Summary
We want to start a community-led grants program to fund ideas submitted by the PoolTogether protocol’s community, or other Web 3.0 community members looking to collaborate with PoolTogether. The focus will be on empowering a wider network of community developers and contributors and to increase adoption of the PoolTogether protocol. We would like this program to be driven by PoolTogether community members and share this proposal for your consideration.
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. We call it PoolGrants.
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 2 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 grants program over two quarters. We request a total budget of $500k per quarter, with the operating budget accounting for a maximum of $100k. 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 each quarter. 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.
For the first quarter we request $500k in POOL tokens. This is 27,000 based on $18.51 POOL spot price.
Additionally, we request a one-time payment of 680 POOL for work done prior to the approval of this PTIP.
We will be making a separate proposal to fund the second quarter of the pilot program.
Committee Members
We propose a committee of 7 members: 2 Community Leads, 4 Reviewers, and 1 PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead. The Leads will be the organizational backbone of the program and ensure that things move smoothly and efficiently. The Community Leads will likely dedicate a significant amount of time to the program.
Reviewers will review applications, advocate for the community, assist PoolTogether participants, ensure that the leads are acting in good faith and are effective in their role, and will, together with the leads, operate a 4-of-6 multisig that 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.
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, and will not be compensated by PoolGrants.
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.
Community Lead: blakeburrito
Community Lead: Torgin
Reviewers:
- McOso
- Gabor
- Praneeth
- AndyKaufman
PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead: @Brendan
Budget
We request a maximum budget of $500k, per quarter, with an operating budget capped at $100k per quarter. This will be funded by the PoolTogether treasury.
Payments to the leads 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 5/20/21, the lead and reviewers will be paid on 6/20/21, and then again on 7/20/21 and 8/20/21 based on their corresponding monthly hours worked).
Any changes to PoolGrants, including continuation of the program at the end of the first quarter, total quarterly budget and committee compensation will require a POOL governance vote.
Committee Compensation
We suggest compensation for the leads roughly in line with the initial Uniswap and Compound proposals - $100/hr for a combined maximum of 40 hrs/week, split among the two leads.
The time commitment for the reviewers is likely to be lower. The compensation for reviewers will be $100/hr for a maximum of 6 hrs/week per reviewer.
This compensation will be allocated to the PoolGrants multisig from the PoolTogether treasury as part of the overall funding for the program.
Committee members will self-report hours worked in a public document. Payment for all positions is contingent upon review and approval of hours submitted. The leads will be responsible for reviewing all reviewer invoiced hours, and the lead’s hours will be reviewed by the other lead and one reviewer.
Priorities
To help inform the types of grants 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
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 this PTIP has been accepted. For example, if the proposal is executed on 5/21/2021, Quarter 1 of PoolGrants will be from 5/21/2021 to 8/21/2021 and Quarter 2 of the PTGC will be from 8/22/2021 to 11/22/2021.
If approved, starting immediately after the proposal is ratified, PoolGrants 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 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 PoolGrants (in the same or an amended form).
Most grants will have 1-2 milestones and recipients will receive about half the grant up front 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. PoolGrants will get progress updates from teams and assess the completion of these milestones. This ensures downside protection for the PoolGrants committee in case the project is unsuccessful or needs to pivot.
If PoolGrants 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.
Backpay
A lot of work has gone into getting the grants committee from an abstract idea to where it is now, ready to be implemented.
As such, we propose an additional one-time payment of 680 POOL for work done prior to approval of this PTIP.
These POOL will immediately be distributed by the grants multi-sig in the following way:
Blakeburrito: 200 POOL
McOso: 200 POOL
Torgin: 100 POOL
Taliskye: 100 POOL
Chriscrypto: 50 POOL
Gabor: 20 POOL
Regisisland: 10 POOL
Conclusion
If feedback is positive, this PTIP will go on-chain and if accepted 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 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 PoolGrants 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.
Technical Specification
The governance will be as simple as possible. The proposal will transfer 27,680 POOL tokens to the PoolGrants multisig wallet.
Distribute 27680 POOL from treasury (0x21950E281bDE1714ffd1062ed17c56D4D8de2359)
Pool.Transfer(0xd605bB8A3DA1f7f777276D3c97c828aAc3Dd4252, 27680 POOL)
- Yes
- No
0 voters
