Pomelo Wraps Up Season 4 and Launches a Strong Season 5

$2.6 million dollars raised for public goods across 4 seasons of Pomelo!

Pomelo had a lot to celebrate at the end of its first year! 🎉🎊

With the community’s better understanding of what qualifies as a public good, we’re now approving more grants each season. Despite the matching pool decreasing due to variable crypto-market conditions, participation and community involvement have increased. 💪💪💪

We’ve continuously improved the process of submitting applications and browsing grants. We’ve also added new features like Collections, and we have Pomelo Bounties coming soon. 🤯

Pomelo is on the path to create an environment where the community can help govern the grants process.

How did Season 4 go?

Season 4 stats

Approved grants: 138Number of donors: 907Number of contributions: 5,281Amount raised: $93,740Amount matched: $365,000

How many new Pomelo participants joined in Season 4?

From Season 3 to Season 4, Pomelo received 34 new grants and gained 446 new contributors! While some of the new contributors may be potential Sybil donations, we’re thrilled to see more community members getting involved on Pomelo.

Results of appeals

One grant was successful in their appeal of Season 4’s analysis and action. The grant owner of EOS Turkey YouTube Channel provided evidence that some of the donations initially deemed Sybil were legitimate. This led to less of a reduction in their matching fund allocation.

What did the feedback survey results tell us?

First, we’ll cover what you thought went well, and then we’ll address the areas for improvement below.

What does Pomelo do well?

1. Ease of applying

A lot of respondents mentioned that the application process is simple and the user experience is smooth.

2. Browsing of grants

Many people said that browsing is excellent, partly because of improved filters and collections.

3. Features like collections and the trust bonus

Respondents hailed collections as a big win! They love how easy it is to organize grants for different topics and communities. The addition of the SMS option for the trust bonus was also well received, with 311 donors in Season 4 verifying with SMS.

4. Continued improvements

A lot of responses mentioned how Pomelo has made progress and added enhancements each season.

What’s happening in Season 5?

Leading up to Season 5, the team was focused on developing Pomelo Bounties and preparing for its release. This means we don’t have any major new features to announce, but we’ve still made progress in other areas.

Through the survey, you gave us feedback on how Pomelo could improve in the future. Many of your comments align with the work we’ve been doing, and they help us understand what to prioritize. You can learn how we’re responding to your feedback below.

What needs to improve?

Grant tracking and progress reporting

Survey respondents want more information about grant owner reputation and project tracking, including clear accomplishments and deliverables. Some suggest implementing a rating system for grant owners.

This topic is always top of mind for the community, and we made some great progress in Season 4 with community members taking on this role (e.g., EOS Support Audit Report).

Actions

1. Clarifying the self-donation rules

We released an article about the results of the proposed amendments to self-donation rules. In the article, Pomelo Donation Rules: Updates You Need to Know, we shared feedback from the community and analyzed what happened in Season 4.

Pomelo Donation Rules: Updates You Need to Know

These updates help to provide clarity and consistency to self-donation rules, including for teams and organizations. This helps to keep the community in charge of deciding which projects are valuable, rather than team members of larger teams.

This process of gathering input from the community is just one example of how Pomelo aims to involve the community in setting rules and addressing other governance topics.

2. Expanding incentives for community reporting of rule violations

Along the same theme of community involvement, the Pomelo team will expand incentives offered to the community to help identify and provide evidence of rule violations.

In Season 4, we offered bounties that resulted in two grants being disqualified for quid pro quo. The grants, Payzura and Jobzura, were paying people for donations. We would not have found this violation if not for community members providing clear evidence in response to our bounties.

After Season 5 donations close, donors will have the chance to earn bounties for information that leads to action being taken on a grant.

Incentives: we asked and you answered

Incentives was your top request in the survey as well. We asked what you would like to see in a future season and asked you to choose 1 of 4 options:

Incentives for community members to do grant review and analysis (38%)The ability to comment on grant pages (28%)A faster and easier claiming process for grant owners (20%)More options to boost the trust bonus (14%)

Almost 40% of respondents chose incentives.

We also recognize that the ability to comment on grants and rate them is important, and we will be adding these features in a future season.

Sidenote: improving the claiming process

By the time claiming opens for Season 5, grant owners will have an easier time:

Finding where to claim their matching funds.Claiming with a different wallet than the one linked for donations.

