Funding The Cosmos Hub Grant Program

Hub Proposals Community Spend
1

Change log

  • 2023-01-12 Created initial post

  • 2023-01-18 Added Addendum at the end of the proposal clarifying the grant program name, scope, compensation details, termination clause and conflict of interest.

  • 2023-01-24: a) The ask amount decreased by 18% from 721,000 to 588,000 ATOM. Updated the financials. b) Auditor in Oversight Committee announced.

  • 2023-01-26: The name of our grant program will be ATOM Accelerator DAO. This replaces the former name Cosmos Hub Grant Program and reflects our desire to NOT position ourselves as the canonical Cosmos Hub grant program

  • 2023-02-01: a) A decision made internally that all 4 validators involved in this proposal would vote Abstain b) amount of grants will be denominated in USD and not ATOM. The new range is 10,000 - 1,000,000 USD c) compensation for Program Managers was reduced by 10% following community feedback. See updated compensation document in the addendum d) following community feedback, there will be a vesting of received ATOM over 6 months with one additional 1/6th made available to the team every month.

Cosmonauts,

We are excited to share with you the Cosmos Hub Grant program. You’ll find below the full proposal. We look forward to engaging with you and hearing your feedback.

  1. Summary
  2. Purpose of CHGP
  3. Reviewer Committee
  4. Oversight & Accountability Committee
  5. Team
  6. Program Operations
  7. Funding and Budget
  8. KPIs, Operations, & Transparency Reporting
  9. Timeframe

This proposal is co-authored with @Better_Future

1. SUMMARY
There is currently on the Cosmos Hub a tremendous creative energy, bolstered by more than 94 proposals since 2019 network genesis, and most recently culminating in proposal 88 which increases the community pool tax from 2-10% in order to fund future enhancements to the Hub. After one year, the community pool will hold an additional 4.2 M ATOM.

With a properly funded community pool, we believe it is the right time to initiate the creation of a grant program to serve community contributors and builders around the Hub.
The newly formed program will foster community’s engagement in a structured and strategic way while reducing the load of small to medium funding proposals on public governance.

With multiple initiatives happening on the Cosmos Hub such as Interchain Security (ICS), the Hub more than ever needs to provide funding to support a wide range of cosmonaut builders and contributors.

2. PURPOSE OF THE COSMOS HUB GRANT PROGRAM
The main purpose of the CHGP is to support the long term sustainability of the Hub and its token, ATOM, through the funding of small to medium size projects that aim to improve Cosmos Hub’s core technology, products and ecosystem.

With CHGP, we seek to boost community participation and unlock its collective intelligence by encouraging individual and team-based initiatives. Grants will be assigned ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000 USD per proposal, and will focus on open source code and ecosystem initiatives that create value for ATOM holders.

An area where a Grant Program can have a long lasting impact is through the gathering and publishing of thematic areas for future value-added projects. By gathering and publishing ideas from across the community, the CHGP website can be a place where builders learn about ideas for value-added project proposals with community interest already voiced.

3. THE REVIEWER COMMITTEE
We envision a group of 7 people that will figure on the Reviewer Committee in charge of allocating grants. These 7 people will each play a functional role on the team, with the goal of creating a high-performance team, and also will steward the Multisig ensuring accountability in the approval of grants. A simple majority of the Reviewer Committee voting in favor of a proposal will be required to approve grants:

  • Full Time Program Managers (2) - to lead, structure, and sit as Reviewer Committee members
  • One Part Time Technical Lead (1) - to augment the Reviewer Committee with Technical Analysis capability if/as needed
  • Four Part Time Proposal Reviewers (4) - Cosmos Hub validators to participate in voting on grant proposals

This composition with 7 team members in this specialized format blending leadership, operational, and decision making roles has a few main advantages:

  • it can deliver strong alignment with the ATOM community,
  • In incorporates strong technical capabilities,
  • it is geared towards “doing work” with in-built operational capacity,
  • It involves four well-known ATOM validators, including one with experience in the Osmosis Grant Program.

4. THE OVERSIGHT & ACCOUNTABILITY COMMITTEE
Oversight and accountability have often proved to be missing pieces in blockchain governance. That is why we want to adopt an innovative approach where there is an oversight and accountability function built in from day one as an integral part of the program and not something that would be implemented ad hoc.

