Allo Protocol

A general purpose protocol for the efficient allocation of capital.

Allo Protocol is a set of smart contracts that enable the democratic allocation and distribution of capital. The protocol was developed by Gitcoin (opens in a new tab) to power the Grants Stack, but is useful beyond grants and quadratic funding.

Why a Protocol for Capital Allocation?

Crypto has given us an incredible set of tools for forming capital: token drops, NFTs, treasury diversifications, staking and yield, etc. It has also given us democratic and secure ways of keeping that capital safe: Safe, Governor Bravo, among others. But very little of the money raised gets allocated back into the community. Instead, it sits in treasuries while flame wars wage on in governance forums over peanut-sized funding decisions.

Why?

Well every proposal has root-level access to the treasury and the entire community gets to weight in on every funding decision.

Allo gives communities a tool set to experiment with capital allocation. Pick a mechanism (like Quadratic Funding), eligibility criteria for projects and voters, and how to distribute the capital (lump sum, milestone-based payments, etc).

Our hope is that communities will use Allo to build and experiment with multiple different ways of allocating and distributing capital in their community and that the movement of tokens will unlock communities to grow and achieve their missions.

Use Cases

Grants Tooling
Bounties and Requests for Proposals
Creating circular economic systems
Quadratic Funding
Mechanism design and experimentation
Wrapped voting

Learning More

You can use this documentation to get an overview of the protocol. We also welcome contributions and would love for you to get involved. Finally, you can head to gitcoin.co (opens in a new tab) to keep up to date with protocol releases.

Community

Current Status

We are live on mainets, please see the main branch of the allo-v2 (opens in a new tab) repository on GitHub for our supported networks (opens in a new tab).

High-level dates on the 2024 roadmap (WIP):

Q1 Grants Stack integration to v2
Q2
Q3
Q4

Allo Protocol vs the Grants Stack

In addition to Allo Protocol, Gitcoin offers a suite of products called the Grants Stack (opens in a new tab).

Allo Protocol is for people building applications with novel capital allocation mechanisms, like quadratic funding. The protocol contains a registry of recipients (Project Registry (opens in a new tab)), a way to create pools of capital (Pools (opens in a new tab)), and a strategy for allocating that pool of capital (Allocation Strategy (opens in a new tab)). Anyone building custom tools for communities to allocate capital or for projects to receive capital should use Allo.

The Grants Stack (opens in a new tab) is a self-service suite of products for hosting a grants program. For now, it lets you run Gitcoin-style quadratic funding rounds in your ecosystem, but will expand into other forms of grants over time. The product suite offers everything you'd need to run your grants program without writing any code. So if you just want to run your grants program, the Grants Stack (opens in a new tab) is a good fit for you.

Next Steps

Conceptual Overview Contracts Getting Involved