Funding The Cosmos Hub Grant Program

we should write a policy in black and white and visible to all in order to make the points related to funding clear. We should perhaps start by asking for the composition of the team that is requesting funding. The work already done in the past (to establish an amount in line with the past performance of the team. If the team is new … I don’t see why it would ask for an astronomical sum but it should not necessarily be a rejection for fund them). To encourage the team to work well, we should therefore agree on a starting percentage for the first release of funds (example 10% of the request). Then unlock as and when not time … but the work done. Imagine that the team wants to be funded for 5 tasks, we could imagine that upon delivery of each task the partial release of funds is executed. So once the last task is delivered the payment would then be complete.

One potential difficulty with this idea is that there must be a threshold where too few funds = decreased program efficacy. I imagine that some of the projects funded won’t come to fruition as planned. That can still be valuable, but I think that it makes sense for the program funds to be able to compensate for the unknowability of the work. Ie, the committee should feel that they have enough funding to fund a wide array of projects, knowing (at least abstractly) that their success rate is variable.

In other words, it becomes more difficult to judge the success of the program without a sufficient data-set of projects funded. And to generate a sufficient data-set, there needs to be an adequately sized treasury.

I guess the question is:

  • what is an adequately sized treasury and how do we determine it?

All of these numbers seem arbitrary to me.

Again, I don’t presume to know what it takes to run such a program (which may invalidate my opinion), but just my 2c on the amount and nature of this type of program.

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For one, i would love to see you guys at least acknowledge the massive post that you insisted i post here, found above.

However, I’m here on an unrelated thought,
How would people feel about @alphagrowth serving AS the oversight & review committee for the CHGP structure outlined here? In my eyes, as long as there was no increased cost, this could only be a benefit as it creates more oversight and accountability both ways, and brings in a wider range of talent relative to the task at hand.

@ala.tusz.am brought up some very good points and asked some good questions in their post. With this in mind I don’t think that AlphaGrowth would be suited to act as the oversight & review committee as they don’t seem to fully understand Cosmos, Cosmos Hub, IBC and the role of ATOM. I would not be in favour of them being involved in such a capacity. The current members proposed here have plenty of experience combined in Cosmos, Web3 and beyond.

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Replying to @TendermintTimmy

Hi TendermintTimmy, thank you for your detailed comments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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image

It seems there are many typos in the on-chain proposal? The bold titles and links are not shown properly, it is very hard to read the text. I don’t remember seen an on-chain proposal like this. Asking for 588,000 ATOM but not taking the time to learn how to format/write on-chain proposals?

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Hi there.

The proposal displays correctly via ping pub.

https://ping.pub/cosmos/gov/95

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@Youssef the original post still shows the budget breakdown to the old ask amount. Could you please update it? I am not sure where the decrease in ask came from (has anything been taken out or is compensation lowered, etc?)

What a great program. I’ll do my best to apply. Thanks for this information.

Is there no spending cap per grant in the proposal? At least it is not mentioned on chain, it seems.

Hello ser,

Yes there is a spending cap on grants. Please refer to the original post on the forum.

Grants will range from 1,000 to 100,000 ATOM, although we don’t expect (given the budget constraints) to give more than two or three 100,000 ATOM grants.

Hi @gjermundgaraba and thank you for your question.

The OpEx budget is unchanged: for compensation, it remains the same as the amount of efforts to run the program is unchanged. If there are divergences on projected vs actuals on the other expenses ( and we do expect some), they will be reflected on our transparency reports.

The only changes are the total amount going to grants (now 5.2 M at 10 ATOM price) , the ratio of expenses vs total budget (went from 10 to 12%) and the ratios of grants vs total ask amount (went from 90 to 88%). These are not hard numbers since ATOM price is volatile.

You can refer to the table where we compare our program to the Osmosis program, it features updated amounts. In short, the numbers you see on the original post are already updated.

As previously noted, any program funds remaining at the end of the program will be returned to the community pool in case the program is not renewed as per the Termination Clause.

FYI, here is the Termination clause:

At the end of the 9 month period, none of the leftover funding will be used for any purpose and a 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.

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Oh, that is unfortunate and a little misleading in the updates honestly.

In any case, I am sorry to see that the cost question was not once seriously considered and just brushed away. In the end, we do need this kind of program, but I am sad to see that the cost question is not taken seriously.

Seems like there is no point in discussing with you guys on this anymore, so I will just leave with my take on funding proposals in general and hope we can do better than this in the future:

"My take on funding proposals: have clear goals and outcomes. And behave like a startup: be scrappy and set expectations that you will be well-rewarded if you do exceptionally well.

Asking for funds to cover high salaries for unproven ideas is not something I will support.

If we want these funds to create value we need hungry teams (not as in food…). Complacent teams will rarely strive to achieve amazing things. Why would they?"

You’re being paid too much too soon to really want to achieve amazing things. In my opinion obviously. If this goes through and you get to do this, I sure hope to be proven wrong :slight_smile: In any case, good luck!

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While I appreciate the reasoning, I don’t see the comparison of a single Cosmos Hub grant funding initiative comparable to Solana or Ethereum. Cosmos is built in a modular fashion, and this modularity should lead to more grant initiatives, for various grant programs or other treasury funding that helps build out this modular architecture, unlike ETH and Solana, which seek to build strictly on their monolithic blockchain architecture.

Personally, I still do not see this proposal as comparable in purpose, when comparing the Hubs vision to the goals of Solana or Ethereum in their monolithic design. While I want you to have enough to fund projects, I believe check and balances are necessary in this case and a smaller amount should be received, and if this grants program does a sufficient job, then a refill can be requested.

Like I said, I get your reasoning, however, I still disagree with the amount. The treasury should have many different grant funds, and many different stated objectives for these grant funds. Obviously this requires more initiative from the community, which I hope will happen, and would be happy to take initiative myself, if I had guidance from other in how I would go about the process of starting my own grant fund, with specific stated objectives, and I would welcome that opportunity. I appreciate the initiative you have taken in getting a grant fund going. And I hope my reasoning makes sense, as to why I believe a lesser amount should be requested. I hope that if this proposal is rejected, you will consider a new proposal with closer to 200,000 ATOMS and go again, as I would certainly be much more apt to vote yes on that amount.

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Where it’s the professionalism, you guys? You don’t know how to write such an important proposal? I submitted an on-chain proposal on the Juno blockchain and tested it before also Mintscan and ping.pub. This is due diligence. It’s this the way you will allocate funds as well?? Lack of professionalism from you guys! For this mistake, I will vote NO!

You guys live in another world. 10.000 ATOM grant is a lot in the real world. Wake up!

Imagine unironically seething about page formatting issues. Grow up. Looks fine here: Ping Dashboard

thank you for putting this together! The whole cosmos ecosystem is really going to benefit from having an official grants program. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m interested in setting up a quick chat but none of the calendar links above seem to have any availability. @Youssef do you think we could set up a time to chat either this week or early next week? My team is building on top of agoric, and I’d love to grab a minute to discuss what we’re working on.

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@tgrecojs: my email is betterfuture2040@gmail.com happy to find a time to connect. :+1:

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While I see the need for a grant program like this. I am a little bit uneasy about 100,000 ATOM grants being given at a small number of peoples discretion. Should larger projects like this not rely on consensus? I would like to hear the justification for why we would want to have these larger decisions in the hands of a select number of people instead of the community.

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