Funding The Cosmos Hub Grant Program

[Better_Future]

Replying to @TendermintTimmy

Hi TendermintTimmy, thank you for your detailed comments.

@TendermintTimmy

How can you not have major details about your ask up front in the summary?

We will add the funding details to the summary of the proposal when we go on-chain, this is a good suggestion, thank you ser.

@TendermintTimmy

There needs to be more info on what Ben’s role would be, what his compensation would be, etc.

It is a coordinator role within the DAO, with initial primary focus to assist with putting up program website & proposal intake system, copywriting, etc. These are tasks that are consistent with his professional background in digital marketing and mgmt of creative agencies.

The comp plan was published earlier, you can find it here. Our general approach has been to size comp for these public service roles at 65-80% of market rates.

@TendermintTimmy

It would be good to either detail what you mean by “focus” on, and if it’s expanded on later, then make sure to state that. Is it exclusively for Open Source stuff? If not what is the criteria? And what defines an “ecosystem” initiative?

The primary focus is to develop a high-quality process to intake proposals, evaluate proposals, rank proposals in terms of their value-add for ATOM, report to the community via the transparency function, and create a good experience for grantees.

As examples of possible funding areas, we can imagine prospective grantees might submit proposals in the following areas: ICS chain recruitment; R&D to evolve interchain services; R&D for public goods incl governance primitives & tooling, DAO tooling, multisig tooling, community polling tooling; ATOM support for wallets; applied research to strengthen governance, validator best practice, security, and community; ecosystem initiatives incl events, marketing, & education; & other areas that might be value-maximizing for ATOM.

@TendermintTimmy

Additionally, please elaborate on what “Due diligence” means, and apply the same granular breakdown as the above to the operational expenses.

Due diligence is the process of examining a proposal from an applicant. In some situations the Reviewer Committee will seek out a specialist consultant to provide a third-party opinion on technical, code, security, legal, tax, etc. We have a strong Reviewer Committee with deep and broad domain experience, but whenever there is a proposal that requires additional specialist knowledge to assess merit we will loop in a specialist consultant.

Replying to @Frank, @JD-Lorax, @Jcook_14:

Re questions about the size of the grant program, we have discussed the sizing topic with many community members, and after careful consideration we’ve reduced our ask to 588,000 ATOM out of respect for the community feedback to run this as a pilot. This represents a 18.4% decrease.

At the same time, we have not reduced the size as much as a vocal minority of community members might have liked, and here is our rationale:

1. Solana’s grant program is $100M; Ethereum has invested more than $100M in grants; Acala has a $250M ecosystem fund; we feel it is important to start to compete with other Top 10 chains if we want to become one ourselves.

2. The amount of ATOM requested represents less than 2 months of community pool replenishment rate following prop 88 which increases the tax from 2 to 10%.

3. The amount of ATOM requested leaves plenty of room in the community pool to fund 2 or 3 more grant programs, and / or other kinds of initiatives in 2023. We support a plurality of grant programs. Lets get competition going, it is healthy.

4. Open source and public goods funding does not attract VC support – and has been categorically ignored across all of crypto – leaving a void that must be filled. Excellence in public goods funding is how L1s will differentiate and compete in the next cycle. The days of launching new L1s are fading, and the future is about the leading L1s enhancing their moat by building out their capabilities to ship and improve their public goods offerings. ATOM should sustain its leadership in public goods!

5. We feel we need to have a sufficiently-sized grant fund to be able to attract lots of great builders to do R&D. Also we need a credible path to offering medium-grants to support teams that ship excellent results. If the fund is running on fumes we won’t be able to credibly recruit great teams.