Background
It’s been about 2 months since we launched our grants program and there’s been a lot of learnings that we’ve had with the program. For those of you not familiar with our existing grants program please check it out here: Other - Perpetual Protocol
With these new learnings we’re hoping to streamline and update the way we do grants
Recap
We’ve been off to a very decent start, with around 11K PERP distributed (~200K USD) and a further ~170K USD to pay for successful milestone deliveries. We’ve had applications from all 3 groups that we were looking for (business integrations, tooling and marketing).
Learnings
We have had a lot of learnings:
- A lot of the grants were actually done through outreach and the team actively reaching out to individuals and letting them know about the program. This confirms our initial thoughts that we will need to continue to be very proactive about reaching out to other individuals/protocols/projects to get them building on Perp
- It’s hard to coordinate a large group: we have a multisig of 5/8 and with everyone in different timezones it’s actually quite hard to coordinate
- We have a lot to improve in our process: right now we do things asynchronously and there’s a lot of pushing from the foundation team. If we want to reach decentralisation we’ll need to reduce the reliance on the foundation team
- Compensation is harder given everyone has different time availability and willingness to commit
- Grant limits: we currently have a hard limit of 50K which may delay potentially very strategic partnerships. One such example is the Shapeshift proposal having taken a fairly large amount of time. Additionally we didn’t specify clearly at the start what this process should look like (snapshot or not).
- Transparency: we’ve been asked (rightfully so) about what’s happening with the spend etc. We need to be more transparent in our spending and our learnings
Proposal
Given all of these learnings I’d like to propose the following changes:
- Reduce the committee size from 8 → 5 people. This will allow us to be faster in execution and deciding how things work.
- Set minimum commitment requirements - we are proposing that committee members commit to having at least 1 hour a week to go through all of the new grants as well as at least 1 hour a week to do a call with the grantee.
- Update the multisig requirements to be 3/5. This will allow us to do payments faster than we currently do and thus create a better experience
- Update the cap from 50K → 100K. Anything >100K will either be broken down into multi grants that occur one after another or in the special case where this is not possible then a snapshot vote is to be done
- Create a grants lead role. This individual will be in charge of hosting the meetings, managing treasury and generally keeping the process moving along. Given the foundation team will still dedicate resources to support this function if we’re unable to find someone to completely own this role we can still own it or co-own it with a committee member if need be
- Move to utilising Coordinape for payments (for those unfamiliar here’s a link: https://coordinape.com/) and look to allocate 1500 PERP per month