Gitcoin Grants Beta Passes $600k Donations Mark Despite Ethereum’s ‘Gaspocalypse’

Grants beta round, which was meant to further test Gitcoin’s decentralised grants protocol closed with over $600,000 in donations to projects, but also raised concerns about high gas fees on Ethereum which made transaction fees to cost more than donations, prompting the platform to announce it was considering cheaper options.

Gitcoin had said it would be using the Beta round that ran from April 25 to May 9 to test new features on the decentralised grants stack which would be launched to replace the centralised grants platform, needed to be made permissionless in order to better serve the Web3 ecosystem.

There were massive promotional activities on social media urging people to donate to projects with either DAI or ETH

For many people who answered the call to make donations, there was a problem with high gas fees. Donations to the core or featured rounds run on Ethereum, making it susceptible to high cost of executing transactions or gas fee, a major weak point of the blockchain.

A Twitter user said he was forced to reduce the number of projects he intended donating to because of high gas fees.

Something should be done definitely. I wanted to donate to 98 projects but gas is equal to my total donation – this is ridiculous… so i was forced to lower number of projects, Aborriginal wrote.

Gas fees increase when there is congestion on Ethereum. Some people blamed the demand for Pepe meme coin for the surge in gas fees for Ethereum. Gas fee was as high as $25 to $50. Some users described the hike in gas fee as a ‘gaspocalypse’.

Gitcoin acknowledged the challenge and described it as frustrating. Gitcoin offered advice, including asking users to save projects in carts and return to donate at off-peak periods; reduce the number of items in their cart so that less space is required; prioritise as more projects in carts incur higher fees.

However, some users have questioned why Gitcoin only uses the Ethereum chain when there are cheaper Layer two chains including Optimism.

Replying to criticisms of its use of Ethereum to run the grants, Gitcoin said projects are housed in a single place on chain, enabling interoperability, transparency, audibility and opportunity to participate in grants on any chain.

We see and appreciate your feedback. We are working on building more streamlined approaches to a better checkout, as well as deploying on an L2, Gitcoin stated.

Despite the gas fee challenge, Gitcoin said in a community call, to give a recap of the Beta round, that it saw thousands of donations every hour of the last two days. It also revealed that the Open Source Software round got more contributions and support.

That is great to see because we really did start more in the funding of open source software and core infrastructure, so to see the amount of support for open source software during this round was really encouraging to know that the community is still very strong…, Jon MJ, co-host of the call said.

Projects will be paid their grants money after the Gitcoin team has checked to ensure there were no irregularities during the round.