We're excited to share Karma's progress each month as we work to become the ultimate all-in-one funding platform for web3! This report gives you a quick rundown of all the cool new features, improvements, and fixes we rolled out across the Karma ecosystem in September.
This year, we've really made some great strides in building our full-stack funding platform with four key parts: application intake and review, onchain project registry, impact metric and monitoring, and finally, direct and retro funds payout features. That last one is super important, and it's where we've put most of our energy, which is now live and being used in the Optimism Season 8 grants round.
Here’s a rundown of our major achievements in September:
Major Features
We rolled out several significant new features designed to improve the application and evaluation process.
- Application Versioning & History Tracking: We built a complete versioning system for grant applications, which means you can now see every change made to an application over time.
- Tracks all changes made to applications over time
- Shows visual diffs between versions
- Provides a timeline view of edits
- Helps reviewers understand how applications evolved
- AI-Powered Grant Evaluation: We integrated AI capabilities to assist with grant review processes, making evaluations faster and more consistent.
- AI scoring for applications with sortable columns
- Admin controls for triggering AI evaluations
- Reference-based evaluation system
- Enhanced CSV exports with evaluation scores
- Post-Approval Form Fields: We created a new system for collecting additional information from grantees after their applications are approved, streamlining the post-approval workflow.
- Privy Integration: We seamlessly integrated privy.io into our backend, allowing users to log in with their wallets effortlessly.
- Communities Page Enhancement: We redesigned the communities experience to make it more intuitive and visually appealing.
- Improved navigation and discovery
- Better categorisation and filtering
- Enhanced visual layout
- Multi-chain community aggregation
- Whitelabel Platform - Shared Domain Hosting: We launched a new shared subdomain architecture for our whitelabel platform, allowing multiple funding programs to be hosted under a unified domain with custom client configurations, so communities can bring their own branding and style while Karma handles the backend.
- Celo Public Goods, Regen Coordination, and Optimism are already live at app.karmahq.xyz. With the Karma-powered platform, you can easily navigate all communities, see funding opportunities, and apply directly in the app, making accessing grant funding easier than ever.
System Improvements
We focused on enhancing the platform's performance, infrastructure, and overall developer experience this month.
- Performance & Infrastructure: We made critical updates to improve the stability and speed of the platform.
- Rate Limiting System: Implemented comprehensive global rate limiting to protect API endpoints and improve system stability
- Goldsky Migration: Moved subgraphs (Arbitrum, Optimism, Celo) to Goldsky for better performance and reliability
- Grant Indexing V2: Improved the grant indexing flow for faster and more accurate data processing
- Developer Experience: We improved our developer tools to make it easier for our team to build and maintain the platform.
- Swagger Documentation: Added comprehensive API documentation for V2 endpoints
- Data & Analytics: We expanded our data and analytics capabilities to provide more comprehensive insights.
- Impact Indicators: Added support for GoodDollar and other community impact indicators
- External Data Providers: Integrated support for external data sources and custom datapoints.
User Experience
We rolled out a series of updates to make the platform more user-friendly and efficient for everyone, from applicants to reviewers.
- Frontend Improvements: We redesigned several key elements of the user interface for a smoother experience.
- Redesigned grant card layouts for better information display
- Improved application form state management
- Enhanced navigation flows across the platform
- Better loading states and error handling
- Reviewer & Admin Tools: We enhanced tools for reviewers and administrators, making their tasks more efficient and manageable.
- Enhanced reviewer role system with granular permissions
- Improved program validation workflows
- Better filtering for expired programs
- Enhanced CSV export capabilities
- Streamlined faucet funding flows for Celo network
- Notifications & Communication: We improved our notification and communication systems to keep everyone better informed.
- Improved email notifications in direct funding platform
- Added approval notification workflows
- Enhanced grantee communication templates
Technical Highlights
Our engineering teams made significant progress across all major repositories, ensuring a robust and scalable platform.
- Backend (gap-indexer): Our backend team focused on solidifying the core architecture and improving reliability.
- 40+ pull requests merged
- Implemented proper V2 architecture patterns
- Enhanced error handling with Sentry integration
- Improved test coverage and validation
- Frontend (gap-app-v2): The frontend team worked on improving the user-facing application with better code quality and integration.
- 15+ pull requests merged
- Better TypeScript coverage
- Improved component architecture
- Enhanced Web3 integration
- Whitelabel Platform: Our team focused on making the platform more flexible and accessible for custom deployments.
- 20+ pull requests merged
- Multi-tenant architecture implementation
- Enhanced testing infrastructure
- Better accessibility features
Platform Capabilities
The Karma platform now offers an even broader range of powerful features to support grant applications and evaluations.
- The Karma platform now supports:
- Multi-chain grant applications and donations
- AI-assisted grant evaluation
- Comprehensive application version history
- Post-approval workflows
- Community impact tracking with custom indicators
- Rate-limited, secure API access
- Enhanced reviewer collaboration tools
- Whitelabel funding platform deployment
Looking Forward
This month saw significant progress in making the platform more scalable, secure, and user-friendly, laying a strong foundation for future growth.
Total Activity: We merged over 75 pull requests across all repositories, addressing new features, improvements, and critical fixes, showing our commitment to continuous development.
Overall the Karma app has gone through a massive transformation combining multiple key modules that come together to create the best funding platform on the market. Thanks to our community for all the feedback and patience. We look forward to seeing what opportunities this brings to our builder community.
Finally the Karma team will be at Devconnect this November in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We are definitely looking forward to connecting with the extended Ethereum builder community. If you plan to be there too reach out and we can grab a coffee. You can always reach out to us on discord or telegram.