TLDR
- Objective: AlloIRL tests a new way to allocate funds democratically by merging blockchain-based capital allocation tools with local, in-person events.
- Approach: Uses Allo.Capital Tech to enable a simple, no-code interface where community events serve as participatory budgeting sessions.
- Experiment: At a Boulder event, attendees used NFC/QR cards to vote on funding allocations ($5K total) via an easy email sign-in and real-time leaderboard.
- Outcomes: Feedback was mostly positive regarding simplicity and gamification, though some UI/process issues (e.g., rule clarity, vote limits, scaling) emerged.
- Next Steps: Improve UX, transition more fully on-chain, experiment with additional funding methods, and simplify access (e.g., removing phone requirements).
- If you want to run a AlloIRL round checkout irl.allo.capital
Background
Gitcoin’s development of Allo Protocol and Grants Stack, a capital allocation protocol and an enterprise-grade platform for running grants programs, respectively, have enabled the development of novel onchain funding mechanisms and value flows.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of tokenization indicates an increasingly large TAM for onchain capital allocation. The available suite of allocation mechanisms can help prevent gatekeeping and bureaucracy, are highly scalable, and enable higher precision by employing the wisdom of crowds through democratic coordination. The processes being open-source and onchain enable new levels of transparency, accessibility, and customizability.
However, up until now, capital allocation mechanisms employed by these tools have targeted predominantly global and regional audiences. While their reach is large the specificity they can achieve is limited by the knowledge of those participating. Subsidiarity suggests that higher impact per dollar allocated may be achieved by mechanisms which tap into the knowledge bases increasingly local to the where the risks and benefits of funding accrue. AlloIRL presents a ‘last mile’ opportunity to close the gap between proven global and regional funding strategies with the organizations and individuals who are having the greatest impact on-the-ground. We suggest that in-real life (IRL) events hosted by and for community members local to organizations for which capital may be allocated can serve as venues to surface crowd knowledge about precise funding amounts.
AlloIRL aims to allow community organizers and local leaders to create social events in which global funding can be routed efficiently at the local level with a simple, no-code interface which abstracts away the current complexity associated with blockchain UX. All while leveraging the capabilities of aforementioned capital allocation mechanisms and the benefits of being onchain. Not only is AlloIRL an experiment in capital allocation but it’s an experiment in using prosocial blockchain tools within communities currently resistant to blockchain and historically skeptical of technology. The goals are (1) to expand the current market of capital allocation tool users, (2) put the tools to use with the highest possible impact, and (3) allow those in our communities who are having the greatest positive social impact to keep their focus on what they do best while not having to learn new software solutions or pander to traditional funding systems.
Questions we set out to answer
- How to bring the experience of participatory budgeting out of the digital and into the physical? Can we make it more fun and embodied?
- Can we make the experience accessible to people for whom standard web3 flows involving wallets & signatures are too complicated or scary?
Experiment 1 on Feb 22
- Hosted at the Cosmo.Local party at GFELxBoulder
- Gave out NFC+QR Code cards to each grantee (6) which linked to their respective project pages on the app
- Small introduction on stage by Aaron and Jon about what AlloIRL is and how to use it; invited the audience to find the grantees and scan their card
- Prototype AlloIRL web app built with a standard Sign in with Email flow and a straightforward web2 stack with Ethereum Attestations on the backend
- Leaderboard for visualizing the results with realtime updates and estimates
- 208 vote allocations from 75 users over ~2 hours on a $5,000 pool
- Used Grants Stack to validate the idea while spending time on UX Dev over Smart Contract work
| Login screen was a standard OTP flow to reduce confusion as well as annoying iOS/Safari auth flow bugs | All Projects view offered a map of all the projects as well as their running totals. | Project view on each page where the allocations were made, as well as displaying allocations from other attendees |
| Leaderboard for visualizing the contributions from attendees to their respective projects. As transactions came in, the emoji users voted with would blast out over the screen. |
Reactions
- Overall: the majority of feedback was positive. “UX was simple and intuitive”, “sign in was easy”, “fun to watch the leaderboard updating”, “felt like a game I could play over and over again”.
- Social context: “Didn’t understand the rules”, “didn’t know it was happening”.
- UI & UX: “Don’t know how many votes I have left”, “Would like to see info about grantees in round, I didn’t have time to get in touch with each org”, “Would like to click a link in verification email instead of copy and paste a code”. NFC cards worked better than expected.
Learnings from first experiment
- Quite a few attendees were not on the Luma: having a better way to handle non-allowlisted people would’ve helped.
- Dashboard styling broke down once rendered attendees went >30. The connections + realtime emojis worked great.
- Importance of having a clean, tested “reset process”. The ad hoc approach we took ended up corrupting the underlying Supabase instance and required us to migrate to a new instance in a rush.
Next steps and questions
- How to make UX even better & smoother for attendees
- Moving the current semi-onchain architecture onchain
- Integrate and experiment with more funding mechanisms
- How simple of a UX can you make for organizers to customize an IRL funding event
- How to drop the attendees’ phone requirement
- Conduct more experiments as features are added and gather additional feedback to improve functionality and UX
If you want to run an AlloIRL round checkout irl.allo.capital.