Season 4 Ideas - Giveth

[GivethJake]

Season 4 Ideas - Giveth

GM SuperFluid Fam! Time to provide some updates from our previous season’s rewards for Giveth.

As you can see below, we have been seeing some MASSIVE gains in both $ value and stream usage through recurring donations in 2025:

What an incredible journey we’ve witnessed! Starting from just $407 of streaming donations in January, we’ve exploded to over $10,000 by September - that’s a staggering 2,362% growth in just 9 months! The momentum has been absolutely phenomenal, with three major sprint milestones (S1, S2, and S3) fueling our acceleration. SUP streaming donations on Giveth isn’t just growing - it’s thriving!

But…how exactly have users been getting SUP through Giveth in Season 3?

Donors on Giveth have been earning SUP when they set streaming donations to GIVbacks eligible projects, with a minimum streaming balance of $20/month.

Streaming, aka “recurring donations”, can be made on Giveth to any project with an Optimism or Base address in a variety of tokens including DAI, USDC, ETH, GIV, and OP. However, to become GIVbacks eligible, a project needs to fill out an application and provide evidence of their impact history and reputation. This information is reviewed by an internal team at Giveth who does checks to ensure their credibility and legitimacy as a public goods project.

Thanks to SUP rewards, donors who stream crypto to legitimate, impactful public goods projects on Giveth are making a difference, earning SUP, and are even entered to win up 500,000 GIV every 2 weeks through our GIVbacks raffles.

And what about the projects, how are they doing with SUP streaming donations?

Here is a breakdown of the top 10 projects receiving the most recurring donations during Season 3:

Also to note since Season 3 began in August we have had a total of 89 unique streamers, having active recurring donations on Giveth.

We’d love to see a continuation of recurring donation rewards in S4 in order to keep growing adoption of superfluid streams as a means of supporting public goods, non-profits and impact projects worldwide.

Ideas for Season 4 to Help Grow the Program!

In Season 3 we proposed some changes to the program to help bring in new audiences to the Superfluid community. We’d be happy to discuss or implement any of these options again for Season 4!

1. Keep things as they are

• Maintain current minimum donation balance for eligibility ($20/month)

• Keep same criteria for chains, tokens and projects (must be GIVbacks Eligible and on Optimism or Base)

2. Superfluid Foundation project curation

• Superfluid Foundation signals ~50 projects they want to incentivize recurring donations to

• Giveth adds badge/filter to allow donors to easily find curated projects eligible for SUP rewards

• Maintain current minimum donation balance for eligibility

• Created targeted comms campaigns for eligible projects to attract new donors

3. $SUP community curates projects

• Create programs for SUP holders to nominate projects using existing tools (Snapshot, JokeRace or DeVouch come to mind)

• SUP holders vote on projects to be incentivized

• Giveth adds badge / filter to allow donors to easily find SUP community curated projects eligible for SUP rewards

• Maintain current minimum donation balance for eligibility

• Created targeted comms campaigns for eligible projects to attract new donors

Other Possible Tweaks

• Create a cap % on new points a single user can earn of SUP rewards from recurring donations over a given period

• Provide bonus SUP rewards for first time users collecting points in a given period from recurring donations

This default proposal is mostly focusing on the first listed Idea above, #1 - keep things as they are, but if there is interest in the other ideas we are happy to flesh them out here in the comments with the community to make the biggest impact we can.

[graven]

Hey Giveth team, a couple questions/feedback items:

• Is there a path to Giveth reccuring donations being delivered as streams directly to grantees’ non-custodial addresses? I understand your implementation was designed to abstract some of the complexities of streaming away from users, but IMO it ends up undercutting the core value prop of using Superfluid (multi-stream and app composability via Supertokens). Because grantees never hold any Supertokens—they manually & periodically claim (withdraw+unwrap) donated funds—the potential pull through value of supporting streaming donations through the platform is limited. These teams aren’t setup well to make Superfluid a part of their operations (i.e., subsequently paying contributors in streams, DCAing with Superboring, etc) or integrate it with their product.
• I totally respect that you don’t take a platform fee on donations. This however creates an easy way for grantees to donate to themselves to farm SUP at zero cost (including anonymously). I’ve personally seen this happening and privately messaged one grantee about it. Especially when SUP gets a market price, I’d want to see some steps taken to ensure real, net new volume is being rewarded. The challenge in some ways is harder than QF sybil protection unless you enforce a fee.
• It’d be great to see less concentration in the top recipient list, and for it to skew more toward projects embracing/integrating with Superfluid. I’d definitely like to see something along the lines of options 2 or 3 that you proposed rather than running another season as-is. When SUP gets a market price, it will become clear just how much $ the DAO is putting out in incentives and we should be putting renewed emphasis on driving value back to the DAO/protocol so SPR is stainable.

