Grants Program Pilot Wave Report: Pilot Phase Wrap-Up

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Since we launched our grants pilot program earlier this year, the Obol Association has funded a series of targeted initiatives aligned with the Collective’s SQUAD goals for 2025. As we wrap up the first wave and prepare for the Grants V1 rollout, we offer a high-level breakdown of the projects we supported, what we learned, and what’s next.

Advancing the Obol Collective

The Obol Grants Program was established to support projects that advance the Obol Collective’s strategic goals by providing milestone-based funding to contributors, builders and educators.

Beyond that, it serves as a way to extend the Collective’s reach and capacity. The program achieves this by tapping into the talent and energy of the broader ecosystem to help ship valuable initiatives. These items may sit in the backlog, require specialized expertise, or fall outside of our prioritization funnel. 

More details on how the original pilot wave was structured can be found here. 

Grants Funded in the Pilot Phase

We selected three projects to receive funding as part of the Pilot Phase: 

1. Curia Lab — DRS Oracle & Governance Infrastructure

  • Scope: Built the Delegate Reputation Score (DRS) Oracle and Governance Analytics Dashboard
  • Why it matters: The DRS Oracle is a foundational piece of infrastructure required to unlock reputation-backed governance and enable delegate compensation.
  • Status: Fully funded and deployed, with ongoing maintenance funded for six months.

2. DAMM Finance — DeFi Integrations for stOBOL

  • Scope: Delivered feasibility studies and integration work for Pendle and Morpho to onboard stOBOL into DeFi markets.
  • Why it matters: These integrations are essential to drive stOBOL utility and expand the token’s presence in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
  • Status: Fully funded. Milestones underway, including the upcoming deployment on Pendle.

3. Vista — Obol Ecosystem Dashboard

  • Scope: Developed a governance-focused Dune dashboard tracking delegate participation, power concentration, and SQUAD alignment.
  • Why it matters: Helps tokenholders, delegates, and contributors monitor governance health and coordinate more effectively.
  • Status: Fully funded retroactively. Dashboard already live.

Get Funded for Your Own Community Event

We received multiple grant requests for community events, meetups, and educational workshops. Rather than evaluating each individually, we’ve created a standardized support model for these contributions.

This system is designed to be permissionless and easy to participate in: just host your event, submit your proof, and get funded retroactively. If you’re planning to host an event for more than 100 people, reach out to us so we can align on scale and logistics. 

Here’s how you can get funded for your own community event: 

  • You’ll need to provide verification for your event. Ideally, your submission should include a Luma event page, a group photo, receipts, and screenshots from any presentation materials. 
  • After verifying, we’ll cover a Food and Drink Budget of $15 per verified attendee for up to 100 attendees.
  • In addition, if your event brings in new validator TVL, you’ll receive a Conversion Bonus representing 0.1% of the total new TVL. For example, if your event brings in five new validators and ETH is priced at $4,300, you’ll receive a $688 bonus (5 * 32 ETH * $4,300 = $688,000 in new TVL). 

We hope to encourage community-led growth and give contributors a framework for launching high-quality activations with tangible rewards. Our goal is to support those helping the Obol ecosystem grow on the ground and make it easy to do so. 

Note: This model is not yet a formal agreement but represents our intended direction. It will be finalized and published alongside the Grants V1 launch in the coming weeks. The official documentation will include full details on eligibility guidelines, proof requirements, and disbursement flows. Until then, consider this a preview of what’s to come.

What’s Next: Grants V1 Launch

We’re moving past the pilot phase and designing a more structured and scalable grants framework. You can expect three streamlined tracks:

  1. Core Grants: Proposals aligned with any SQUAD goal (protocol, governance, ecosystem, infra, etc.)
  • This means that initiatives that previously required central execution can be proposed externally. 
  1. Community Events: Via the new permissionless support model
  • Consolidates prior categories (e.g. Silver Techne, community squads)
  1. Staking Mastery Program: Pre-scoped missions created by Obol
  • Tasks the community can “pick up” with guaranteed funding and clear scope

We believe establishing these three tracks will allow us to better match contributors with the Collective’s evolving needs.

We also plan to improve the overall processes around grants (from application flows to post-approval communication) to ensure smoother coordination between applicants, reviewers, and stakeholders. We want to continue making the experience of contributing via grants easier, faster, and more transparent.

Thank You

We appreciate every builder, researcher, and community contributor who participated in the pilot. We’ll be updating our documentation and launching Grants V1 soon. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re interested in contributing, applying, or learning more.

Let’s keep building together.