In the spirit of achieving a new kind of gold standard, we have designed a self-regulation, oversight, accountability, and transparency function as part of the Cosmos Hub Grant Program. This function is not exactly like a corporate Board. It is not exactly like an audit committee. It is not exactly like the ombudsman function at a multilateral institution. Instead it combines aspects of all three, in a unique design that we believe is specifically suited for the task at hand.

The scope of the oversight covers both the Reviewer Committee and the grant recipients themselves. The function of the Oversight Committee and job descriptions for the three roles are defined in the following document.

5. TEAM
A. Reviewer Committee:

  1. Program Manager: Youssef Amrani. Core contributor Cosmos Hub, Economic Committee of IST stablecoin, previously community analyst at Messari. To lead program structuring, strategy & outreach
  2. Program Manager: Better Future (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-o-05853/). Previously ran Ripple Accelerator. 20 years in software, incubators, accelerators and seed investing; Stanford Ph.D. To lead program structuring & team processes.
  3. Technical Lead: Luke Saunders, Chief Technology Officer at Delphi Digital (Labs). Incubated projects like Astroport & Mars Protocol on Terra.
  4. Reviewer: Mikey L, Business Development at Cosmostation
  5. Reviewer: Dilan Asatekin, Imperator founder also acting as Lead Data Engineer at Osmosis
  6. Reviewer: Reena Shtedle, Founding team, Head of Business Development and DevRel at Citadel One
  7. Reviewer: Xavier Meegan, Chief Investment Officer at Chorus One

The Reviewer Committee will be supported by a Program Coordinator, Ben Davis, who brings 15 years of digital marketing experience and will assist with website, marketing, community and program processes.

B. Oversight Committee

  • Senior; Jason Choi: Founder of angel investing collective Tangent. Hosts the popular Blockcrunch podcast. Formerly General Partner at Spartan Capital.
  • Coordinator: Recruiting underway
  • Auditor/ Controller: Patricia Mizuki, formerly PwC auditor, over 10 years of experience of audit, risk management and process improvements.

6. PROGRAM OPERATIONS
Prior to issuing grants, there are many action items that need to be completed by the Program Managers. Here are a few of the bigger items:

  • Set-up of legal structure
  • Establish team workflows
  • Build the website & social media presence
  • Start to gather thematic areas as inspiration for prospective grantees

Once the Grant Program is up & running and ready to issue grants, the responsibilities of the operational team will be as follow:

  • Outbound communication to attract applicants, including media & public speaking
  • Q&A Calls w/ prospective Applicants
  • Maintenance of website, social media, and proposal intake system
  • Review and due diligence of proposals from Applicants
  • Sharing of proposal materials and analysis with Reviewer Committee
  • Hosting final presentation from short-listed Applicants
  • Voting with Reviewer Committee on each proposal
  • Onboarding, mentoring, and pay-out of funds to accepted Applicants
  • Notifications with feedback to unsuccessful Applicants
  • Work with Oversight Committee to prepare KPIs & requested information

7. FUNDING AND BUDGET
A. Funding request: Now 588,000 ATOM
Funding the most promising initiatives can unlock the spontaneity and collective intelligence of the Hub community while delivering an intentional and strategic roadmap for the Hub.

Kick-starting open source software initiatives will make the Cosmos Hub self-sustainable in the long term and create value for ATOM holders.

The CHGP program will provide Open Grants covering a wide array of initiatives: content creation, tooling, infra, analytics, governance, research, etc. The program grant-making priority will be on high-quality projects and teams that can create value for the ATOM community.

Given the current size of the community pool (1.7M ATOM as of 01/12/2023), we suggest starting with a budget of 588,000 ATOM (approx. $5.88M at $10 ATOM last month approximate average price). 588,000 ATOM represents roughly 2 months of the replenishment rate into the Community Pool (from Prop 88 tax increase).

After removing the 588,000 requested ATOM to fund the GHGP, the Community Pool will hold a balance of approximately 1,112,000 ATOM, with an additional 343,000 ATOM from new inflation tax being added every month.
At the end of the 9 month period and assuming the same spending rate as the previous 6 months, the Community Pool should hold 1.1 M + (343,000 x 9 mo.) - 322,500 = 3.86 M ATOM or $38.6M at average ATOM price for last month.
Note: 322,500 ATOM represent 9 months of spending at the rate of the last 6 months of spending.

For reference, the Osmosis Grants Program (OGP) was initially funded with 1.5 M OSMO, worth approximately 10.5 M $ at the time. The Cosmos Hub, with an order of magnitude (8X) larger ecosystem than Osmosis, is requesting approximately half less for the pilot grant program.

