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?
Web3 has given us an incredible set of tools for forming capital, and democratic ways of keeping that capital safe. But very little of the money raised gets allocated back into the community. Instead, it sits in treasuries while governance forums deliberate over peanut-sized funding decisions.
Why? Every proposal has root-level access to the treasury and the entire community gets to weigh in on every funding decision.
Allo gives communities a tool set to experiment with capital allocation. Pick a mechanism (like Quadratic Funding (opens in a new tab)), eligibility criteria for projects and voters, and a way to distribute the capital (lump sum, milestone-based payments, etc).
Instead of choosing from a list of options put together not because they'll serve you best, but because its whats available, we charge communities to ask - "If our mechanism could look like anything, what would we want?"
...and build it.
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
- Twitter (opens in a new tab)
- Telegram (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub discussion (opens in a new tab)
- Discord (see Getting Involved)
Current Status
Allo v2 is live on mainnets (supported networks (opens in a new tab)).
Allo 2.1 is in pre-release testnet.
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 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 product layer built on Allo for hosting a grants program. It powers fully-featured self-serve funding rounds utilizing a variety of methods (opens in a new tab).