---
title: "Scoring and review gates in DAO funding"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/scoring-and-review-gates"
updated: 2026-08-08
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Scoring and review gates in DAO funding

| Topic | What a published application score decides in a DAO funding process, and what it does not |
| --- | --- |
| Three live gates | Optimism Grants Council (scores out of 10, stated pass mark) · ENS SPP3 (weighted rubric out of 4.75, committee cohort) · VitaDAO senior review (conviction score out of 5) |
| The common finding | In all three the number is real, published and non‑binding. Budget, portfolio shape or a vote nobody calls decides the outcome. |
| Disclosure pattern | Scores are published for the applications that won; declined applicants get aggregate rationale or a forum thread |
| Related | [Procurement and RFPs](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-procurement-and-rfps), [Service providers](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-service-providers), [RetroPGF](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) |

## What a review gate is

A review gate is the step where a DAO hands a funding decision to a small group of named people, asks them to score applications against a written rubric, and publishes the numbers. It exists because token voting answers the wrong question. A vote measures how popular a proposal is among people holding the token; it does not measure whether the engineering is sound, whether the team has shipped before, or whether the science is any good. Nearly every DAO that funds work at scale has arrived at the same patch: put competence in front of the ballot, and write down how it scored.

This page is about the number that comes out. It is a narrower object than the two topics it sits between. [Procurement and RFPs](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-procurement-and-rfps) covers how the call is run and who is eligible to answer it; [DAO service providers](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-service-providers) covers who the DAO ends up contracting with and on what terms. Between the two sits a published score, and the question worth asking of any DAO that produces one is simple: what did it decide?

Three programmes published enough to answer that. In all three the honest answer is that the score decided less than the artifact implies.

## Optimism: a stated pass mark its own table contradicts

The Optimism Grants Council reviews applications to the Governance Fund and publishes the results per cycle. [Cycle 35's preliminary review results](https://gov.optimism.io/t/cycle-35-preliminary-review-results/9791), posted 28 March 2025, are unusually legible: a single table listing every application, the OP requested, the average reviewer score, and the outcome. The post states the rule in one line above the table, that the score required to advance was 7 or higher, and reports that 13 of the applications passed preliminary review.

The table does not obey the line. Three applications advanced below the stated mark: Giza at 6.66, DeSyn Protocol at 6.00 and SwapBased at 6.00. In the same table, Gamma Strategies was declined at 6.66, Orderly at 6.33 and yUSD at 6.00. An identical 6.66 produced both outcomes in the same cycle, and a 6.00 both passed and was declined.

The explanation is in the budget line rather than in any inconsistency of judgement. The post records that finalists requested 15,365,599 OP against a Grants Council budget of 3,285,070 OP, an oversubscription of roughly 4.7 to 1. A pass mark cannot bind when the money runs out at a quarter of the qualifying field. Once that is true the score has quietly changed job: it is a ranking used to sort a queue, not a threshold that admits anyone who clears it, and the two are different instruments even though they are printed in the same column. The council's own framing points the same way, since the same post ties every award to the season's success metrics for Superchain TVL rather than to the number in the table.

Optimism's wider funding history is covered on [Optimism Collective](/wiki/daos/networks/optimism-collective) and, for the retroactive rounds that ran alongside the council, on [retroactive public goods funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding).

## ENS: the rubric says outright that it is not the decision

[ENS DAO](/wiki/daos/infrastructure/ens-dao) reached the same place from the opposite direction, and wrote it down. The DAO's Service Provider Program had asked delegates to rate and rank every applicant themselves. [A February 2026 proposal](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/proposal-committee-model-for-spp3-funding-allocation/21918) argued that this had failed on three counts: delegates were hit with a barrage of lobbying, applicants spent weeks chasing up to a hundred delegates with the well‑connected ones advantaged, and most delegates did not know enough about the ecosystem to read the applications properly. The remedy was to stop voting on applicants and vote on a panel instead.

Delegates ratified exactly that. [SPP3's program authorization](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/6-42-social-spp3-program-authorization-and-committee-model/22086) passed on Snapshot in May 2026 with 1,478,297 votes for against 18,438 opposed, authorizing one cycle, naming the committee, and capping the budget at 20% of trailing protocol revenue. The committee then [published its rubric before the submission window opened](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/spp3-submission-timeline-and-artifacts/22124): four weighted criteria scored 1 to 5 in half‑point steps, with prior delivery history at 25%, scope clarity at 15%, milestone structure at 15%, adoption and ecosystem utility at 40%, and 5% of discretion for team and budget fit.