[karmaticacid]

Hey @graven Thanks for the reply and thoughtful questions. I’m Lauren, Giveth PM - I think we’ve met before. I’ll respond one at time:

@graven

Is there a path to Giveth reccuring donations being delivered as streams directly to grantees’ non-custodial addresses? I understand your implementation was designed to abstract some of the complexities of streaming away from users, but IMO it ends up undercutting the core value prop of using Superfluid (multi-stream and app composability via Supertokens). Because grantees never hold any Supertokens—they manually & periodically claim (withdraw+unwrap) donated funds—the potential pull through value of supporting streaming donations through the platform is limited.

There are 2 main reasons the system is designed this way, requiring project owners to withdraw and unwrap their donations:

1. It allows project owners to be able to manage their recipient addresses on Giveth as needed. It happens often that they need to be updated for better accounting, or if their wallet gets hacked (sad that happens frequently, but it does).

2. It ensures they are fully aware of their received donations, rather than having them hidden through an obscure wrapped version of the token streaming right to their wallet that might even be hidden, depending on the wallet.

On Giveth, the donors hold the responsibility of setting up the recurring donations. Projects become interested really only after their is something for them to claim.

I totally hear what you’re saying about the ideal use case having these projects get funding in via Superfluid, and then having them direct it out again via streams for payments, etc. but for the use case of nonprofits, it’s not very practical. They usually need to use these donations right away to fund their impact. Many of these projects are really struggling for funding, getting the most as one-time injections during QF rounds, or “hot topic” donation periods (like Roman Storm’s trial).

Our users just have never indicated they want that feature.

@graven

I totally respect that you don’t take a platform fee on donations. This however creates an easy way for grantees to donate to themselves to farm SUP at zero cost (including anonymously). I’ve personally seen this happening and privately messaged one grantee about it. Especially when SUP gets a market price, I’d want to see some steps taken to ensure real, net new volume is being rewarded. The challenge in some ways is harder than QF sybil protection unless you enforce a fee.

Totally agree! SUP rewards shouldn’t go to people recirculating funds.

The way we mitigate this now: SUP rewards in these programs are ONLY going to “GIVbacks eligible” projects. To get that status, projects need to apply, submit information about funds use, history of impact and reputation. If a project is found to be recirculating funds (donating received funds back to themselves), they are disqualified from the program (and therefore their donors won’t get any more SUP). You can see all disqualifying factors here in our docs.

We do regular (every 2 weeks) spot checking on donations, track on-chain the winning donations in our GIVbacks raffle to see where funds came from. If we catch a recirc, we reach out to the project, they get 1 warning and then are disqualified if they do it again. I’ll DM you about the one grantee you mentioned.

I would love to do something to reward and incentivize new Superfluid users. What do you think of these ideas we have in the proposal above?

@GivethJake

Other Possible Tweaks

• Create a cap % on new points a single user can earn of SUP rewards from recurring donations over a given period
• Provide bonus SUP rewards for first time users collecting points in a given period from recurring donations

@graven

It’d be great to see less concentration in the top recipient list, and for it to skew more toward projects embracing/integrating with Superfluid. I’d definitely like to see something along the lines of options 2 or 3 that you proposed rather than running another season as-is. When SUP gets a market price, it will become clear just how much $ the DAO is putting out in incentives and we should be putting renewed emphasis on driving value back to the DAO/protocol so SPR is stainable.

Yes!! I love this! We’ve been wanting to change things up for a while now. My preferences is definitely option 2, where SuperFluid Foundation signals around 50 projects they want to incentivize recurring donations to.

We could even work to onboard new projects that are not currently on Giveth, if there are some in mind that you want to fund in particular.

I like this option the best because it would be the quickest to set up and we can ensure that the projects in the round are closest to the Foundation’s goals.

How do we know what the best final decision is here to put to the vote?

[graven]

Hi Lauren

Lots of threads here, so I’ll respond one at a time too:

@karmaticacid

It allows project owners to be able to manage their recipient addresses on Giveth as needed. It happens often that they need to be updated for better accounting, or if their wallet gets hacked (sad that happens frequently, but it does).