Sybil attack detection

Respondents have concerns that not enough Sybil donations are detected, and that there are legitimate donations being identified as Sybil attacks.

Actions

1. Automating Sybil analysis

Over the last few seasons, we’ve been working on automating Sybil detection to make the analysis period quicker while maintaining accurate results. We’ve made more strides this season with automation and will soon be able to produce results that do not contain personal data.

This development will make the analysis more transparent. As we have seen from the successful appeal in Season 4, we can work together to improve this going forward.

2. Investigating trust bonus usage

We wanted to look into why more donors weren’t using Port to increase their trust bonus. The trust bonus helps defend against Sybil attacks by increasing the likelihood that donors are unique. We asked survey respondents why and provided some options:

I don’t have a passportI couldn’t get the Port app to scan my passportWhat is Port?My country’s passport doesn’t work with PortMy phone doesn’t have an NFC chipOther

The highest percentage of respondents (26%) replied they don’t have a passport, with 20% having scanning issues. Some respondents didn’t know about Port and a few are concerned about the privacy of their personal information.

If you have a biometric passport, we invite you to try Port:

Port is an app that cryptographically proves your uniqueness with your passport, without revealing personal data. The app exposes only the country of origin and no other personal information.Port is a Pomelo project! Learn all about Port on their grant page.The app is continually updated, so if your country’s passport wasn’t previously working, it may be now and it’s worth another try.If you have any difficulty with the process, you can contact the Port team on their Telegram channel for help.

Browsing and discoverability of grants

Although we received positive feedback about browsing grants on Pomelo, some respondents also commented that we could improve scrolling and add more filters for category or by season.

Actions

1. Leveraging collections for browsing and discoverability

Collections had a big impact in Season 4 as the community used this tool to spotlight and discover high quality and trustworthy projects.

Grant owners received 15% of their donations through collections. That’s 934 donations with a value of just over $14K! Of the 138 approved grants, 110 received at least one donation through a collection.

Top 5 collections by donated value

Season 4 by Chris Barnes | Total value donated: $4,657.04EOS Respect Community Collection by EOS Support | Total value donated: $2,856.39EDEN by Xavier Fernandez | Total value donated: $1,668.42Personal Picks by Yves La Rose | Total value donated: $1,094.22 (Currently leading in number of followers. 🏆)Josh Chung’s preference by (you guessed it 😄) Josh Chung | Total value donated: $939.31

Grants that received more than 50% of their donated value via collections

NFT Standard for Traditional Painting Art Works ShuFan NFT Art NewChat Video Tutorials for EOS Support Pomelo Spend Explorer — Donations management tool Antelope Tools — Network monitoring dashboard EOS-Español EOS San Diego Serving EOS Community for 4 years German Audiobook: More Equal Animals (Dan Larimer)EOS VIETNAM NEWS EOS China | EOS information aggregation platform Immersys

Collections awards

To recognize the collectors who put together the most popular collections, we’re introducing new achievement badges! 🏅 The collections with the most value donated will receive these badges in the form of non-transferable NFTs. Plus, achievement badges earn you free Pomelo NFTs and bonuses in future seasons.

Exceptional Collection badge awarded to top 5 collectionsHonorable Collection badge awarded to top 6–25 collections

2. Adding new grant categories and making them editable

Pomelo has two new categories for Season 5, GameFi and IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication).

The category of a returning grant can now be changed when applying for a new season. This was not previously editable, but with the addition of these categories, grants are able to switch.

Explaining and enhancing Pomelo NFTs

Some people who took the survey want to understand the Pomelo NFT activities better and suggest adding more utility to the NFTs to encourage more participation.

Action

Adding lore for the NFT adventure

Season 5 launched The Chronicles of Pomelo: A New Dawn to add more context to the adventure and bring the Pomelo NFT world to life. The lore will guide us through the next few seasons. Go ahead and immerse yourself in the story!

Pomelo — Crowdfunding on EOS Pomelo 크라우드펀딩 Pomelo中文

Help influence Pomelo!

Thank you to everyone who responded to our Season 4 feedback survey.

Watch for future surveys and send us your thoughts. Community involvement is key to Pomelo’s success and surveys are one of the tools we use to gather your input.

You can be sure that the survey will be quick and easy to answer. 😁