The CARBON Copy Team recently took a look at the results of the recent GG21 Climate Solutions Round operated by Climate Coordination Network. Our goals were to get a sense of how the funding was being allocated and which categories were generating the most interest. We also hope to use this data as a means of comparison for the next climate round.
You can find the round results here.
Our analysis of the GG20 Climate Round is available here.
Key macro stats
- The total number of unique contributors was 794, a 65% decrease from GG20 (2,262).
- The total donated was $22,050, a 62% decrease from GG20 ($58,010.54).
- 21 projects considered non-Web3 in scope (just using Web3 for funding) received a total of $28,513.60, compared to 41 and $21,503.74 in GG20.
- 50 projects considered as Web3 in scope received a total of $118,536.41, compared to 97 and $156,185.32 in GG20.
GG19-GG21 trends
The overall trend across the past three Climate Solution rounds is an overall decline in unique contributors and total amount donated. For GG21, the most frequently cited explanation is the lack of an Open-Source Software (OSS) round, which typically attracts a lot more interest for all of the other rounds.
Looking at unique contributors, there has been quite a decrease since GG19:
After a strong GG20, GG21 saw a decline in total amount donated:
Category representation
The round's 71 projects were distributed across 19 categories as follows:
Network societies and their nodes once again had the biggest representation, however there was a slight decrease in the percentage of total projects. This can likely be explained by the existence of a dedicated node round on Celo.
Regenerative agriculture also continued its strong representation. Agroforestry practices are proving effective in terms of localised impact.
On the other end, the biggest surprise was the complete absence of investment instruments after seeing five last year.
Funding distribution
The $22,050 in donations and $125,000 in matching funds was distributed as follows:
The first thing that sticks out is the increase in the amount received by projects that primarily finance other grassroots initiatives, an almost 100% increase over last round. Impact verification projects saw an even larger increase of nearly 800%.
Interestingly, education projects received 54% less than last round, while recycling and waste projects received about 50% less. These are despite that fact that there were 50 fewer projects in the round.
From an average received per project perspective, it breaks down like this:
Impact currencies (referred to as ecological currencies in the last analysis) led the way once again, although $EARTH was the only project represented.
Regenerative agriculture projects received twice as much on average as last round, as did content and research projects, impact NFTs, and conservation projects. Projects leveraging artificial intelligence saw the biggest increase (1000%), however.
Oracles and data were the only category to see a material decrease in average.
Donations vs. matching
Drilling down into the amounts received, we can see the split between donations and matching funds:
Given the fact that the matching amount remained the same but the number of projects decreased by 31%, the expectation was the that matching numbers would be advantageous across the board.
Only ecological accounting projects had a higher donation amount than matching amount. This is a reminder that quadratic funding mechanisms favour a higher number of unique contributors than total donation amount.
Every other category, save for artificial intelligence and conservation had a large gap between donation amount and matching amount.
Matching impact per contributor
A new addition to this analysis is average matching amount per contributor per project. We think this is a great way to understand where contributors are generating the most matching impact with their donations and to evaluate the mechanism used to determine matching funds allocation.
For example, each contributor who donated to a reforestation project generated $23.25 in matching funds for that project on average.
What we can see is that the contributors donating to project financing, solutions developer, and impact currency projects generated the most matching impact on average.
Unique vs. total contributors
We also took a look at the average unique contributors relative to the total contributors per category. We felt this was a better reflection of interest than looking purely at totals. It breaks down like this:
The analysis is most interesting when you compare this chart with the one above. Take two categories with the same average number of unique contributors: 1) content and research, 2) recycling and waste. Both had 40 unique contributors on average, yet content and research contributors generated double the matching impact.
What is clear is that average number of unique contributors is not an accurate indicator of matching success. While it's better than total donation amount, it does appear that the wallet making the donation (and the donation currency/network) had more of an influence this time around.
With CCN moving to a 50/50 combination of quadratic funding (QF) and connection-oriented cluster matching (COCM), we were likely to see a change in the way a contributor's matching impact was determined.
Methodology
We took data from two different sources. Donation data came directly from the Gitcoin Grants API, while matching results were issued by Climate Coordination Network last week.
We then categorised the projects according to our the taxonomy used in our ReFi project database. Our classification was based on the project's primary activity.
Note that the above analysis doesn't include data from the Shell sub-round because it didn't include all projects in the Climate Solutions round.
Disclosure
We were a participant in both the Climate Solutions round and Shell sub-round, earning a total of $1,864.10 and $2,095.77, respectively.
More by CARBON Copy Team
Breaking Down the GG20 Climate Round
The View From Rwanda
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