PoolTogether Community Grants Committee
Update
5/1/21 -
- The Community Grants Committee is solely a grants committee in a traditional fashion. Any formulation of a contributors group/committee is a separate entity. Funding of the aforementioned group may be possible through the grants committee in terms of a grant application but is outside the scope of this proposal.
- Grants Lead position is an active, not a passive role. The Lead, and Grants Committee as a whole, is responsible for the steady influx of potential beneficial grant applications.
- PT Tech Lead serves only in an advisory role as expert of PT protocol; not included on committee multisig.
- Brendan, PT Inc., has volunteered for the PT Tech Lead role.
- Multisig requirement: 3 of 5 - Lead and 4 Reviewers
- In spirit of keeping it simple: Reviewers will be compensated in the form of a monthly stipend of $2500 USD per month
- Community Grants Lead position proposals: here. If interested, please pitch yourself on that thread. The goal is to determine the Community Grants Lead position by Thursday 5/6/21. Once the Lead position is decided we will then fill the Reviewer positions.
These updates supersede any of the below statements that may contradict.
Content “forked” from the AAVE Community Grants Program (ARC: Aave Community Grants Program - General - Aave)
Authored by: @blakeburrito, @McOso, & @Taliskye
Preamble
This is a continuation of the first attempt of community engagement in creation of a grants committee (Previous Post). We have heard your feedback on this forum and on discord. We took the community’s input and the information from the original write-up to create this new proposal.
Summary
We want to start a community-led program to fund ideas submitted by the PoolTogether protocol’s community, with a focus on empowering a wider network of community developers and contributors and increase adoption of the PoolTogether protocol. We would like this program to be driven by regular PoolTogether community members and share this proposal for feedback from the community.
Rationale
To promote inclusivity, transparency, and a streamlined avenue for funding development in the PoolTogether ecosystem, while maintaining the decentralized nature of the ecosystem; we propose a community-led, for the community, by the community, grants program. For the purpose of this Pre-PTIP, we’ll refer to it as the PoolTogether Community Grants Committee, or PTCGC.
The goal of the program is to provide resources to grow the PoolTogether ecosystem in a way that can scale over time. There are many great ideas for improving the protocol bubbling up in the Discord, community forum and other places. We hope to initiate a community-led, transparent process for connecting those developers/creators/innovators with resources needed to go from idea to funded development.
Given the difficulty of decentralizing grants administration, we propose establishing a committee which has the power to administer grants on a discretionary basis. The focus will be on disbursing grant funding effectively and quickly to individuals and teams working to improve the PoolTogether ecosystem.
Proposal Description
Our proposal is inspired by the Compound and Uniswap grants programs, which have both received approvals to deploy $1m and $750k per quarter, respectively. And includes inspiration from the Aave Grants Proposal, which is asking for $2.25m for 2 quarters.
We propose to run the pilot grants program over two quarters. We request a total budget of $400k per quarter, with the operating budget accounting for a maximum of $85k. The operating budget will be used to pay the leads, reviewers, and other administrative costs to set up the program.
The expenses will be priced in USD at the beginning of each quarter. The reviewers will ensure that all unspent funds will be returned to the Ecosystem Reserve at the conclusion of the pilot. If the program is underfunded because POOL’s token price falls significantly, the committee may request the underfunded amount from governance. After running the pilot program for one quarter, the community can vote to continue, modify, or discontinue the program.
Applications will be reviewed and funded on a rolling basis. The applications approved and funded within each quarter will form a funding round which will be tracked, supported, and documented.
Documentation of results will be made available to the community at the end of each round, at which point we will solicit feedback from the community. The idea is to start with a rough MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and evolve through community feedback. We expect to learn a lot about how to do this right in the first 2 quarters and anticipate making changes to the grants program over time through subsequent proposals.
Committee Members
We propose a committee of 6 members: 1 Community Lead, 4 Reviewers, and 1 PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead. The Community Lead will be the organizational backbone of the program and ensure that things move smoothly and efficiently. The Community Lead will likely dedicate a significant amount of time to the program. The PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead will operate from an advisory role for the committee, on an as needed basis to assist with technical capabilities within the protocol.
Reviewers will process applications, advocate for the community, assist PoolTogether participants, ensure that the lead is acting in good faith and is effective in their role, and will operate a 4 of 6 multisig which disburses funds to grantees. The reviewers will also hold the program accountable to its goals and objectives and return any excess funds to the PoolTogether Ecosystem Reserve. Reviewers are likely to dedicate a smaller amount of time to the program.
Both the lead and the reviewers will serve for a period of two quarters. After two quarters, the grants program and the committee member positions will be up for renewal. This will be put up on the governance forum for a discussion and subsequent on-chain vote.
Members may be replaced during the pilot program, for example, if they find they are not able to dedicate sufficient time to the program. We aim to be as transparent as possible and get feedback on the PoolTogether forum and discord if there are any changes to the committee during the program.