The sentence that matters sits directly under the weights table. The committee wrote that the rubric is an evaluation tool, not a selection formula, and that the final cohort would account for budget constraints, provider overlap and strategic gaps across the cohort as a whole. That is Optimism's Cycle 35 table stated as policy in advance rather than left for a reader to infer.

The [cohort recommendation](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/ep-6-49-spp3-cohort-recommendation/22237) in July 2026 bore it out. Twenty‑six applications requested a combined $12.2M; one failed the eligibility screen and 25 were scored. Four providers were funded for $1,690,000 against roughly $3.25M available, and their weighted scores were published: Namespace 3.43, Goldsky 3.37, Unruggable 3.30 and Fluidkey 3.11, each out of 4.75 once the discretionary component is excluded. The whole funded cohort therefore sits in the rubric's adequate band, and the highest single criterion score anywhere in the published table is a 4.5 for prior delivery. The committee also stated plainly that several declined teams scored competitively and that redundancy rather than quality was the deciding factor, because the applicant pool contained multiple marketplaces, subname providers and indexing proposals and funding duplicative work reduces total programme value.

Two structural facts round it out. The committee left roughly $1.56M of authorized budget uncommitted rather than fund a marginal application, which is the strongest available evidence that the panel was exercising judgement rather than spending a pot. And the programme carries a $200,000 floor on requests, so the gate excludes small applicants before any scoring happens. The committee named that as a finding of the cycle, reporting demonstrated demand for discrete sub‑$200K funding that no active programme serves, and recommended the DAO stand one up.

## VitaDAO: a low score does not reject, it strands

[VitaDAO](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/vitadao) runs the same instrument on research rather than infrastructure, and supplies the failure mode neither of the others reaches. [VDP-164](https://web.archive.org/web/20260421081428/https://gov.vitadao.com/t/vdp-164-vitadao-funding-proposal-500k-loan-to-advance-vitarna-through-non-glp-toxicology-toward-2026-ind-submission/2052), proposed in September 2025, asked for a $500,000 recoverable loan to take a therapeutic through non‑GLP toxicology toward an IND submission. Four reviewers scored it across seven categories for an overall conviction score of 2.3, against an average of 3.7 for the projects VitaDAO had previously funded.

Nothing then rejected it. The constitution's escalation ladder says a request of that size needs a forum poll and a Snapshot vote, and the proposal has never appeared on VitaDAO's Snapshot space. It did not lose a vote; the vote was never called. A scored gate that sits in front of the ballot can therefore produce a third outcome beyond pass and fail, which is that a proposal simply stops, with the record of what happened living in a forum thread rather than in a tally anyone can point to. That has since become literal: gov.vitadao.com stopped resolving during 2026, and the thread survives only as an [Internet Archive capture](https://web.archive.org/web/20260421081428/https://gov.vitadao.com/t/vdp-164-vitadao-funding-proposal-500k-loan-to-advance-vitarna-through-non-glp-toxicology-toward-2026-ind-submission/2052). A gate that strands proposals leaves its only record on the least durable layer of a DAO's stack – the detail is on [VitaDAO](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/vitadao). The wider mechanics of research funding are covered on [decentralized science funding](/wiki/desci/desci-funding).

## What the published score actually does

Read together, the three programmes point at the same conclusion from different angles. The score is an accountability artifact, not a decision rule.

- **It is a ranking, not a threshold.** Optimism printed a pass mark and then advanced three applications below it while declining others above it, because the money bound before the mark did. Any programme that is oversubscribed will do the same thing whether or not it says so.
- **Portfolio shape overrides the column.** ENS declined competitively scored teams for overlapping with each other. A rubric scores applications one at a time; a cohort is chosen as a set, and no per‑application score can express the fact that two good proposals do the same job.
- **The gate can strand as well as decide.** A low score reached before the binding vote does not have to be converted into a rejection anyone is accountable for. Where the vote is discretionary to call, nobody has to call it.
- **The eligibility screen does more work than the rubric.** ENS applies a hard screen before scoring, and its $200,000 floor removes an entire class of applicant without producing a number at all. The most consequential judgement in a scored process is frequently the one made before scoring starts, a pattern also visible in DAO [tender panels](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-procurement-and-rfps).

None of this is an argument against review gates. Every alternative on offer is worse: delegates who admit they cannot read 26 commercial proposals, or a token vote that measures popularity and calls it merit. The argument is against reading the number as though it were the decision. A DAO that publishes scores and lets its members infer that the top scores were funded is claiming a legibility it does not have, and ENS's contribution is to have said so in the rubric itself.

## The disclosure gradient runs the wrong way

There is a consistent asymmetry in what these processes publish, and it points away from the people with the strongest interest in the answer.

