PTIP-62: Grants Committee Funding (Q4)

Governance PT Improvement Proposals
1

Summary

The PoolGrants program was created through PTIP-14: PoolTogether Grants Committee. In PTIP-48, governance approved an identical budget ($500k/Quarter) as in PTIP-14 for Q3 and Q4. In order to limit the funds at risk in the multisig wallets, only Q3 funds were transferred to the PoolGrants wallet. Now that Q3 has concluded, governance is requested to approve the transfer of budget funds to PoolGrants for Q4, which runs from 2/19/2022 to 5/18/2022.

Q3 review

PoolGrants Q3 was much more focused on funding and empowering projects from within the community, rather than external initiatives.

Highlights include the community substack, coordinape and underthesea’s quality of life projects, such as poolexplorer.win and wheresthedrip.com.

We also supported delegation experiments such as NFT Christmas cards and the Valentine’s delegation NFT giveaway.
These were enormously successful and from now on we plan to have 100k USDC earmarked for delegation initiatives on an ongoing basis.

We look forward to supporting more awesome community projects like these in Q4!

Specification

In Q3, we funded grants to the amount of $88.5k and spent $15.6k on committee wages and gas expenses.

At present, the committee multisigs hold about $41k worth of POOL (@$2.44) and 142k USDC, across Ethereum and Polygon. We have $60k committed to open grant milestones. Consistent with the plan and soft consensus reached in PTIP-48, PoolGrants requests the transfer of 85.6k POOL (worth $209k) and 108k PTaUSDC from the PoolTogether treasury to the PoolGrants Ethereum multisig wallet, to restore it to a total of $500k as budgeted.

The POOL amount is so high because the POOL we received for Q3 has depreciated a lot in value since then.

Transparency

As we are funded by PoolTogether governance, it is important that PoolGrants operations are transparent. You can find our transparency resources below. If there is anything you would like to see improved in this area, please let us know.

• Medium articles & updates

• Complete list of funded projects

• Committee time tracking

Technical specification

• Transfer 85’600 POOL ($209k) from the PoolTogether treasury to the PoolGrants Ethereum multisig wallet.

• Transfer 108’000 PTaUSDC from the PoolTogether treasury to the PoolGrants Ethereum multisig wallet.

PoolGrants’ Ethereum multisig wallet address: 0xd605bB8A3DA1f7f777276D3c97c828aAc3Dd4252

Previous related PTIPs:

-PTIP-14: PoolTogether Grants Committee - #3 by Torgin
-[Revised] PTIP-34: Grants Committee Q2 Funding
-PTIP-48: Grants Committee Funding (Season 2)

Do you approve funding Q4 of PoolGrants?

  • Yes

  • No

0 voters

4 Likes
2

Before voting, I do have a question. I don’t see any breakdown of POOL vs USDC payouts to participants. Could you provide some summarized statistics of how many participants choose a POOL versus a USDC payout and how much that amounts to in total? I can probably calculate that based on funding rate and price, but I assume you have those numbers for grabs.

The reason I’m asking is because, as you note, the requested POOL funding is very significant. If POOL were to double in price in the coming month (I’m an optimist sometimes), you would suddenly control a much larger treasury. If only a small minority of grant participants are choosing the POOL option, I’m wondering if that makes sense and if we should not rebalance the request.

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I don’t have detailed numbers at hand, but I would say that likely at least 50% of our payouts are in POOL or uGMI. For example, the coordinape program was a significant grant that was 100% uGMI.

If requested, we could return some of the POOL to the treasury if the price does increase significantly.

We could also adjust the budget request to include more USDC and less pool. This could also make sense considering we are likely to use large amounts of our USDC for delegation campagins.

2 Likes
4

Grants! Grants! Grants!

I really like the re-framing of the past quarter to supporting more community led projects. That’s been awesome!

Definitely in favor of continuing – my only question:

Is this amount of funding needed right now?

I know this is pegged to the 500k quarter budget goal but if the grants team still has resources on hand… perhaps we should wait or re-size?

Also would be curious how grants team has been handling POOL vs. USDC lately (in broad strokes)?

5

In terms of it being needed right now:
Yes, we are almost out of POOL ($40k) and have 140k USDC but we want to use at least 100k of that for delegation campaigns (if not more).
We do not plan on spending the full budget but don’t see a downside to it being available. We also expect to see grant applications from the marketing working group to come in soon, which could get expensive.
Any leftover funds will obviously roll over to the next quarter or be returned to the treasury.

For USDC vs POOL (vs uGMI) handling:
We let people have free choice over which currency they want.
If they need the money for expenses and would sell their POOL, we encourage them to take USDC instead.
A lot of people choose POOL.
In particular, the grants team takes most of its wages in POOL or uGMI.
How could you not at these prices? :wink:

1 Like
6

Could you clarify this? I was under the impressions that the MWG would receive a separate operating budget?

7

The latest plan is that they would apply for grants to get themselves started, build a track record and deliver first items that show their effectiveness.

Then they would use this as a basis to apply for a separate budget through PTIP at a later stage.

This is the model they chose based on the feedback on their first proposal that a large blank-check budget was a big ask with no track record.

You can find more detail on it in their post, specifically, the “How will the MWG be compensated” section: Amended- Forming The PT Marketing Working Group

1 Like
8

I don’t really feel good about this, mainly because you mention that it could be quite expensive without much detail. Let me explain.

First of all I realize this may only be my opinion and that getting this right is a difficult and lengthy process. It also totally depends on the requested budgets and maybe I am overreacting. I am also totally fine with the MWG setting up a campaign or two using grants within a reasonable budget (e.g. two times $20k), that’s not too different from previous grants.

What I don’t like is if they would receive substantial hourly wages or a big upfront check from grants as that was quite a contentious point in the original founding request. If substantial amounts of operational money flow from the GC to the MWG, it feels to me like the checks and balances of the normal funding procedures of our DAO are circumvented given that both entities operate within the DAO.

In the past the GC created RFC’s whenever a certain budget was exceeded, which I quite liked. If this procedure is also followed for any substantial MWG funding requests, then I don’t see a difference with the MWG writing up an RFC + PTIP for their operational budget, and I would very much prefer that.

I’m not attributing any malice to anyone here, I just want to make sure any substantial budget spending happens above board as much as possible. The strength of a DAO is that everything is as public and transparent as possible. If it is not, a DAO essentially becomes a private company with a very limited number of insiders.

4 Likes
9

I totally get where you’re coming from and agree.

Our general level from which we ask for input from the community is when a grant exceeds the $30-40k range.
As far as I’ve gathered from my conversations with them, their intent is to have a first wave of about 3 grants with an average cost of around $15k. This would fall under the “normal” size of grants that we have autonomously given in the past.

There were also 2 polls in the previously linked post Amended- Forming The PT Marketing Working Group, which were positive on the idea of supporting MWG at all. We will take this into consideration when the grants come in.

If you are generally skeptical of the value of the MWG, I think that is valuable and can be discussed on that thread or in a new post.

2 Likes
10

I still think the grants committee is doing a great job all around.
For those not aware I was on the committee for the initial phase so there is potential for bias on my end.

Either way I support this :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

If there are no more comments, I’ll take the vote on-chain tomorrow.

1 Like