Proposal: Grants Program

Proposals Other
#1

Background

The grand goal of Perp is to eventually dissolve the foundation and transition it fully into a DAO. However to reach this we need to do things in small steps. This proposal aims to outline the first step is doing this through forming a grants program.

Given one of our aims is to become the base layer for other protocols to build on top of it makes sense to incentivise users to build on top of Perp. The aim of the grants program is to accelerate the adoption of Perpetual Protocol.

Much of this proposal has been inspired by Uniswap, Aave and Compound grants programs. We have also talked to lots of individuals involved with these grants programs to learn about early mistakes.

Proposal

Grant Types

We already have the concept of a bounty on our site. This links directly over to Request for Proposal (RFPs) in the grants world. Would propose to standardise the naming convention to be the same. Similar to other grant programs we should have one that is under the pure discretion of the committee and one which requires going through a more formalised public forum discussion and ending with some form of snapshot vote.

We then propose the following:

  • <$50K - full discretion of the committee
  • >$50K - requires going to the public forum
  • RFPs - the price is set by the committee at the start

Funding

For funding of these projects it’s up to the committee and at their discretion if they want to create milestones for payments or not. Payment on delivery of milestones allows the grants program to stay lean and ensure that projects pivot if they are not fulfilling their initial goal.

All grants are priced in USD and then paid out in PERP. We will use a 7 day TWAP price as at the time of payout. For example, if we payout a milestone then we take the USD amount / TWAP price and send out the required amount of PERP. We expect there also to be up front payments to kick start grants but again this will be at the discretion of the committee

At a high level it may make sense for there to be at least milestones based on each ~10-20K worth of payments. There needs to be the fine balance between creating overhead and being able to quickly pivot where ideas or projects are failing.

Focus Areas

We propose the following areas that the grants committee focuses on:

  1. Business solutions/integrations - anything that utilises Perp as a base layer. Some examples of this could include:
    1. Developing basis trading strategies leveraging PERP and YFI,
    2. Systematic hedging solutions for investors
    3. Executing integrations with other DeFi protocols to become primary PERP provider,
  2. Tooling - building out any tooling that may be helpful for either makers, traders of token holders. Some examples of this could include:
    1. Dashboards
    2. Periodic reports on assets, business and initiatives
    3. Governance and treasury modules, etc.
    4. Tools and dev infrastructure for building trading bots
    5. Integrations with 3rd party tools such as TA charting tools
  3. Marketing - anything that focuses on explaining Perp and how it works as well as getting the word out to the community. This can be anything from design to written content

Budget

From previous vote there is about 500k worth of PERP allocated to the bounty program. We propose to utilise half of this, or 2M USD worth of PERP (~250K PERP at current prices) and have at 1M USDC per quarter cap over 2 quarters. Reviews can be done at the end of the quarter if need be.

Committee

Responsibilities

We propose that the lead will do the majority of the work with initial vetting, write ups and interviews. They will then present to the committee who will ask any questions and provide feedback.

One key learning has been the need for grants to get back to grantees and provide as much support as possible. Given this the committee endeavours to get back to grantees as quickly as possible.

Members

For the committee members we propose to have members fill out key areas that ensure we have full coverage to properly evaluate projects.

Core Team:

  • Yenwen (Core team, Engineering)
  • Nick (Core team, Strategy + Partnerships)

Early Investors

Traders

Community

  • Lanre
  • Snowsledge
  • almccan

Edit1
Given there was some push back from the committee to firstly prove their value, some have proposed for the time being to update the comp from 300 PERP to:

  • Base: 50 PERP per month
  • Flexible : up to 150 PERP per month. Flexible piece depends on the volume and amount of work put in

The core team members and investors have agreed to forgo this payment

8 Likes
#2

Awesome! PERP v2 can become a fundamental building block for decentralised hedge funds and sophisticated yield farming strategies on Arbitrium. However, there is now no structured incentive mechanism in place to reward BUIDLers, hence I think this is a great initiative to propel the ecosystem forward.

Let me know how I can help as a guv’nor @tongnk! Happy to contribute.