B. Budget

Budgeted Area Total in USD
One-time legal structure set up fee $52,500
Headcount for Reviewer Committee which includes: $407,250
* Two (2) full-time Program Managers
* One Part Time Technical Lead
* Four (4) part-time Community Review Panel Participants
* One part-time Program Coordinator
Headcount for Oversight Committee which includes: $140,000
* Three (3) part-time members
Due Diligence Consultants $30,000
Operational Expenses which include: $80,000
* Website: Creation, hosting, maintenance, basic SEO
* Ops: software licenses; human and/or virtual assistant for additional support
* Outreach: marketing, promotion and education
Grand Total $709,750

The estimated all-in total is 709,750 USD (or approx. 71,000 ATOM at time of writing @ $10 ATOM). This represents ~12% of total budget, which leaves 88% to grant recipients.

If there is an unspent amount, it will be either kept in the CHGP program multisig for the second mandate or returned to the community pool if the CHGP program is discontinued.

Legal setup is a one-time activity and is budgeted to include structure set-up, filing fees, registered office fees, mandatory secretary/supervisor and director fee.

Budget Design Benchmark
In the case of Osmosis Grant Program, the OSMO community recruited a third-party service provider to design and run the program. This Osmosis program costs were $100,000 for upfront setup and 76,000 USD per month for ongoing functions.

For comparison purposes:

Setup Monthly Term Grants Total
Cosmos Hub $52.5k $73k 9 months $5.2M $5.88M
Osmosis $100k $76k 6 months $9.5M $10.5M

With the CHGP proposal, we’re suggesting a team drawn from within Cosmos Hub community, to design the program and actively run it, as opposed to simply delegating the work to a third-party service provider that wouldn’t be fully aligned with the ATOM community. We are also adding an Oversight Committee function, which the Osmosis program does not provide. Even with a larger number of community contributors on payroll and the addition of the Oversight function, the CHGP budget is still lower.

8. KPIs, OPERATIONS & TRANSPARENCY REPORTING
A report will be monthly published by the Oversight Committee that includes:

  • KPIs
  • Operational updates
  • Funding activity
  • Grantee update
  • URL to CHGP on-chain wallets
  • Verification of on-chain transactions

The report will be submitted to the Community at large so that a flow of recent and up to date information about the status and progress of the program is always available.

KPIs will include:

  • Number of applicants
  • Number of grants vs total applicants
  • Number of completed projects vs assigned grants
  • Any other KPI the Oversight Committee deems valuable in communicating information about the program to the community

9. TIMEFRAME
Here are the different steps we envision for the implementation and bootstrapping of the CHGP:

  • Months 0-2: set up the organization, create the program & workflows, setup website and proposal intake system, and build-up social media presence
  • Months 2-9: CHGP in full steam, proposals are coming in, being reviewed, and being funded, and most of the budget is assigned to grants
  • End of Month 9: Oversight committee to produce CHGP end of mandate report
  • Following CHGP end of mandate report, the community can either (a) Maintain confidence in the team behind the CHGP and renew the mandate, or (b) Terminate the program. (in which case unspent funds are returned to the community pool)

Come talk to us between January 13, 2023 and January 20, 2023:
Community members who would like to meet via a 30 minutes video call to discuss the proposal, can schedule us here:
Calendly Better Future
Calendy Youssef
Calendly Bendy One
We will take calls for the first week after the proposal goes live, and we will make ourselves available on a first-come first-served to engage with the Community.

Addendum posted January 18th, 2023

Based on community feedback, the DAO team is amending it’s original proposal with the following points:

  1. The applicant submitting the proposal is a DAO with name “DAO NAME (TBD)” and the name of the project shall be “DAO NAME Grant Program”.
  2. The DAO’s vision “is to create a grant program to support small/med size projects for open source software, public goods, and ecosystem initiatives that add value for ATOM holders.”
  3. The program is not intended to be the canonical grant program at the Hub, and by creating transparency around program status, KPIs, and application flow via Oversight Committee it is anticipated that a plurality of more specialized grant programs will emerge organically within the ecosystem.
  4. The program is not intended to make or recommend any upgrades to the canonical codebase at the Hub; this decision to upgrade the canonical codebase will continue to rest with community gov and we would hope should adhere to the principle of minimalism at the Hub.
  5. As requested by the community, line item compensation and operational expense details are presented in the following [document]. Update: please ask one of the DAO members for the full doc
  6. Termination clause: at the end of the 9 month period, none of the leftover funding will be used for any purpose and a CHGP renewal proposal will be raised on the Cosmos Forum within 4 weeks of the completion of the program. If the renewal proposal is rejected, all community funds will be returned to the community pool within 72 hours.
  7. Conflict of Interest Policy: if a member of the Reviewer Committee perceives a conflict of interest, they shall report it to the Oversight Committee and abstain from voting on any grant application impacted connected to the conflict of interest. All conflicts shall be reported by Oversight in the Transparency Report.

