. Committed to this vision for continuous long-term support, Dora hosts a Moonriver grant round on March 23 and the BoBa Network Grant 1 less than a week later. These grants are built to open the doors for thousands of developers to create and make the multi-chain space as exciting as we know it can be. Getting involved now as a partner or as an early-stage project is crucial as opportunities like these have never been better.