On December 13, Mashal Waqar joined the Accelerating Makers team to present Secrets to Collaborating with Makers to Co-create Tech for Civil Society as part of the Accelerating Makers community learning series.
Mashal is currently working as Head of Ecosystem at Octant, a platform enabling experiments in participatory and sustainable public goods funding using Web3 technology. She also recently co-authored the State of Web3 Grants report and created the Protocol Party game as a researcher for Ethereum Foundation’s Summer of Protocols program. She’s a Forbes 30 Under 30, is a two-time TEDx speaker, and has worn many hats in prior years, including being a media entrepreneur, community builder, and writer.
Mashal began her presentation by giving an overview of the pillars of Web3 culture, including decentralization, flexibility, permissionless-ness, public goods, community-run and community power, events, hackathons, conferences, and open-source software. As opposed to Web2, which prioritizes intellectual property (IP), most of Web3 is open-source, allowing others to freely use software and build on top of it.
Mashal’s advice for newcomers to the industry is to pick an ecosystem and deep dive into it through attending events (like ETH Denver, Devcon), joining a Discord and introducing yourself, joining an education program (like SheFi, Kernel), participating in a hackathon, and being active on Twitter/X. She notes that many business deals are done through direct messaging online (DMs).
Mashal recently published research titled the State of Web3 Grants Report, where she and her co-author covered 13 grant programs that have deployed upwards of $1 billion in funding over 5,855 projects. The report highlights the various mechanisms used by the different programs to deploy capital, including quadratic funding (Gitcoin, Clr.fund, Giveth, jokeface), prospective grants (Arbitrum), requests for proposals (Solana, Aave), retrospective grants (Optimism), and research grants (Ethereum, Protocol Labs, Molecule, Metagov).
The report came to a few key conclusions — the first being that grant programs can better align the intentions of their grant programs with their positioning. In other words, “If the goal is to grow the ecosystem, call it an ecosystem support fund. If the goal is to deploy capital as part of marketing, call it a growth fund.” Second, operations are sometimes overlooked yet are crucial to grant programs. The report states: “There need to be individuals dedicated to the grants program, especially if the intention is to run the program over time, to be able to efficiently deploy capital, to update the community with results, and to work towards developing metrics.” Other takeaways covered have to do with rubrics, transparency, and interprogram collaborations. Be sure to check out the full report if you’re interested in learning more.
One more key point Mashal makes in her presentation is that grant programs and bounties can help attract high-quality contributors to the community. In the future, Mashal is curious to see more experiments in the ecosystem that allow the community to decide on the allocation of the funds.
Be sure to watch the full playback on YouTube or just peruse her slides. Follow Mashal on Twitter/X @arlery or reach out to her with your questions about Web3 grant programs at mashal@milestoneventures.co.