Voting
By voting YES, you indicate support for funding the Cosmos Hub Grant Program that will be managed by a multisig committee of 7 members.
By voting NO, you do not support this proposal in its current form and refuse to fund the Cosmos Hub Grant Program.
By voting ABSTAIN, you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal but want to contribute to the quorum.
By voting NOWITHVETO, you express that you consider this proposal malicious or harmful and would like to see depositors penalized by revocation of the deposit, which contributes towards an automatic ⅓ veto threshold.

26 Likes
2

I strongly agree with this proposal.

Cosmos Hub needs its own grant program with a structured evaluation process with experienced & qualified community members. I also liked

  1. Existence of oversight committee which can review behalf of community if CHGP is doing okay.
  2. Not recruiting a third party service provider to run the program. I mean, why recruit third party if cosmos hub community has enough talents to run this program? If this experiment doesn’t go well, then we can considering other actors.

I just wish that Oversight Committee extra focuses on communication with the Cosmos Hub community.

I think its maybe typo?

6 Likes
3

This is awesome. Just what the Hub needs going into Interchain Security and the team is stacked. Strong support for this prop!

10 Likes
4

The ICF grants program will reopen likely in 2023, moreover several projects requested funds directly from the community pool via governance.

The 7 proposed people will make the decisions about who receives the grants, and for making these decisions there will be a high expense of over $70k monthly. Firstly, the people that will make the decisions about the grants cannot just be self-appointed like this, there should be a comprehensive list of representatives from all validators or relevant entities in the ecosystem for the broad community to vote. Moreover, it is difficult to justify that decisions by a self-appointed group of 7 people are so much better than governance of the Cosmos Hub involving all validators and atom holders, to justify such high expenses, these expenses could be used instead to fund multiple projects.

Again, 7 self-appointed people cannot represent more the ATOM community than the ATOM community itself. Also, 4 validators cannot have more technical capabilities or experience than 175 validators.

This small group of 7 people, according with this draft proposal, will have a huge power by basically having the final decisions of all projects that receive funding in the Cosmos Hub and they will get paid a large amount for this centralized decision power. We are totally against this, there could be plenty of conflict of interests, biases towards some projects versus others by these 7 people than with a much larger group of 175 validators and the overall community of Atom holders. Such a small group with a huge centralized decision power must not be self-appointed like this, choosing the group that will make the grants decisions is a more complex task than reviewing which projects get or not a grant.

So the self-appointed 7 people are suggesting 9 months for this program, and after these 9 months it is suggested that the community could maintain ‘trust’ in these 7 people to renew the program (not even mentioned the possibility of adding or removing any member from this group of 7). Isn’t the essence of blockchain tech trustlessness? And the community is being asked to ‘trust’ a self-appointed group of 7 people to basically have total control of grants funding in the Cosmos Hub?
Moreover, with this draft proposal everyone wishing to present a proposal for a community pool spend will then be ‘forced’ to go through this centralized governance body as it is aimed to be controlling funding for all kinds of projects, we are really againts this massive centralization of funding decision making in such a small group of 7 self-appointed people.
This is like, in Switzerland a group of 7 citizens propose themselves to manage and fully decide about all investments of the country, and receive a large payment for doing this, people would find this ridiculous. @jaekwon doesn’t this sound similar to the Allocator idea in the Atom 2.0 WP? So in Atom 2.0 higher inflation is implemented and directed to fund this allocator, and now a higher community tax has been implemented to be kind of this higher inflation, and also now the community pool investments would be also kind of centralized and managed by this self-proposed small group of 7 people?

6 Likes
5
  1. I’m personally in support of this proposal
  2. I reckon that notional is in support, too
  3. nice touch with calendly
3 Likes
6

I am in support of the general idea of this proposal, though I do have a few thoughts I’d like to add to the conversation.

