Organizations work better with Hats. Save time, automate onboarding, and manage permissions across the internet with programmable onchain roles.
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Many DAO grants programs struggle with fragmented permissions, unclear responsibilities, and inefficient fund management. These issues often result in a lack of accountability, compliance problems, and difficulties in managing grants programs effectively, leading to wasted resources and huge operational costs.
Hats Protocol provides grants programs with a better way to manage your grants program from start to finish: hold transparent committee elections, simplify permissions across the review process, securely distribute funds, and hold grantees accountable to their commitments.
Featured Organization: RareDAO. See their Hats structure here.
RareDAO’s Grants Committee is an elected body that is responsible for administering the DAO’s grants program and allocating funds approved by community proposals. Control of Grants Committee funds is delegated by the DAO to Grants Committee Members by minting them the appropriate hat.
RareDAO maintains the authority to revoke signing authority from Grants Committee Members by revoking their hat. This ensures Grants Committee Members remain accountable to the DAO, and provides an added layer of security in case grants committee members become compromised or lose access to their wallets. When it comes time to transition committee members, RareDAO simply transfers the Grants Committee Member hats from one set of addresses to another, rather than executing a complex and time-consuming series of transactions, which has been a source of frustration in the past.
Featured Organizations: Grant Ships & Arbitrum. Learn more about Grant Ships here.
Grant Ships is a competitive grant allocation game where multiple subDAOs (aka Ships) compete to best allocate funds within a given domain. Grant Ships is built on the premise that explicit and visible competition, along with accountability and selection pressure on grants programs will force them to mature into something that is both effective and aligned with the desires of the DAO. Grant Ships uses Hats Protocol behind the scenes to power its roles, responsibilities, and onchain permissions.
Through a grant from Arbitrum Foundation via Plurality Labs and Thrive’s Thank ARB program, Grant Ships was used to allocate 90,000 ARB across two rounds, with future rounds forthcoming.
Featured Organization: RareDAO. See their Hats structure here.
Workflows are at the heart of how organizations run day to day. RareDAO’s grant review process is a perfect example of how Hats helps streamline workflows, turning what could be a chaotic back-and-forth into a clear, step-by-step system that moves grants from draft to approval based on the roles people hold.There are three key roles that are involved in this process for RareDAO: the Grants Committee members, the Grants Committee Chair, and the Foundation Operator. Each has a distinct responsibility at different stages of the review as defined by their hat, and each gets the permissions they need to follow through on their responsibilities directly from their hat.
In the case of the RareDAO grants review process, Grants Committee Members handle the first pass, reviewing grants applications and providing feedback using a rubric. The permission to do so is provided by the very same hat that gives Grants Committee Members signing authority on the Grants Committee Safe. Bundling multiple grants permissions into a single hat means it’s easy to onboard and offboard new committee members as needed, like when role transitions take place.Once enough reviews are in, the Committee Chair checks everything over, makes sure all the details are in place, and then passes the application on to the Foundation Operator. The Foundation Operator then manages the final steps, making sure everything is ready for approval. These permissions are also granted by their respective hats.
With Hats Protocol, the grants review process is made simple. The right people are involved at the right time, without key responsibilities slipping through the cracks. When it’s time to add or remove someone from the Grants Committee, or transfer the Grants Committee Chair role from one person to another, nothing about the workflow itself needs to change. No manual work is required to swap permissions in and out. All that’s needed is to transfer the hat, and all the responsibilities and permissions in the workflow will go along with it.
For more examples of how Hats can be used to supercharge your grants program, read The State of Web3 Grant from Metagov, featuring Hats.