Why Gitcoin chooses Liquifi to manage token grants, lockups, and vesting for web3 contributors

Gitcoin has distributed over $50 million to builders across more than 3,500 projects, enabling communities to build and fund the development of public goods projects with their protocols — all while supporting software developers. With Gitcoin’s Allo Protocol, communities select and fund projects using novel mechanisms like Quadratic Funding, which rewards developers for their contributions to open-source software.

Liquifi is a crypto-native token management platform built to help web3 founders, finance, and operation teams navigate the challenges of distributing tokens compliantly.

“Liquifi has enabled me to put our best and brightest into the hands of one good solution rather than taping multiple solutions together.”

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‍The Challenge

Gitcoin wanted to migrate, consolidate, maintain, create, and administer token vesting schedules on autopilot. The Gitcoin DAO launched in May 2021 with the genesis of GTC, its governance token. GTC and Gitcoin DAO were launched to empower the community behind their grants program. As a web3-native organization, finding a solution that empowers each contributor with transparency and control was important.

Liquifi delivered a way to honor token agreements, set up vesting schedules, and give token grants across multiple entities: a foundation, a DAO, and another entity in charge of building out the platform. Before Liquifi, they mainly used the Gnosis Safe method for these purposes. We devised a solution to cover the following HR, operations, and finance priorities.

• See all token agreements in an intuitive dashboard
• Fund token vesting plans with proper off-chain drafting and on-chain finalization
• Cancel token compensation plans if contributors or employees leave
• Execute basic functions to interact with smart contracts
• Enable flexibility for starting new vesting schedules and making custom schedules, including retroactive compensation plans
• Automate the end-to-end system

“With Liquifi, I don’t have to worry about depositing tokens on a monthly cadence. I don’t need to micromanage individual token grants or token compensation plans.”

The Solution

We delivered a turnkey product for employee compensation and decentralized contributor grants. As a Gitcoin administrator, you could feel the impact of our work in the following ways. 

• Peace of mind that human error is a non-factor (at scale, anyone can slip up with money and date calculations)
• Minimization of single points of failure (if an administrator gets sick or goes on vacation, tokens vest on time and payments happen without mistakes)
• Sense of security that token agreements are properly funded
• Convenience of automatic record keeping 

As someone being paid by Gitcoin, you would be able to do the following: 

• See your own token allocation, vesting schedule, and lockup period in one glance
• Exercise control over your own assets, including withdrawing tokens
• Trust in code, rather than the diligence and accuracy of colleagues in HR and finance, to make sure you get paid

‍The Experience

It took about one week to onboard all the contributors. To make sure there was no risk of doxxing individual contributors, onboarding was split into two stages: a test phase to make sure agreements would import properly (and to test a double-blind naming setup) and an implementation phase for creating the agreements tied to real contributors’ wallets.

“The level of support from Liquifi’s team was really great. It took them only a day or two, at most, to resolve any issue.”

If you're looking to simplify your token vesting and grant management, book a call with the sales team at Liquifi.