Endaoment’s First Retroactive Grant
Last week, we were honored to have been selected as a recipient of a significant grant from Optimism’s RPGF3! We were awarded just over 76,000 OP tokens, worth approximately $300k USD at time of announcement.
We must begin by applauding the intentionality, transparency and accessibility of the initiative. RPGF3 was an incredible milestone for retroactive public goods fundraising. Now, as a grantee, we feel it’s our job to maintain those values going forward by providing context, plans and updates on how we are using this new funding.
RPGF3 was designed to incentivize projects that bring meaningful activity and real-world impact onto the Superchain, the suite of low-fee, fast-execution blockchains powered by the OP Stack and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Embracing the Optimistic Vision
Endaoment.org was proud to apply into the RPGF3 grant round, citing our recent launches on two OP Stack chains: Optimism and Base.
Launching on these networks has buoyed our traction and greatly expanded the kinds of users we could welcome. In turn, adopting the Optimistic Vision resulted in more fundraising on Endaoment, and opened the door for completely crypto-agnostic fundraising to be recorded & facilitated onchain.
We saw an entirely new kind of impact happening through Endaoment: retail donations through nonprofit referrals. The usability enhancements we were able to ship as a result of deploying on Layer 2 scaling solutions drove new nonprofit adoption of Endaoment in 4Q23. Organizations are already telling us they see Endaoment as an easier way to take in donations of any kind—not just crypto.
These vital, grassroots institutions for communities around the globe are now driving donors with no crypto experience or assets to Endaoment, while the onchain protocol remains the underlying infrastructure for recording donation activity.
This, we feel, is the future we’ve been clamoring for; a crypto-native application that any user can use simply because it’s more effective and accessible than its traditional predecessor.
The activity being recorded and managed through Base and Optimism is, in our view, one of the principal examples of real-world impact available today. Charitable donations, straight to a wide range of established nonprofits with almost little to no prior crypto fundraising experience. Thousands of onboarded organizations, across 150 countries, are already set up to receive donations via onchain and offchain assets. The OP stack is now home to the largest rolodex of verified, nonprofit, public, and permissionless payment endpoints in the world.
Next Steps
As we reflect on receiving this grant from the OP community, it’s important for us to think big about what these funds enable. We’re committed to use this grant to further fund public goods. We aim to achieve that in two ways:
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by setting aside half of the OP granted into the Endaoment.org treasury as OP, to be held as a mission-aligned investment at the discretion of the Endaoment.org Board of Directors, and
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by spending the other half of the grant over the coming months and years to fund specific experiments and development, focused broadly around impact attestations and program accountability in philanthropic giving.
This allocation of capital allows Endaoment.org to lengthen its runway through exposure to OP appreciation, while also enabling the team to fund dedicated work towards advancing public goods infrastructure we’d otherwise not have the bandwidth or capacity to fund.
We’ll share more about what we’ve got in mind for impact attestations as we progress—and we’re encouraged by work we’re seeing from others in the broader OP/Public Goods communities. Our goal is to be additive, strive for standardization across efforts, and look for novel, easy-to-understand use cases for these kinds of attestations for donors & nonprofits alike. We are looking forward to building in public with a broad set of community members who are already motivated to make impact proofs a part of the philanthropic supply chain. If this work interests you, please feel free to reach out to admin@endaoment.org, or join us in Discord to get involved.
We are inspired by—and are immensely grateful for—the results of RPGF3. An enormous thank you to all the badge holders who included us in ballots. We hope to bring pride to your votes and serve as an example of what is possible thanks to RPGF, and look forward to further opportunities as we invest in building critical open source infrastructure for generosity.
(🔴, 🔴)