Before I begin, a brief statement about the Hub and DAOs in general:

Optimizing for Plurality, Complexity, and Emergence

  • There are a variety of different crypto-political parties (for lack of a better term) operating within the Hub, and each has an unstated bias.
  • One of the most potent aspects of blockchain (DAO) governance is the ability to optimize for robust, complex systems that enshrine plurality and emergence via the social-infrastructure built around them.
  • There should not be a single canonical grants program, but a variety of funding platforms with clearly articulated platforms and values, and budgets that accommodate the inclusion of differing platforms.

Reason for Support
I support this proposal, due to the:

  • need filled by this proposal (alternative funding structures for teams seeking funding)
  • merit and experience of the team
  • oversight structures being built-in
  • minimal impact on the community pool (replenishment rate of the community pool)

General Feedback

Taking into account my above comments, here is my general feedback on the proposal in its current form:

  • I would like to see a clearer articulation of the values of the team that this iteration of a Cosmos Hub Grant Program seeks to fund. While it’s not perfect in this context, an example of a well-articulated values-statement is the Validator Commons Declaration.
  • It is unclear to me how projects that are funded would be able to interact with the Hub’s codebase and functionality. Optimally, a constitution would outline what is and is not possible here, but because we don’t have one, it would be helpful to make a tentative attempt to outline the “interventions” that would be off-limits in this regard.

Feedback on Specific Items
Here is my feedback about specific items within the proposal. In giving feedback, I’ve stated the concern, and followed it with the item from the original post.

  1. The name of this iteration of a grants program should not be “The Cosmos Hub Grant Program”, but should be related to the underlying vision and platform of the team members.

  2. Renewal or cancellation of the program should be more clearly stated within the proposal itself. I would like to see something like the following appended onto the proposal: at the end of the 9 month period, no funding will be used for any purpose and a CHGP renewal proposal will be raised within x weeks of the completion of the program. If the renewal proposal is rejected, all community funds will be returned to the community pool within x days.

  1. It would be helpful to publish detailed meeting minutes following independent conversations.

All of you deserve credit for being the first to outline a solid structure for alternative methods of funding builders on the Hub. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this proposal. It is well-written and thoughtful, particularly in regards to the oversight committee.

While I strongly advocate for a plurality of funding methods and platforms (not limited to delegated authority, but also extending to other funding methods such as quadratic funding), I believe that the oversight structure and precedent that this proposal would set is very valuable, and can help to establish a solid structure for this type of work on the Hub.

7 Likes
7

This proposal seems good !

Nevertheless, I have a question : why choosing a validator (Imperator) who can change his mind about the Hub future after a 10mn phone call with Jae ?

3 Likes
8

This looks very well thought out. However, I would be interested to know what lessons can be drawn from the ICF’s grant program which was more active in the past. My perception is that the grants given were somewhat scattered and did not necessarily result in any new products on the Hub or long term maintenance. Maybe @hxrts can correct me on this if I’m wrong.

I guess another way to put it is- does your grant committee have any strategy or vision which will guide your granting? Or are you just going to see what cool proposals come in?

8 Likes
9

I think it’s apples and oranges. Until very recently the ICF’s sole purpose was to bootstrap the entire Cosmos ecosystem (now it’s more focused on ecosystem maturation). That means we had to take some shots knowing a decent proportion of them would fail. The ICF also has a bizarre arms length relationship with the Hub that’s structurally incapable of serving its business needs. That said, there are some basic learnings on how to run a grants program that I’m happy to share with the grants team should the proposal pass.

As far as vision goes I’m not sure what to tell you. I tried to work on the Hub vision with Port City + ATOM 2.0 with mixed results. I’ve expressed this elsewhere, but I believe the priorities are to make sure interchain security works well, get better incentive alignment with consumer chains, and (securely) deploy liquid staked ATOM absolutely everywhere. No-brainer next steps.

7 Likes
10

Overall i support this prop especially with the relative oversight that’s included. I would vote for all those mentioned if this was already a DAO (which i look forward to it becoming in the future).

7 Likes
11

I agree with all of the points above. The name should be specific to the group, and not appear to represent the totality of Cosmos, so that other DAOs can exist as well.