Some background about myself:

  • I run a $10mil ecosystem growth fund for Zilliqa that invest in talents early on (conducting dev bootcamps), gives out grants (to fund PoCs) and also invest in projects (in exchange for equity/tokens). Currently, the fund life is at its 3rd years and it is still going strong.
  • I also dabble in DeFi on a daily basis since May 2020 with a bunch of degen friends which I must admit has been hell of a ride. Currently, I am mostly participating in the governance of Ribbon Finance and Perpetual Protocol.
  • I do trade perps on low leverage and options (not an ape like alex wice) to capture macro moves. So I have a good understand of how the protocol works which in turn allows me to give good insights on which projects to fund.
5 Likes
#3

I am interested in helping.

#4

I’m all for this. I’m actually working on a funding dashboard that needs … funding.

#5

I would like to contribute as a community committee member. I bring diverse experiences from law to software engineering at startups which suits assessing new crypto teams, as well as navigating governance and accountability considerations.

I’m an entrepreneurial investor from Australia. I’m naturally curious and have made my journey about self-development and learning.

To give my biography and qualifications:

  • I studied law at Monash University in Melbourne graduating on 2006.
  • I started my career practising commercial law in Melbourne for 2 years focusing on company, business and intellectual property.
  • After leaving law in 2010, I started a fashion film festival and produced over 50 fashion films.
  • From around 2013 onwards I taught myself programming. I have worked as a software engineer for the years since, primarily building web applications (front and back-end) with higher level languages like JavaScript and Python. Nearly all of my work has been with early stage startups, both in-person and 100% remote.
  • In 2018 my friend and I started a company mining Zcash in Melbourne. We still run the mining operation. We received an innovation tax credit from the Australian Tax Office in the first year.
  • I now manage the investments of the company as well as my personal account. The main approach is to invest in early ideas.
  • I am one of the original guvnors (my handle was previously @almccann on Discord) and I helped influence the economic design of the current staking contract by suggesting the “PERP-denominated USD fees” interim step.

Twitter supernoveau
GitHub supernoveau
Discord supernoveau
LinkedIn alastairmccann

2 Likes
#6

Hi everyone,

I would like to put myself forward as a candidate for committee member.

Some background of myself:

  1. I am active derivative trader to both CEXes and DEXes, so I understand the ecosystem well, esp the competitive landscape of derivative DEXes.
  2. I am active user of perp so I know what improvements can/should be made to improve user experience. Currently I own about 5% of all OI on perp protocol.
  3. Of course, I also own and stake perp.
  4. I have my 10 years of derivative trading experience in tradfi and I am keen to utilise my knowledge to ensure the success of perp protocol.

Since I own/stake Perp and am a heavy user of perp protocol, I am heavily invested in the success of this project. Hence I believe I would be a good candidate for committee member.

Thank you for your consideration.

3 Likes
#7

I was asked to provide my input here as a govnor. Depending on the price of perp, 300/month could be the equivalent to a full time salary for not a lot of work to be performed by each member for a few reasons:

  1. I do not expect there to be an overwhelming amount of grant requests to process.

  2. Providing an opinion on specific grant requests that do come through isn’t hard to do, everyone has one and a particular committee members isn’t necessarily better or right just because they’re now being paid.

  3. Given how unique each request might be, a committee member may not even be qualified to provide any insight due to lack of experience in a given topic.

  4. Due to the above, you are just paying 3 lucky individuals who were selected to vote on something for the sake of diversity.

  5. Is it even necessary to do all this for sub <$50k grants as anything over involves the wider community?

  6. Paying the smaller members to vote may create a negative incentive structure for them to just fall in line to vote for what the bigger committee members vote possibly to gain favor or just not be contrarian on the fear they may lose their pay.

Other solutions:
-Make it 300 perp/month divided between the whole committee(not per member)

-You’ve already been using the tipping feature quite regularly on discord to great effect, just create a grant channel for community to voice their opinion and tip them ad hoc as needed when you feel they’ve contributed valuable advice.

-Make all grant proposals a community vote regardless of the $ value of the grant but in the case where the grant is <$50k, the community vote carries the weight of 3 committee members and in the case where it’s >$50k then it’s strictly by voting power. Voting turn out and participation is already bad, it will only get worse if the whole community is not included a say even for the smallest of grants.

