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Grant and incentive impact tracking

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What is grant and incentive impact tracking?

Grant and incentive impact tracking is measuring what a chain’s or DAO’s grants and incentive programs changed onchain: the users, volume and TVL each grantee brought in, compared with a baseline such as the weeks before the grant.

Foundations, grants councils and the analytics teams they hire run it to show token holders a return on each program and to check grantee milestones against onchain numbers.

Goldsky watches the grantee addresses you list and lands their activity, including the weeks before each grant, in your warehouse; the address list, the baseline, attribution and milestone decisions stay with your team.

Who uses grant and incentive impact tracking?

Chain foundations, DAO grants councils, and the analytics firms and grants platforms that report on their programs.

How grant and incentive impact tracking works

The diagram follows one grant program from the addresses its grantees submit to the impact analysis the DAO reads. Your setup may differ.

Your business, step 1: Collect grantee addressesWallets and contracts, by program
Goldsky, step 2: TurboWatch grantee addressesNew grantees added with no redeploy
Blockchains, step 3: Users interactWith grantees’ contracts and apps
Your business, step 5: Measure users, volume and TVLPer grantee, program and week
Goldsky, step 4: TurboLand activity in your warehouseIncluding the weeks before each grant
Your business, step 6: Compare with a baselineBefore and after, or a control group
Your business, step 7: Review milestonesAgainst each grantee’s onchain KPIs
Your business, step 8: Publish the impact analysisReturn on each program’s spend
  • Goldsky

How to track grant and incentive impact

A pipeline watches the addresses your grantees submit and lands their activity, from before each grant onward, in your warehouse. Your analysts measure each grantee against a baseline and report on each program.

What you’ll need

  • Goldsky Turbo
  • Each grantee’s wallet and contract addresses, by program
  • A Postgres database for the address list
  • A data warehouse for the activity
  • Token price data for volume and TVL
  • A grant record with each grantee’s milestones

  1. Collect grantee addresses

    A grantee’s impact can only be measured once you know which wallets and contracts are theirs.

    Ask each grantee for the wallets that receive the grant and the contracts users touch, and record the program, grant size and dates beside them. A contract left off the list makes a grantee look smaller than they are.

  2. Watch grantee addresses

    Handled by Goldsky Turbo

    Only activity at grantee addresses counts, and new grantees join each season.

    Each new address has to start counting without restarting anything, or a grantee’s first weeks go missing.

    Goldsky’s Turbo Pipelines keeps the address list in a dynamic table, which lives in a Postgres database, and filters activity with dynamic_table_check(); a row added mid-season applies to the running pipeline.

    Learn about dynamic tables (opens in a new tab)

  3. Users interact with grantees

    Users deposit, trade and transact with grantee contracts and apps, which is what a grant is meant to grow.

    Each of those actions is a transaction onchain. Signals such as GitHub activity or site visits come from other sources.

  4. Land activity in your warehouse, with history

    Handled by Goldsky Turbo

    A baseline needs the weeks before each grant as well as the weeks after.

    History and live activity land in the same tables with their block times, so any window can be compared. Rows from blocks the chain later replaces have to be corrected, or volume is counted that never settled.

    A Turbo Pipelines job mode pipeline backfills a fixed block range once and exits, and a live pipeline writes new activity to your warehouse as it happens.

    Backfill history with job mode (opens in a new tab)

  5. Measure users, volume and TVL

    These are the numbers grants councils judge a grantee by.

    Your warehouse counts distinct addresses as users, sums volume and values the funds held in grantee contracts for TVL, per grantee, program and week. Pick metrics that fit each sector, such as TVL and volume for DeFi or users and transactions for games.

  6. Compare with a baseline

    Growth during a grant only means something next to what would have happened anyway.

    Compare each grantee with its own weeks before the grant, or with similar projects that got no grant. When other incentives ran at the same time, count only the share the grant can claim, or every program takes credit for the same growth.

  7. Review milestones against onchain KPIs

    Grants are often set against milestones, so reviewers check each one against the numbers agreed with the grantee.

    Agree on the onchain KPI for each milestone when the grant is made, so the review compares like with like.

  8. Publish the impact analysis

    Token holders fund these programs, so they expect to see what each one returned.

    Report results per program and grantee with the method, the baseline and the attribution rules, so readers can check the numbers. Show the return per token spent, so programs of different sizes can be compared.

What you control

Your team
  • Collect grantee addresses
  • Measure users, volume and TVL
  • Compare with a baseline
  • Review milestones against onchain KPIs
  • Publish the impact analysis

Security and deployment

  • SOC 2 Type IIIndependently audited security controls.
  • Dedicated infrastructureSingle-tenant options for production workloads.
  • Data residencyCloud, on-premises or co-located.

More use cases that analyze onchain activity

Use cases built the same way

Track grant and incentive impact with Goldsky

We’ll map it to your systems and show you what Goldsky runs, so your team builds the product, not the pipelines underneath it.

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