We do need to agree on a vision for the direction of the hub. Here are some specific questions for the committee, so the Cosmos community knows what they would be voting for:

  • How will the committee enforce hub minimalism? Will it? What does that mean?
  • To what extent is ICS1 a priority? Will multiple approaches be funded?
  • How will this committee make decisions regarding Tendermint? Will it continue to support 0.34 for the hub, or will it be opinionated toward say, informal’s fork? How does it ensure that actual technical merits are considered in a highly political environment?

FYI, Regarding the need for a constitution to align on the overall direction, please refer to the latest ATOM_ONE draft, which now doesn’t include a secondary token. (Turns out, PHOTON and other non-inflationary derivatives of ATOM can be implemented permissionlessly with ICS1, so there is no need to include it in the initial constitution). This latest draft ensures that we are aligned in keeping the hub minimal, in focusing on the ICS1 architecture for the hub, and ties up some other loose ends that should be codified in english in a common document. Please fork this and create your own constitution proposal.

4 Likes
12

Thank you @ala.tusz.am for the thoughtful, well articulated comments.

I very much agree with your idea that this program should NOT be seen as a canonical Grant Program. If anything, I’d say we need multiple initiatives like this one that complement each other and find convergence in the value they bring to the Cosmos Hub and beyond. A change of name to something that doesn’t sound as official maybe be a good idea to explore.

This is fair and very aligned with what we have in mind.

The idea of the Oversight Committee is basically to help the newly formed structure to self-regulate.
I really think we can set a precedent here and inspire other projects to come up with strong built-in control mechanisms. The end goal is to raise the bar in terms of deliverables and how projects self-organize.

2 Likes
13

In general I support this proposal for it’s ideas and plans. When considering the ATOM 2.0 discussion a notable plan was for the Hub to become more self-sustaining and I think that a grants program is a step in the right direction. While ICF has plans to reopen their grants program I think it’s important for Cosmos Hub to have it’s own funding plan separate with an ATOM specific mandate.

I appreciate the diversity of this team with a mix of members from various organizations, all of whom are separated from the ICF and other core teams. I see this as healthy decentralized collaboration and coordination in action. I’d add that it would be nice to see a validator representative coming from lower in the validator rankings (currently ranging from 13th-26th in voting power) for the sake of further decentralized representation. But that is by no means a blocker to this prop for me, I think the team listed is strong and I personally trust the members to make choices based on what’s best for the Hub.

While the budget plan laid out is detailed and appreciated I do wonder if the requested funds is a bit much. I understand it will be replenished soon enough but for a first time funding it seems high. Prop 72 only requested 150k ATOM ($950k at the time) and was succesful in funding a number of projects that we can expect to see applying for spots as consumer chains. I feel that going all in with $7million(+/- depending on markets of course) for a first time funding is a bit much. I think it’s more sensible to allocate a somewhat conservative starting budget to work with for the first 9 months (maybe reduce it to 6 months?) and then a follow up proposal for additional funding based on program success. Perhaps the setup cost and an additional 200k ATOM for project funding to start.

I feel that the scope as it’s laid out is too broad. Taking in consideration the approach of ATOM 2.0 councils being purpose driven I feel this grants program can be more app-specific if you will. Perhaps reducing this to:

  • content, governance, and research
    or:
  • tooling, infra, applications, analytics
    Just as an example to narrow the scope.

Finding a way to make this program more domain specific will leave room for other groups to form teams targeting other areas lead by other domain experts. This thinking is inspired by the ATOM 2.0 treasury, councils and assembly approach as I understood it. To simplify my explanation I will just echo @ala.tusz.am:

Some other comments and questions:

Comments:

  • Cosmos Hub Grant Program funding can, and should, only be used to fund strictly open-source projects (as per prop 93 assuming it passes as it currently seems to be). Cosmos Hub and the broader ecosystem was largely made possible thanks to FOSS and I don’t think this program should be an exception to the Open-Source policy laid out in prop 93.
  • Detailed monthly reports (as stated would be done in the proposal) should be posted here in the forum and also relayed to other mediums by the grants team ensuring the community will not miss updates.
  • COI (Conflicts of Interest) made public if/when they come up - such as if a member of the Grants team has any involvement or has personally invested in a project being funded via CHGP.
  • As others have said I think it would benefit the community if there were a grant mission/vision document detailing the values and intentions of the CHGP team in their approach to funding projects.
  • It would be nice if members of the grants team would share their own brief introductions here in the forum so those who don’t know them can get to know them. Also to express a willingness to engage with the community.

