GIVbacks

GIVbacks is a revolutionary concept that rewards donors to verified projects with GIV. When you give to verified projects during a GIVbacks round, you become eligible to receive GIV rewards after the round ends and the GIV is ready to claim. You can see live information --- including round schedule & your claimable GIV --- on the GIVbacks page.

GIVbacks Rounds

GIVbacks rounds last two weeks. For each round, there is 1 million GIV available to be rewarded. Givers who **donate at least 5 USD** to an eligible project within an active GIVbacks will qualify to receive rewards.

• *Note that addresses of verified projects will not receive GIVbacks for donations made to their own project or other verified projects.**

Project Verification

'Verified' is a seal of approval for legitimate projects on Giveth. Many verified projects came pre-vetted from our partnership with Endaoment. Endaoment is a decentralized non-profit platform that allows individuals and organizations to create donor-advised funds, and with our integration, you can donate to their projects from the Giveth UI.

For non-Endaoment projects, the verification process requires projects to provide additional information about their project and the intended impact of the organization. Our amazing Project Verification Team then reviews these applications, investigates the information provided and informs the project owners about the verdict.

To learn more about the project verification process check out our documentation.

Tokens Eligible for GIVbacks

A donor can donate any ERC-20 token to projects on Giveth.io on Gnosis Chain, Optimism Mainnet, Polygon PoS, Polygon zkEVM, Celo, Optimism, Base, Solana, Stellar, Ethereum Mainnet or Classic. However, only donations to verified projects in certain tokens are eligible for GIVbacks. This restriction ensures that we are able to get accurate price data for donations (a requirement for fair distribution of GIVbacks), and prevents bad actors from gaming the GIVbacks program.

You can identify which tokens are GIVbacks eligible by looking for the while donating:

If you would like to request for a token to be considered GIVbacks eligible, you can visit this forum post.

Getting GIVbacks

During each round, all donations to verified projects on the DApp are tracked, and this data is used to calculate the amount of GIVbacks received by each Giver for that period.

GIVbacks are distributed on three different networks:

• Donations made on Gnosis Chain will be rewarded with GIV on Gnosis Chain.
• Donations made on Polygon zkEVM will yield GIVbacks on Polygon zkEVM.
• Donations made on all other GIVbacks-supported chains will receive their GIV on OP Mainnet.

Givers are able to claim their GIV after the round ends and a fraud review has been conducted. Donors will receive an email when the rewards are ready to be claimed on the GIVbacks page. A portion of the GIV will be liquid immediately, and the rest will increase the flowrate of their GIVstream. To learn more about the GIVstream and how it works, check out our documentation. For the purposes of this documentation, we will refer to the sum of the liquid amount and the amount allocated to the GIVstream from GIVbacks as `cumulative GIVbacks`.

Rank & Calculation

Note that, even with the GIVbacks program, a donation on Giveth is still a donation. The maximum value of the donor's `cumulative GIVbacks` could be **anywhere from 50% up to 80% of the USD value of their donation**, at the time of donation. The exact amount of GIVbacks they receive will depend on the project's current GIVpower rank. Each verified project that has been boosted with GIVpower will have a rank on the platform. The project that has been boosted with the most GIVpower for the previous bi-weekly round will offer the highest GIVbacks factor percentage (80%), while the lowest ranked project and unranked/unboosted projects for the previous round will receive the lowest GIVbacks factor percentage (50%). Each project from the bottom to the top ranked will have an incrementally higher GIVbacks factor percentage, you can learn more in the GIVpower documentation.

If, at the end of a round, the estimated amount of GIVbacks to distribute exceeds the limit of 1 million GIV per round then donors will receive proportionally less matching relative to the rank of the project they donated to, for each donation. This is calculated as follows:

where:

• n = Total cumulative amount of GIV tokens earned by the donor for a particular donation
• N = Total number of GIV tokens allocated for distribution in the round (1 million GIV)
• g = The estimated full amount of GIVbacks the donor could receive.
• G = Total estimated amount of GIVbacks for all donors during the given round.

GIV tokens earned through the GIVbacks program can be used throughout the GIVeconomy: Voting in the Giveth Snapshot, locking GIV & boosting projects with GIVpower or for donating to projects on Giveth.

Harvesting GIVbacks

GIVbacks are available to be harvested after the round ends, data has been reviewed and GIV is distributed to eligible donor addresses. Donors will receive an email when GIVbacks rewards are ready to claim - this GIV can be harvested here. Please note that when you harvest GIV rewards from any part of the GIVeconomy, our token distro contract sends you all liquid GIV allocated to your address on that network. For example, when you harvest GIV rewards earned from staking LP tokens in the GIVfarm on Gnosis Chain, you also harvest rewards allocated to you from GIVbacks (if any) and the liquid amount from your GIVstream. This is broken down in the harvest popup that you encounter upon claim:

Disqualifying Factors for the GIVbacks Program

Once a GIVbacks round ends, there is a period of time granted to our team to review flagged projects and donations for the following disqualifying factors before GIV is distributed to donors. A project could have their eligibility revoked if any of these factors are found. Donors to projects who are found with any of the following activity may also be denied GIVbacks for that round.

1. Giving/offering goods or services to donors in exchange for their donation. A project owner cannot offer goods such as a sponsorship for a conference, Girl Scout cookie purchases or tickets for a dinner, even if the proceeds go to charity. Project owners cannot provide services like acting as a crypto exchange for their donors. They can explain how to use an exchange, but they cannot convert the money for their donors.

2. Circulating donations raised by other means. Only “first touch” donations count for GIVbacks. If a project receives funding from a donor and is found to be circulating these donations within the Giveth platform to receive GIVbacks, they will be disqualified. For example, a project should not be sending fiat donations received elsewhere back to their donors and asking them to donate on Giveth with crypto.

3. The funds are not being used for what is expressed in the project page or submitted verification application. Verified projects are responsible for keeping their projects up-to-date with information on how the funds are being used. If the project states explicitly that they are, for example, using the funds to develop education programs but are found to be using the funds to employ developers, they may be disqualified from the GIVbacks program.

4. Unscrupulous or fraudulent activity. This can be the use of violence, breaking laws, or other behaviour that does not uphold the values of the Giveth community. Projects found to be violating our Terms and Conditions will not only lose their verification status, but also will be canceled.

The Giveth Project Verification team is responsible for monitoring GIVbacks activity and the Project Verification system, and will ultimately use their discretion to determine whether a project’s actions are unscrupulous and/or disqualifying.

Sanctions for flagged donations

Verified projects and donations that are flagged for any of the disqualifying factors above will be analyzed and discerned according to the sanctions outlined here:

• A donor whose GIVbacks were revoked because they were found to be recirculating funds or donated to a project that was disqualified for that round will receive an email with a link to the forum post discussing eligible donations for that round. Donations cannot be refunded and GIVbacks cannot be “unrevoked” if the project was disqualified from the round.

Donations are donations and they go directly to the project. The GIVbacks program was created to additionally empower our donors with GIV & therefore governance rights, but you should not make a donation purely out of the expectation of receiving GIV. We appreciate your understanding.

The GIVbacks program is our way of giving back to those who give. It’s our exit to the community - empowering real donors with governance power over the future of Giveth and hence, the Future of Giving. To get GIVbacks, start donating to eligible projects today!