This is a revised version of PTIP-34: Grants Committee Q2 Funding.
The major changes include updating numbers to be most recent and a change in committee structure, with @blakeburrito moving to a reviewer role and @gabor becoming deputy lead.
Summary
The PoolGrants program was created through PTIP-14: PoolTogether Grants Committee
We are now at the end of the first quarter of PoolGrants, which was a roaring success! We have received a total of 60 applications and funded 20 of them. We strongly encourage you to check out the grants we funded in the first , second and third month. We’ve already got a couple more in the pipe. PTIP-14 laid out the creation of the PoolGrants program with a two-quarter pilot program, but only included the funding for the first quarter. This PTIP will fund the second.
First quarter 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 will be 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. Moving forward, we want to split our budget 50/50 between POOL and USDC.
This 50/50 allocation will allow for more flexibility when funding applications. 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 will come 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. Any funds left over from the first quarter will roll over to the second.
Specification
The multisig wallet (0xd605bB8A3DA1f7f777276D3c97c828aAc3Dd4252) currently holds about $158.6k with the spot of POOL @ $14.6. We have $61k committed to open grant milestones that have not been paid out and wages and admin costs for last month will be another $12k. This leaves us with $85.6k in POOL that will roll over. So for the second quarter we are applying for $164.4k in POOL and $250k 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 second quarter will again be rolled over to the third quarter’s funding, or returned to the treasury if the program is not continued.
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 second quarter will be:
Lead: @Torgin
Deputy Lead: @gabor
Reviewers:
@McOso
@Praneeth
@AndyKaufman
@blakeburrito
@Taliskye
PoolTogether Inc. Technical Lead:
@Brendan
Praneeth is often occupied with other obligations. Whenever he does chime in, his feedback is very valuable, so we would like to keep him on.
Still, we would like to have four reviewers that have the time to be active. As such, we want to add an additional reviewer role to the committee for the coming quarter. We think it is reasonable to add a fifth reviewer without removing Praneeth, as Praneeth has only logged a total of 7 hours over the last 3 months.
For the extra reviewer role, we suggest @Taliskye. He has shown fantastic engagement in the PT discord over the last months and was one of the original drafters of what turned into the PoolGrants program. We think he would be a great fit. The community has shown support for this in the poll of the previous discussion post.
Additionally, @blakeburrito will be moving from Lead to a reviewer role. The responsibilities between lead and reviewer are very different and there are open issues that Blake is point of contact on. To ensure a smooth transition, it will be a gradual shift over 2 months. In the first month of Q2, Blake’s hours will be capped at 15h/week, in the second month 10h/week. Thereafter, he will be a normal reviewer with a cap of 6h/week.
@gabor will expand his role to deputy lead. We think it makes more sense to have an explicit hierarchy of lead and deputy lead, rather than two equivalent co-leads. This should help shape workflows and resolve situations where the leads are in disagreement with each other.
Should the PoolGrants program be continued at the end of the pilot program, all committee positions will be up for open applications from anyone in the community at that time, as they were when the committee was formed.
Budget:
The budget will remain the same as outlined in PTIP-14 .
The budget for the 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.
Technical specification
Transfer 11’260 POOL ($164’400) POOL from treasury to PoolGrants multisig.
Transfer 250’000 ScUSDC from treasury to PoolGrants multisig.
Multisig’s address: 0xd605bB8A3DA1f7f777276D3c97c828aAc3Dd4252
Previous discussion: Pooltogether grants program renewal, PTIP-34
Fund grants committee’s budget for Quarter 2?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