Questions:

  • Will there be a contingency plan in the event a grants funded project fails to deliver on expectations/milestones but has been paid?
  • Will this grants program be focusing on core software support such as SDK, CosmWasm, IBC or BFT consensus development?
  • How will cases where members of the team can no longer participate be addressed? Suppose someone left the ecosystem or had other conflicts that prevent them from being able to participate, how would the grants team move forward?
  • Does the community have the ability to request and/or vote for the removal of members?

I think I’ve rambled on long enough. I’ll close by saying that I appreciate the consideration and work that went into this proposal. I think that it sets a good precedent for the quality of proposals we should expect to see moving forward.

Thanks for your time and efforts!

6 Likes
14

Isn’t it a conflict of interest for many of the people involved. And why are we chossing amost the same people working already at some capicity.
Rather form a framework and ask people openly to apply for positions. After all you are asking for a big amount.
A framework is going to be good for long term.

My opinion might sound negative but absolute power corrupt absolutly. And i think we are slowly moving towards that.

15

I like the idea, and the proposed team is trustworthy to give this a shot in my mind.

My suggestions:

  1. Trim the sticker price on this initial ask by 25-50%. If value is proven and whatever granted funds are used efficiently, an extension with more funding can be brought up for a vote.
  2. Set up as much of the on-chain activity as you can in DAO DAO on Neutron.
  3. Provide more of a focused approach for your intended goals, and brand this DAO in the spirit of that.
7 Likes
16

Great suggestion. Thanks.

3 Likes
17

The volumes and types of proposals coming into the program will be reported to the community in the monthly transparency reports.

Once the community has this data, if a concentration of domain specific proposals emerges , then a specialized grant-making committee could be proposed and approved by the community to add capacity in the area of concentration.

1 Like
18

That doesn’t address this point:

To me it seems a more sensible approach is to have a mandate. A purpose driven grants program might be more effective than scattered funding (points to @jtremback questions). If we are just doing general project funding then the community pool can manage that approach with an improved spend process; which while slower comes at a lower cost with less risks than this proposal.

5 Likes
19

Thank you.

Based on feedback here on Forum we will likely rename as “ATOM Orbital DAO” when we submit on-chain - open to other names if there are ideas, but so far people seem to like this one.

We share the vision of an ecosystem where decentralized initiatives flourish w/ many DAOs doing work on behalf of ATOM community, including multiple DAOs serving as grant administrators.

Minimalism refers to the practice of keeping the design and code as simple and uncluttered as possible, while still achieving the desired functionality. This can involve using minimal lines of code, simple and clear naming conventions, avoiding unnecessary features or complexities, and adhering to established design patterns and best practices. The goal is to make the code more readable, maintainable, precise, efficient, timeless, and to reduce likelihood of bugs and errors.

As adherents of minimalism on Hub, we generally believe that new ideas should be attempted first in other zones whenever possible, and this can be a guiding principle for grant applicants. Also, many of the projects funded by the Orbital DAO will be ecosystem initiatives that lie adjacent to the Hub.

If a project achieves community-wide support to be included in the canonical Cosmos Hub software stack, that would be the specific team’s prerogative to pursue an upgrade via governance, and that is not a course of action or decision that could be affected by the Orbital DAO.

When gov support for an upgrade exists, modern software release management process can keep the Hub community safe. Research on best practice for software release management as it relates to Cosmos blockchains could be a promising area for grant-funding w/ ecosystem-wide benefit.

As a precedent for change: Even Bitcoin has upgraded several times.

ICS1 (replicated security) goes live soon & we expect there will be low-hanging fruit for ATOM holders for new initiatives that build on top of it.

Other approaches to shared security can be funded if / as there is merit (it is still early days), for example, Mesh security is an exciting concept.

If there are other shared security ideas that you believe ought to be pursued, can you please share those ideas or point us to places where you’ve written about them previously?

The committee will help to foster an open ecosystem that is neutral and agnostic within the realm of IBC compatibility, guided by proposals and what developers choose to build with, and not inducing demand for any specific tech.

Assessing technical merit and value-add for ATOM holders is a goal of the program, and we intend to build this into internal workflows and Oversight reporting.

We are not trying to define a direction or constitution for the Hub, and we will operate in alignment with decisions of Hub governance.

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Hello, I want to know if cosmos actually support creatives initiatives to grow their ecosystem. Supporting the Musicians, Artists, Fashion and many more. Do they actually support NFts and also encourage onboarding? Please anyone should help out @Cosmic_Validator @CosmosHub.Support @Damien

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