Grants Team
| Start Date | Oct 1st, 2023 |
| Duration of Work | 3 months |
| Budget | $25000 |
The grants team serves as a community-led program to fund ideas submitted by both PoolTogether community members as well as third-party applicants, with a focus on empowering a wider network of developers and contributors and increase adoption of the PoolTogether protocol. There are many great ideas for improving the protocol and grants plays a key role in evaluating and equipping those contributors with resources needed to go from idea to funded development.
Scope of Work
Motivation
The concept of a Grants program is pretty well known in the DeFi space.
Grants programs are often the first point of contact for outside teams to contact and communicate with a DeFi protocol and Grants aims to fullfill this role, always trying to embrace the spirit of the PoolTogether Community and Constitution.
Goal
- Be a supportive, reliable and transparent partner
Grants represents a funding source of relatively low resistance for instance compared to a fully fledged governance proposal to obtain funding. The grants team commits to be accessible, responsive and supportive of grant requests regardless of their achievability to ensure that all applicants that put in the effort to engage with the PoolTogether protocol feel respected and taken seriously.
- Emphasize initiatives that benefit the adoption of PoolTogether on all deployed chains
Being deployed on multiple chains has been elemental for PoolTogether to drive user adoption. The grants team shall but an emphasis on initiatives that improve the user adoption, experience or create additional features / layers utilizing PoolTogether on all chains.
- Continue the growth of V4 but also preparing the Hyperstructure launch
The Hyperstructure launch is coming nearer and everyone in the Community is preparing for that. During the phase of transition Grants will provide support for everyone that wants to build on the existing V4 structure but also for people that already plan to build and spread awareness about the upcoming Hyperstructure.
- Apply for Incentives to growth the new V5 HyperStructure
Incentives will be an important part in kickstarting the growth of the V5 HyperStructure. Together with the Community and Growth Team Grants plans to apply for incentives on OP and Arbitrum so PT users so PT users have an additional incentive to deposit although the prizes are still small at the beginning.
- Steward the formation of a legal entity
A legal entity has multiple benefits for the PT Community, e.g. holding the domain and other assets but also applying for incentives and communication and partnerships with other protocols. After a successfull Gov Proposal about the formation, Grants will do the needed steps with MiDao.
Milestones & Deliverables
The Milestones and Deliverables are linked with the Motivation and Goals and our new PTBR structure.
To be a supportive, reliable and transparent partner Grants will continue to track the funded Grants and at the end of the quarter Grants will publish a review about the funded grants of that quarter. Grants will also reguarly attend the weekly council calls to inform the council calls about new Grants and the status of the current Grants, gather feedback and input and apply it in the review process.
Be a steward for the new PTBR process and guide people and teams through it, providing assistance and helping them presenting their ideas to the PT Community to write a proposal rdy for on chain voting. If needed and the Community shows support of the published PTBR, using Grants POOL funds to propose the PTBR on chain.
Apply for incentives and Grants to help grow the new V5 HyperStructure, e.g. Optimism OP tokens through the Foundation Partner fund and/or the Grants program and through Arbitrum Grants.
Be a steward for the formation of a PT legal entity and do the needed work and communication with MiDao in the formation process, informing the Community about the steps, benefits and drawbacks.
Last Season Review
Last quarter Grants received a total of 30 applications.
Some Grants I want to highlight here especially are:
V5 Beta Vault Boosts
The V5 Beta is very close and to better test the new system incentives are important. There will be $3k in incentives split between booth vaults to test out the liquidation mechanism.
https://gov.pooltogether.com/t/v5-private-beta-launch-information/3021
Governance Upgrade by ScopeLift
ScopeLift upgraded the PoolTogether Governance contracts. This has multiple benefits e.g. unlocking the stuck ETH, making the protocol more future proof, more than 10 actions per proposal.
https://www.tally.xyz/gov/pooltogether
Polygon POOL Pool
The Polygon POOL Pool has a weekly prize of 50 POOL Tokens. The Polygon POOL Pool is a great way to hold on to POOL Tokens while having the chance to win more POOL as prizes.
See: https://polygonpool.win/
Across bridge listing
Liquidty and being Multi Chain are two important parts of the new V5 HyperStructure. The Across bridge listing allows people to bridge their won POOL tokens between the deployed chains fast and cheap.
https://across.to/bridge
Candide Wallet RetroActive Public Goods Pooling
Candide Wallet made a website so Candide Wallet users can easily in one tx deposit into PT and delegate their deposit to the OP RetroActive Public Goods Funding. Grants is sponsoring the first 100 deposits so users can deposit gasless:
https://retropool.app.candidewallet.com/
Budget
| Amount | Token |
|---|---|
| 25000 | USDC |
Additionally a 100k delegation, in custody of the Executive Team and managed by Grants.
Grants currently has a budget surplus of 20k USDC and 20k POOL from Q2 2023.
Grants aim to continue the work with a quarterly budget of 45k USDC and 20k POOL. The focus will be on small and medium Grants up to 10k. Higher Grants will be funded through a PTBR, Grants will guide and help navigate applicants through the PTBR process.
The reviewers are the same as last quarter (mcoso, gabor).
The Grants Multi sig will stay a 3/5 Multi Sig with the same signers and also with some voluntary members as back up (TangFeng, Taliskye).
