PTIP-48: Grants Committee Funding (Season 2)
Simple Summary
The PoolGrants program was created through PTIP-14: PoolTogether Grants Committee
We are now at the end of the first two quarters (Season 1) of PoolGrants, which was an amazing success! We have received a total of 99 applications and funded 43 of them. We strongly encourage you to check out the grants we funded in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth month. PTIP-14 laid out the creation of the PoolGrants program with a two-quarter pilot program. This PTIP aims to extend the program for another 6 month period.
Season 1 review:
As stated in the original PTIP-14 , one of our main goals was to fund ideas submitted by the PoolTogether protocol’s community or other Web 3.0 community members looking to collaborate with PoolTogether. The focus was to empower a wider network of community developers and contributors and to increase adoption of the PoolTogether protocol.
We feel we have accomplished this well and hope to continue expanding PoolTogether awareness and utility to the community.
PoolGrants has also proven useful as a more nimble arm of governance, for example when things go wrong with PTIPs. The pPOOL drip to the Sushi pool was supposed to happen through PTIP-27, but due to a technicality, it didn’t. PoolGrants was able to move quickly and fill the gap without a 10-day governance delay. Later, the long-term fix could be bundled in with other PTIPs, avoiding any additional voting overhead. The “Coordinape for community contributors” initiative is another good example of PoolGrants acting as an extension of governance to keep overheads low.
Quarter 1 of PoolGrants ran from 5/19/2021 to 8/18/2021 and Quarter 2 from 8/19/2021 to 11/18/2021.
Quarter 1 started out with a budget of 27k POOL worth 500k USD at the time. However, the spot price for POOL dropped significantly after the original budget allocation and we worked with a smaller overall budget. Since the second quarter, we split our budget 50/50 between POOL and USDC, which provided the committee with more flexibility in the remuneration of grantees.
Those that would sell their POOL immediately to cover expenses will receive USDC, while those that want to hodl will receive POOL. This should mean that there is no sell pressure on POOL from grants. One example where this came in handy is the Llama DAO Tokenomics research grant - PTIP-26: Llama 
PoolTogether: Tokenomics Research and Exploring Alternative Capital Structures
In quarter 1, we funded grants to the amount of $205k and spent $46.2k on committee wages and admin costs.
In quarter 2, we funded grants to the amount of $146k and spent $33k on committee wages and admin costs.
Specification
The committee multisigs currently hold about $155k worth of POOL (@$10) and 196k USDC, across Ethereum and Polygon. We have $67k committed to open grant milestones that have not been paid out and wages and expenses for last month will be another $11k. This leaves us with $273k that will roll over. For the third quarter we are applying for $173k in POOL and $54k in USDC in additional funding, to bring us back to a total of $500k as outlined in PTIP-14. Any amount left over at the end of the third quarter will again be rolled over to the fourth quarter’s funding.
Approving this PTIP is meant to signal intent to fund both quarter 3 and 4. The budget for quarter 4 will be requested at the end of quarter 3 through a separate PTIP, in order to limit the funds available in the multisigs at any given time.
Transparency
As we are funded by Pooltogether governance, it is important to us that we are transparent about what we are doing. You can find our transparency resources ranging from funded projects and updates to RFPs and member timesheets below. If there is anything you would like to see improved in this area, please let us know.
Medium Articles & Updates - PoolGrants
Request for Proposals - RFPs
Funded Projects - Funded projects
Committee Time Tracking - Committee time tracking
Committee Members
The PoolGrants committee members for the third quarter will be:
Lead: @Torgin (continuing)
Deputy Lead: @gabor (continuing)
Reviewers:
@McOso (continuing)
@Taliskye (continuing)
@Oops (new)
@gio.eth (new)
@TangFeng (new)
PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead:
@Brendan (continuing)
The process for choosing committee members was the same as previously.
There were open applications for all positions, then the lead positions were elected by the community. Following this, the leads interviewed reviewer applicants and decided who shall join the team as a reviewer.
Budget:
The budget will remain the same as outlined in PTIP-14 .
The budget for each quarter is capped at $500k with a maximum of $100k of that accounting for the operating budget.
The compensation will continue to be $100/hr for all roles.
Hours will be capped at 30 hrs/week split among the two leads and 6hrs/week per reviewer.
In the past, these caps have rarely been hit.
Technical specification
Transfer 17’000 POOL ($170’000) POOL from treasury to PoolGrants multisig.
Transfer 54’000 ScUSDC from treasury to PoolGrants multisig.
Multisig’s address: 0xd605bB8A3DA1f7f777276D3c97c828aAc3Dd4252
Previous PTIPs:
PTIP-14: PoolTogether Grants Committee
PTIP-34: Grants Committee Q2 Funding
Fund grants committee’s budget for Quarter 3 and 4?
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Yes
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No
0 voters