The shipping in April was dense at Karma. We shipped across every layer of the product, a foundational architecture shift to make Karma agent-native, new Telegram and Discord notifications for grant reviewers, a batch of milestone workflow fixes, and a handful of UI improvements that have been on the wishlist for a while. Here's everything that went out the door.
Headless Platform & Agent-Native Architecture
The biggest strategic move this month was to make Karma as a headless platform. The team rearchitected the entire middleware so that Karma's webapp is just one interface — not the only interface. Programs and builders can now interact with Karma through:
APIs and Skills (already live)
MCP (Model Context Protocol) — for agent-native integrations
Any AI agent or automation layer
This opens the door to workflows we couldn't support before: AI agents that review grant applications, automated milestone tracking, and custom interfaces built on top of Karma's data layer. It's a quiet but significant shift from "grants web app" to "grants infrastructure."
Telegram Notifications for Reviewers
We shipped full Telegram notification support for grant workflows:
When an applicant posts a comment on a pending application, program reviewers get notified. Once an application is approved, milestone reviewers take over the notification thread. Each notification includes the title in bold, up to 500 characters of context, reviewer tags, and a direct link
This matters because review cycles have historically relied on people checking Karma manually. Now the work comes to reviewers, not the other way around.
Milestone & Invoice Workflow Fixes
A couple of long-standing pain points in the milestone flow got resolved:
Invoice verification no longer gets overwritten. There was a potential edge case where a grantee would: complete a milestone → forget to add an invoice → admin verifies → grantee adds the invoice → and accidentally trigger a second on-chain completion that overwrote the original verification. That flow is now blocked.
Project updates ordering and milestone status filter. Milestone completions are now ordered first on project pages — exactly what Filecoin admins asked for during a live call. A second-level milestone status dropdown filter was also added, consistent with how status is displayed elsewhere in the app.
Data Quality & Identity Improvements
Filecoin applications now show project names. When 1,013 Filecoin programs were ingested as applications, they were missing a projectName field, so every title just showed a raw reference ID. Fixed.
Names shown wherever addresses were shown. A sweep across the UI to replace raw wallet addresses with display names wherever a resolved name is available. Small change, big readability lift.
Filecoin project data synced from OSO. Open Source Observer data for Filecoin projects is now synced into Karma, enriching project profiles with external activity signals.
Funding Program. ChainID no longer required for funding programs. The requirement was removed, but errors were still surfacing. The backend was audited and remaining references cleaned up.
UI & Platform Polish
Landing page refresh. The home page, for-projects page, and communities pages were updated to speak directly to funders and grant operators.
Login button on Filecoin/Optimism static pages. Now appears correctly on the static-page versions of those grant portals.
Whitelabel navbar crash fixed. A TypeError: Class extends value undefined was crashing every whitelabel page whose first SDK evaluation was a deep import into the Karma GAP SDK. Fixed at the import level.
Project settings button hidden from non-owners. Non-owners no longer see the settings dropdown at all.
Frontend report logic. Report generation logic shipped to the frontend, enabling in-app reporting workflows.
Closing This month's work balances depth and breadth. A major architecture unlock with the headless platform, real-world workflow fixes requested by Filecoin admins, and a steadier system underneath. If you're a grant program running on Karma and want to explore the API or MCP integrations, reach out. We're building this for you.
Website: www.karmahq.xyz
Schedule a demo: https://calendly.com/mvmurthy