If you are interested in being a reviewer or lead, please reply to this thread with your interest with some basic info on yourself, including:
- Describe your involvement in the PoolTogether ecosystem
- What skills/experience do you bring to the committee?
- Can you commit ~10 hours a week as a reviewer or ~30 hours a week as a lead?
How the voting mechanism will be achieved is TBD.
Community Lead: person
Reviewers:
- person
- person
- person
- person
PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead: @Brendan
Budget
We request a max grants budget of $400k to distribute grants, of which a max operating budget of $85k per quarter to pay the leads, reviewers, and other administrative costs to set up the grants program. This will be funded by the PoolTogether Ecosystem Reserve.
Payments to the lead and reviewers will be approved by the 4 of 6 multisig signers and made at the end of every month (i.e., if the program begins on 4/20/21, the lead and reviewers will be paid on 5/20/21, and then again on 6/20/21 and 7/20/21 based on their corresponding weekly hour commitment).
Any changes to the PTCGC including renewal of the program at the end of 2 quarters, total quarterly budget and committee compensation will require quarterly authorization.
Committee Compensation
We suggest compensation for the lead roughly in line with the initial Uniswap and Compound proposals - $100/hr for a maximum of 30 hrs/week. This compensation will be allocated to the PTCGC multisig from the PoolTogether Ecosystem Reserve as part of the overall funding for the program.
The time commitment for the reviewers is likely to be lower. The compensation for reviewers will be $100/hr for a maximum of 10 hrs/week. This compensation will be allocated to the PTCGC multisig from the PoolTogether Ecosystem Reserve as part of the overall funding for the program.
All compensations will be paid in POOL at the USD spot price during distribution.
Priorities
To help inform the types of grants and community led initiatives which are most likely to get funded, we highlight the following target areas:
- Protocol development (including core PoolTogether protocol development, development of higher layer protocols which use the PoolTogether protocol)
- Applications and integrations (front-ends and other applications/yield sources that use the PoolTogether protocol)
- Developer tooling
- Community (marketing and educational)
- Committees, sub-committees, and DAOs that serve the PoolTogether ecosystem
- Code audits
- Events and hackathons
- Bounties
- Community contests and giveaways
What Does Success Look Like?
We will evaluate the success of the program against the following criteria:
Measurable criteria:
- Growth in the number of grants applications received quarter-over-quarter
- Growth in the number of projects, ideas, and events funded
- Growth in community engagement (e.g. increased activity on forums, Discord, etc.)
- Growth in PoolTogether pools driven by applications funded via grants (e.g. increased TVL, increased yield integration, and unique addresses due to apps funded by grants)
Subjective criteria:
- Improved sentiment and goodwill within the community
- Improvement to the PoolTogether protocol’s brand and positioning in the market
Timeline / Process
Quarter 1 will be for three months from the day the grants proposal has been approved. For example, if the proposal is approved on 4/21/2021, Quarter 1 of the PTCGC will be from 4/21/2021 to 7/21/2021 and Quarter 2 of the PTCGC will be from 7/22/2021 to 10/22/2021.
If approved, starting immediately after a proposal is ratified, PTCGC will begin accepting applications on a rolling basis. The grants committee will determine how funding is to be disbursed (e.g. milestones, upfront, etc.) on a case-by-case basis. In general, the goal will be to align long-term incentives with the interests of the PoolTogether community and POOL holders.
At the end of each round, the committee is responsible for sharing all the grant recipients along with amounts and descriptions as part of a transparent quarterly review process. The end of the Round 2 marks the end of the pilot. At that point, the community will decide based on the results of the first two rounds whether or not to continue funding PTCGC (in the same or an amended form).
Most grants will have 1-2 milestones and recipients will receive about half the grant upfront and half on the completion of a milestone. For more complex projects or larger grants, there may be several milestones and payments could be split across these milestones. PTCGC will get progress updates from teams and assess the completion of these milestones. This ensures downside protection for the PTCGC in case the project is unsuccessful or needs to pivot.
If PTCGC has distributed all grants but has more promising projects to fund, it can propose increasing the budget to governance. However, it is entirely up to the PoolTogether community to vote on whether to increase the budget.
Conclusion
If feedback is positive, the PTCGC will move to a governance proposal and if ratified, will begin accepting applications for grants on a rolling basis shortly after its approval.
Should the pilot be successful, we could scale the program over time to accommodate more capital-intensive grants (including protocol work) so that it can ultimately become a primary engine of funding in the PoolTogether ecosystem.
We are POOL holders who want POOL holders to lead and participate in the community. We are committed to the success of PTCGC and to the PoolTogether protocol. However, this is an experiment. If it does not work, hopefully we’ll have learned how we can implement this better and can help others pursue alternative approaches. We look forward to hearing your comments and questions below.
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