Avalanche Retro9000

Submission Flow

A grant submission needed to do double duty: capture what a project actually is, and give the community enough to judge it fairly. Beyond the basics (project name, description, logo), the form captured team profiles with GitHub, LinkedIn, and X links per member, a roadmap broken into milestones for testnet and mainnet delivery, and prior funding history, so a voter could see a team's track record and technical footprint, not just their pitch.

Projects were sorted into ten categories (from Permissionless and Permissioned L1s to Gaming, DeFi, Developer Tooling, and more), keeping the leaderboard filterable in a system meant to hold hundreds of very different kinds of submissions side by side.

Two smaller decisions mattered more than they look. GitHub replaced a social link that added noise without signal, and pulling real commit activity and streaks from it let the leaderboard reflect actual shipping behavior, not just self-reported claims. And milestones were capped to one per day or one per week, a small rate limit that kept the platform from turning into a spam vector the moment incentives were attached to visible activity.

Making the Vote Feel Fair, Not Arbitrary

Community members needed a way to see and back projects with real confidence that the process was fair. I designed a round-based ballot system built around full transparency, votes, standings, and how allocations were determined were all visible, so the community could trust the outcome rather than take it on faith.

Keeping Momentum Across Multiple Rounds

With funding distributed across ongoing rounds rather than a single event, I designed leaderboards to keep both builders and voters engaged between rounds, giving people a reason to check back in rather than treating the platform as a one-time application portal.