An intermediary Super App is one way you could seamlessly allow recipients to update their addresses without closing donor streams (of course, you’d want to apply the same security rigor in updates to the Super App recipient as you do to your current intermediary contract).

@karmaticacid

It ensures they are fully aware of their received donations, rather than having them hidden through an obscure wrapped version of the token streaming right to their wallet that might even be hidden, depending on the wallet.

The only way we will change this perception/reality of Super Tokens being “obscure wrapped versions of the token” is by prominently featuring them in our integrations and pushing native usage.

@karmaticacid

I totally hear what you’re saying about the ideal use case having these projects get funding in via Superfluid, and then having them direct it out again via streams for payments, etc. but for the use case of nonprofits, it’s not very practical.

Heard. I’m not expecting many traditional non-profits to jump headfirst into fully streaming operations anytime soon (but I’ll hold out hope for more web3 native projects). But my suggestion wasn’t really targeted toward adding more features to Giveth itself. My stance is that Super Token holders get those possibilities for free via other apps that integrate Superfluid. This token-level composability is what makes Superfluid different than Drips, Sablier, etc. By not letting Giveth recipients become Super Token holders, those possibilities are foreclosed and that limits the potential value of SUP incentives here.

@karmaticacid

We do regular (every 2 weeks) spot checking on donations

An added challenge with SUP incentives is that they’re distributed in real-time. Without a Sybil score in place, what would your approach be if you saw a brand-new address receive a deposit, wrap it all to ETHx, then start a large recurring donation to one of the grantees?

How do we know what the best final decision is here to put to the vote?

All these questions/comments are just my perspective, of course. The most important (long-term) one to me is Super Token usage because that represents a path for these SUP incentives to shift from just being a subsidy for general philanthropy (which, as a public goods-y person, I can appreciate, but don’t think is sustainable for the DAO) to a stronger onramp for broader protocol usage.

[karmaticacid]

@graven

But my suggestion wasn’t really targeted toward adding more features to Giveth itself. My stance is that Super Token holders get those possibilities for free via other apps that integrate Superfluid. This token-level composability is what makes Superfluid different than Drips, Sablier, etc. By not letting Giveth recipients become Super Token holders, those possibilities are foreclosed and that limits the potential value of SUP incentives here.

The tough part though is that to change things so Giveth projects direct receive the Super Tokens would add dev scope, UX complexity and ultimately friction for projects in the end, and it’s not likely that most would then take the time to then actually make use of new opportunities.

The reason that SUP goes to donors and not projects is because the donor community is the Giveth audience more likely to dive into new tools and opportunities within the Superfluid ecosystem. Projects are mainly focused on funding their direct impact.

@graven

Without a Sybil score in place, what would your approach be if you saw a brand-new address receive a deposit, wrap it all to ETHx, then start a large recurring donation to one of the grantees?

If the ETH deposit came from the project they are streaming to, the project would lose their GIVbacks eligibility and therefore that stream would no longer be giving the donor SUP.

Founders of a project, or contributors to a project are “allowed” to donate to the project, as long as the project is using the funds they get for their goals, not just send it back.

They benefits of GIVbacks eligibility go beyond SUP incentives for donors. Donors have a change to win GIV, the project can be “boosted” with GIVpower and projects also get more opportunities to join QF rounds and get extra funding injections.

To get GIVbacks eligible projects need to prove they have reputation at stake and a history of impact. They jeopardize their reputation and lose a lot of opportunities for this recirculating “bad behaviour”.

@graven

The most important (long-term) one to me is Super Token usage because that represents a path for these SUP incentives to shift from just being a subsidy for general philanthropy (which, as a public goods-y person, I can appreciate, but don’t think is sustainable for the DAO) to a stronger onramp for broader protocol usage.

I think further narrowing the list of “eligible” project that yield SUP to donors who make streams - by allowing the Foundation to hand pick the aligned projects - would really solve this problem as well. I’m reaching out to the Superfluid team to ask if we should adjust the proposal for this.

[karmaticacid]

Since this is moving to a vote tomorrow, I just wanted to add a quick remark:

We (the Giveth team) are now in the process of engaging with Superfluid DAO/delegates to better focus the Season 4 allocation so that donors to specific Superfluid protocol aligned projects are incentivized wtih SUP. We will share details of those on this thread as they evolve.