Hey folks, there’s approximately one week left for the 22nd round of Gitcoin Grants, and in today’s article I’m going to be breaking down my picks for why I decided to donate (again).
What are Gitcoin Grants and why should you care?
If you’ve been around the cryptospace for awhile, you may have already heard of Gitcoin Grants, or the Gitcoin Passport, but if you haven’t donated via Gitcoin, historically speaking it’s proven quite profitable to do so as wallets who have done so have either qualified for airdrops (as in the case of tokens like $OP or $RSS3) or at the very least served as an anti-sybil qualifier.
Of course, you can donate to whatever cause/project you think deserves it, but usually I try to look at projects that will most likely also provide the highest chances of a return.
Without any further ado let’s dive into some of these projects shall we?
Revoke.cash
Revoke.cash doesn’t have their own token, in fact they have no TVL on their platform because it’s simply a protocol that allows the removal of approvals tied with your wallet address. I’ve written an article about Revoke.cash in the past, but in a nutshell, it’s probably the most popular place to track and clear any approvals and can give you alerts about risky ones you may want to clear.
In my opinion, they are an extremely trusted member of the cryptospace and regardless of whether or not they do an airdrop, if you wanted to truly give back to web3 public goods, I think Revoke.cash should be at the top of the list.
Link to donate: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/608/89
RubyScore
RubyScore is another platform I’ve written about, an analytics platform that helps you track your farming activity on different L2s. On a daily basis, Ruby Score provides different quests that allow you to accumulate points based on your on-chain activity:
Based on the number of points you accrue, you can earn different NFTs in correspondence with your rank:
Link to donate: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/608/5
Mini Bridge
If you followed through with minting all the badges I outlined in my article on Scroll, you probably would have remembered using Mini Bridge — a “zero-fee” cross-chain tool that is specifically built for cheaply moving smaller amounts of tokens across different different L2s.
Similar to RubyScore, Mini Bridge has their own points system ($pMNB) which you can accrue through either bridging or referrals.
Link to donate: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/610/7
Pheasant Network
Another bridging protocol, Pheasant Network, is also a L2 bridge which also incorporates Bridging-as-a-service for other protocols. Unlike Mini Bridge however, Pheasant doesn’t have a points system (but also doesn’t have its own token).
Link to donate: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/610/10
Hey.xyz (formerly Lenster)
If you look at the number of different contributors, Hey.xyz has perhaps the largest number (almost 3k at time of writing), but it’s last on my list as it’s the one I’m least bullish on.
If you haven’t used Hey.xyz or Lenster before, it’s a social media app built with Lens Protocol however they have an 8 $POL sign-up to simply just make an account. In my opinion, there are so many other different social media web3 projects where you don’t have to pay anything, and I’m also a bit skeptical as they’ve been around for some time (2.5 years) and it doesn’t appear that they’ve gained a whole lot of traction (thus probably the need for the rebrand).
Link to donate: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/42161/608/6
Conclusion
How much should I donate?
Generally the recommendation from others that I’ve gathered is that you don’t really need to donate more than $1–5 dollars, and personally I do $3 dollar donations to around 3–5 different projects.
Are there any you found that I should have included on my list? If so, please let me know about it in the comments below.
And as always thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!