2 Likes
#8

Hey everyone! I’m interested in being a committee member and will post a bit more about my background below. I agree w/ @shumwhere on the 300 PERP grant potentially being too high, especially when we haven’t properly sussed out how much of a time commitment the work is likely to be and how effective the proposed set-up is. I’d be happy to be a committee member for any amount of PERP or just totally waive the stipend altogether if that’s judged to be the best and I’d rather air on the side of caution with compensation until we can ascertain how much tangible value a committee member would bring.

Some more info. on me:

  • Currently a senior researcher at Menai Financial Group — a crypto trading firm and asset management firm. I spend most of my time working on our investment ideas for our hedge fund.
  • Previously started the research team at 21Shares — a $1B+ AUM crypto ETP issuer — and was active in some of our DeFi initiatives (leveraged tokens in early 2020)
  • Was a founding team member of the Hashmasks NFT project and worked alongside the original two founders to lead BD, marketing, and social media-related efforts. I also started a community grants program for Hashamasks to relative success

I’ve been involved in the PERP community since the early days and I’m really excited as we begin to build out our community in the run-up to the launch of V2. I think I could be a strong addition to the committee and I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has.

4 Likes
#9

Hi there! My name is Danil. I’m a big supporter and advocate for Perp since the early days of the project. Appreciate the team’s intention to involve a community representative in the committee and want to offer myself as a candidate.
-I have been using various defi dapps since the early days of 2019, I believe I understand what does a user want to see and generally which applications/options are currently missing in the defi lego
-I wrote some reports covering Perp’s potential and funding farming instruction in Russian to engage more users from the Russian community

Regarding regular payment for each committee member, I agree with the pals above - don’t believe the members should be paid since day 1. However, there could be some grants/tips if there are obvious results of the work made by the committee.
Starting from the Curie launch, Perp will finally be fully composable with other dapps on top of Arbitrum, and the grants program could accelerate Perp’s adoption. With or without me as a committee member, I hope this initiative will play out.

1 Like
#10

Hi Nick,

Thank you for putting this proposal together. I would definitely be interested in learning more about how I could contribute to the Marketing side of things for Perpetual Protocol.

A bit of background on myself:

  • Started as a Lawyer in Crypto/Commercial Law & In-House at a large Ecommerce Brand (Australia)

  • Previously Head of Growth at Independent Reserve - Australian Crypto Exchange. I lead customer acquisition/retention for both retail & institutional clients

  • Previously worked with DXdao, dHEDGE and am currently the Head of Brand/Growth at ARCx.

  • Founded and grew an affiliate website for cryptocurrency exchanges that gets around 3,000 users per week. Growth strategy was primarily SEO for targeted keywords.

  • I also founded a creative studio that services DeFi protocols called Epoch Studio. I developed the strategy around DeFi Passports for ARCx and have designed all of the DeFi Passport NFTs. You can find our portfolio on our twitter @epochstudio_ (unfortunately I cant have more than 2 links on this post!).

I think I can add a lot of value in bringing across traditional exchange growth strategies that include SEO, Paid Affiliates, Paid Advertising and more to Perpetual Protocol.

My personal view is that key acquisition channels like the ones mentioned above are under-utilised in DeFi and I have a keen interested in testing this thesis out.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Mike__Eli
LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/michael-elisha

Thanks.

2 Likes
#11

Hey, my only input is This. There should be a max number of <50k per years to avoid abuse. Let say 5 per year, then any other have to be done on public forums

#12

I would like to express my interest as well for the community role.

I have been in Crypto since 2014, and in Marketing since 2018. I have a computer science degree, a 8 year developer background, and have also published and presented a peer-reviewed paper at a conference. I am used to managing and optimizing ad campaigns on social media and search engines, and regularly write newsletters to over 60k subscribers. I am well versed in Photoshop and graphic design and can also do animations. I am proficient in English and German is my first language.

I think I could do a lot of legwork like write ups or newsletters to update the community about the progress or state of grants.

Some of you may already know me as @Reinhard from Discord. I am a huge fan of Perpetual Protocol for a while now, and I like to think I got a solid grasp on it. + I might be able to contribute insights on Marketing.

You can also find me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/InterstellarGS

2 Likes
#13

Thanks everyone for so much support!! There was a lot more people looking to join this than expected. We’re happy to announce that we’ll be adding:

  • Lanre
  • Snowsledge
  • almccan

All of them have been super early contributors and supporters of Perp and we thank you very much for helping out to date.

We’re going to get to work on the grants program for now and hopefully get something live soon!

#14

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