ENS published a per‑criterion score table for the four providers it funded. Declined applicants received aggregate rationale grouped into recurring patterns, and the individual scoring records remain internal working documents available to the accountability body or the foundation on request. Optimism is the more transparent of the two on this axis, publishing a score for every application including the declines, though only a single average rather than the reviewers' individual marks. VitaDAO published a category‑by‑category digest for its declined proposal but not the reviewer document, and the loudest objection came from the chief executive of the company under review, who argued in the forum thread that the community should be able to read the reviews rather than rely on anonymous reviewers whose credentials nobody could check.

The pattern is that the applicant who won learns the most about why. This is understandable in each case and unfortunate in aggregate: the decline is where the information is, both for the applicant deciding whether to reapply and for a delegate trying to judge whether the panel it deputized is any good. A programme that discloses only its winners is asking to be trusted on precisely the decisions it is not showing. The wider failure of a committee whose work the DAO cannot check is covered on [council dissolution](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/council-dissolution) and [how DAOs fail](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/how-daos-fail).

## How Caper approaches this

Caper has no review gate, and no way to build one. There is no reviewer, panel, committee or steward class anywhere in the contracts, no rubric, no score and no eligibility screen. On the merits of choosing between 26 applications that is a gap rather than an answer, and it should be said plainly: nothing in Caper helps a group of people work out which of several proposals is worth funding. The DAOs above built rubrics because that problem is genuinely hard, and a shorter leash does not solve it.

What Caper does remove is the third outcome. A [proposal](/wiki/governance/proposals) carries an execution window on a clock, and once that window opens `settle_proposal` is a public method: any account can call it, tally the ballots and settle the result, and the winning payout is then executed through an equally public method. The party inconvenienced by the outcome is not the party who has to call the vote. A funding request on a caper cannot spend eleven months between a review and a ballot nobody schedules, because scheduling is not a privilege anybody holds.

The other structural difference is who the gate answers to. Vote weight in a caper multiplies a member's holdings by their earned, non‑transferable participation record, normalized against the caper's supply of each, so a large position on its own does not carry a decision. There is no separate body whose approval a proposal needs before members can vote on it, which means there is also no body a well‑funded applicant can lobby instead of the membership. And a member who loses the argument retains a standing exit that returns their share of the treasury rather than only the option to keep arguing. See [what is a caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) for the full model.

## References

- [Cycle 35 Preliminary Review Results](https://gov.optimism.io/t/cycle-35-preliminary-review-results/9791) – gov.optimism.io, 28 March 2025. The full per‑application score table, the stated 7‑or‑higher advance mark, and the 15,365,599 OP requested against a 3,285,070 OP budget.
- [Proposal: Committee Model for SPP3 Funding Allocation](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/proposal-committee-model-for-spp3-funding-allocation/21918) – discuss.ens.domains, 26 February 2026. Delegate fatigue, applicant lobbying and lack of context, and the case for voting on a panel instead of on applicants.
- [[6.42] [Social] SPP3: Program Authorization and Committee Model](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/6-42-social-spp3-program-authorization-and-committee-model/22086) – discuss.ens.domains, 25 April 2026. One‑cycle authorization, the named committee, and the 20%‑of‑trailing‑revenue cap.
- [SPP3: Submission Timeline and Artifacts](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/spp3-submission-timeline-and-artifacts/22124) – discuss.ens.domains, 14 May 2026. The four weighted criteria, the 1‑to‑5 half‑point scale, the pre‑scoring eligibility screen with its $200,000 floor, and the statement that the rubric is an evaluation tool rather than a selection formula.
- [[EP 6.49] SPP3: Cohort Recommendation](https://discuss.ens.domains/t/ep-6-49-spp3-cohort-recommendation/22237) – discuss.ens.domains, 3 July 2026. The 26‑application funnel, the published weighted scores out of 4.75, the $1,690,000 cohort against roughly $3.25M available, and the aggregate decline rationale.
- [VDP-164: $500K loan to advance VITARNA](https://web.archive.org/web/20260421081428/https://gov.vitadao.com/t/vdp-164-vitadao-funding-proposal-500k-loan-to-advance-vitarna-through-non-glp-toxicology-toward-2026-ind-submission/2052) – gov.vitadao.com, 16 September 2025, cited through the Internet Archive because the forum is offline. The seven‑category senior review, the 2.3 conviction score against a 3.7 average, and the argument over publishing the reviewer document.
- [ENS DAO on Snapshot](https://snapshot.box/#/s:ens.eth) and [VitaDAO on Snapshot](https://snapshot.box/#/s:vote.vitadao.eth) – the vote records behind the SPP3 authorization and the absence of a VDP-164 ballot.