ERC-7794: Grant Registry

Abstract

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This proposal introduces a Grant Registry contract intended for managing financial, research, or project-based grants that provide funding for projects across multiple blockchains. The contract standardizes the registration, management, and tracking of these grants by organizing data into distinct categories, enabling clear separation between immutable fields and mutable fields. It supports modular disbursement tracking and allows for external links to off-chain documentation. This registry emits lifecycle events, enabling external protocols to efficiently access grant data, which promotes transparency, interoperability, and enhanced insights into grant program performance.

Motivation

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The Ethereum ecosystem currently lacks a standardized way to manage and track grants across different chains and programs, leading to inefficiencies and fragmentation. Each grant program has its own distinct interface, processes, and management mechanisms, which creates barriers for both funders and grantees. These issues hinder transparency, complicate the tracking of fund disbursements, and make it difficult to evaluate the overall effectiveness of grant programs across different networks.

The lack of interoperability between grant programs further exacerbates the problem, as projects and contributors often work across multiple blockchains. This makes it challenging to aggregate data, monitor milestones, and assess grantee performance in a consistent manner.

The Grant Registry contract solves these issues by introducing a unified standard that ensures all grants can be registered, tracked, and managed consistently, regardless of the underlying chain or program. This approach not only simplifies the lifecycle management of grants but also fosters better collaboration between communities, allowing for more competitiveness and better tracking of progress. Additionally, the standardization of data opens the door for more insightful analytics, enabling protocols to measure the impact of grants in a much more streamlined and transparent way.

Specification

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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

Contract Interface

When calling the registerGrant function:

• The grantManager MUST submit a valid grantManager address that is not the zero address.
• The community label MUST be a non-empty string.
• The grant ID MUST be unique and not already registered in the system.

When editing overall grant details:

• The grantManager MUST be the current grant manager to make changes to the grant.

When adding a milestoneDate:

• The milestoneDate MUST not exist in the milestonesDates set.

When editing disbursments:

• The milestoneDate MUST be a valid milestone date associated with the grant.

When adding externalLinks:

• The string MUST not be empty.

Rationale

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The design of this Grant Registry Contract is driven by the need for a flexible and modular system that supports a wide range of grant programs across different chains. The rationale for the key design decisions is outlined below:

1. Separation of Fields: The division of fields into different categories, such as identification, grant data, and disbursement-related information, allows for a more efficient use of on-chain storage. Immutable fields like id, chainid, and community are kept separate from mutable fields, ensuring that core identification elements remain unchanged, while other aspects like milestones and participants can be updated throughout the grant lifecycle.

2. Modular Disbursement Handling: Not all grant programs will choose to perform disbursements on-chain. By allowing disbursements to be managed through external links, the contract remains modular and adaptable to different use cases. Programs that prefer to handle disbursements off-chain can still use the registry for status tracking, ensuring broad applicability across different ecosystems.

3. Dynamic Team Management: The participants structure uses EnumerableSet for grantees, allowing for team-based grants. This feature facilitates tracking of contributions and adjustments to the grant team over time, enabling more comprehensive reputation systems and transparency.

This design aims to create a scalable, efficient system that can evolve with the needs of different grant programs, while maintaining key benefits like transparency, modularity, and low gas usage.

Backwards Compatibility

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No backward compatibility issues found.

Reference Implementation

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Key considerations for this implementation:

1. Gas Optimization: grantId utilizes immutable identification fields to minimize large gas consumption. This ensures that essential information is used with keccak256 efficiently, while the mutable data can be submitted or modified later as the project evolves without affecting the identification method.

2. Use of EnumerableSet: By leveraging EnumerableSet for managing participants and milestone dates, the contract allows for dynamic updates, such as team composition changes or new milestones. This approach offers flexibility without sacrificing the ability to efficiently track changes.

Security Considerations

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No security concerns were found.

Copyright

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Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.