# Zksync grants and how to eat them. By [Gefestoss](https://paragraph.com/@gefestoss) · 2023-08-11 --- **The path is very short** Let's start with a very short description of what happened. Somehow it happened by chance that I knocked out a grant of $400-450k from DAO Zksync. The whole journey took six months, because the first promo was released in April 2023, and they received it only recently. In total, there were a lot of conversations with different people from the DAO itself and outside it. And do not forget that there were many doubts that the idea was doomed to failure due to possible super deep conversations, and clarifications of all sorts of details on the grant topic for which I was not ready (they were). **What happened before?** Before that, I had no grant-related work experience as such. There were only initial conversations at the last job about the purchase of asics capacities for an N-sum with [Gate.io](http://Gate.io) . But there I immediately transferred this matter to the CEO and disappeared from the fields myself in this party with Gate. That is, deep dive from the first seconds, since I had to discuss everything myself. There was also an experience of clarifying the relationship about our kick, when we were just banned for 3-4 days, and we eventually became second in votes, we lost like JediSwap. And nearby were Umbra Cash, Rotki and Tally now Taho. And they also took away $50,000 grants from Polygon and Aurora. Perhaps my indignation was noticed by someone from the Aurora team, and we were returned a grant from their team and accordingly returned to the round. But I don't have any information on this topic, so it's better to say that the little man from Aurora decided. And thank him for that! In total, we managed to raise more than $250,000 on gitcoin rounds 13, 14 and 15. Approximately 150k were donated from the community and the rest is a square of donations and grants in different profiles. I didn't participate in this except as a marketer/community, I was doing everything Bruno, and the results are kind of good. And we were the first to start doing roles in the discord for donations in the crypt, because I personally have not seen anyone do it before us. But after them there was darkness. By the way, the roles were the reason for the ban The first steps Initially, my plans were to stupidly fall in with a propousal and randomly get this grant, but with a smaller amount - $ 50,000. Most of the time I was still in the guest account without statistics. He recommended me to contact the delegates and the rest of the people in the governance in discord. One of my messages attracted only one person, who at that time, in fact, did not decide anything. Everyone was busy discussing the Velodrome website (>190 messages), so all participants no longer had time and desire for other projects. For this reason, I have another opportunity to simply write to everyone in private messages in Discord or Telegram. Thus, I enlisted the support of Synthetix, Katie, Polynya and someone else, which gave a carte blanche in the form of 51% of the available tokens for voting, at that time, according to my calculations, it turned out around 6 million OP tokens would vote for us. But since there was a Velodrome at that moment, then everyone, to put it mildly, gave a shit about everyone, and they forgot about us and didn't even let us into the primary selection because of the stupid rule “At least 2 comments from delegates to go to the next stage“ This is how I looked at TAO when I realized that all actions were meaningless. **Waiting and waiting again** The end of May also gave nothing, and I was similarly sent by two other people and waited even further. In mid-January, documents were already released, according to which it was necessary to resubmit or supplement their propositions through a new person who is engaged in posting all propositions. I missed this fact, and I just missed the first couple of days, fortunately they wrote about the question on the forum in a personal account. Further actions were quite simple, and it was already the end of February. There were two questions on the forum, and that's kind of how it ended, I thought. In fact, 5 more chats were formed from these two questions, in which I was tortured a little about various issues. making more accurate numbers, (when drops will occur) ways to calculate awards methods of dealing with sibyls a sign with critical goals The final chat is already optimistic **KYC** A report from me on how everything went and my comments The final form for all sorts of mini reports on the type of drop or transfer of tokens (in fact, I just wrote to them in the chat, that's all) **Result** Everyone could. It's all tedious and long, busy for 2-3 weeks because of the workload of all the involved men. But because of all the shortcomings and poor organization, we got such a result in six months. In the future, all DAOs will become the same banks, and slow down any initiative with long preparations. For myself, I got the achievement “1,000,000 in 1 year without investments”, it's a pity that it's not true for me, but come on… It was bad before. I also communicated with Grantops throughout the entire period of receipt, and after the round we discussed all the points that I didn't like so much. He even noted later that I was the most talkative about problems among all the participants. Therefore, be more accommodating to current problems, rather than focusing on emptiness. After all, who knows, maybe it helped me too, --- *Originally published on [Gefestoss](https://paragraph.com/@gefestoss/zksync-grants-and-how-to-eat-them)*