[DAO:27b319a] Deprecation of the current Grants program and Bidding and Tendering process

Governance
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by 0x858343382132b9ab46c857a7d52fdbafc039f784 (Zino)

Linked Draft Proposal

Deprecation of the current Grants program and Bidding and Tendering process

Summary

This proposal aims to deprecate the existing Grants Program and Bidding and Tendering process in favor of a more strategically aligned and efficient way of managing and allocating DAO funds.

Abstract

According to the following discussions we had at the DCL DAO: Regenesis Summit Summary, the result of the kickstart governance process, and the feedback gathered on the RFC - “Deprecation of the Current Decentraland DAO Grants program and Bidding and Tendering process” Draft Proposal, this proposal calls for the deprecation of the current Grants Program and Bidding and Tendering process within the Decentraland DAO to create a more effective, strategically aligned funding model.

Upon approval, both programs will be frozen, with no new proposals accepted. Active projects will continue under the supervision of the Grant Support Squad, and the Revocations Committee will be dissolved. Historical data on funding will remain accessible.

Deprecating these programs is critical for addressing inefficiencies and ensuring future funding aligns with Decentraland’s long-term vision. A concurrent proposal for a new funding model is also under consideration, aimed at enhancing transparency and resource allocation.

Motivation

Despite allowing direct community-driven funding decisions for the past four years, these programs have faced several key issues, including vote influencing based on personal connections, community tension over securing votes, and inefficiencies in proposal submissions. Many funded projects have failed to meet expectations, leading to resource misallocation and grant revocations, while the programs lack alignment with Decentraland’s long-term goals:

  • Vote Influencing: Participants often lobby for votes based on personal connections rather than project merit, undermining the objectivity of the funding process.

  • Community Tension: The pressure to secure votes has created tension within the community, shifting focus from evaluating projects to garnering support, which compromises fairness and transparency.

  • Inefficiencies in Proposal Submission: Rejected applicants must restart the process, causing delays and discouraging project creators, which slows ecosystem growth.

  • Resource Misallocation: A significant portion of funded projects have not met expectations, resulting in wasted resources and grant revocations.

  • Lack of Strategic Alignment: The current program does not prioritize advancing Decentraland’s long-term goals, leading to the approval of projects that do not contribute meaningfully to ecosystem growth.
    To ensure more effective use of the DAO’s treasury and support Decentraland’s strategic vision, a new funding model is required, and these programs should be deprecated.

Specification

Deprecation of the Current Grants program and Tender process:

  • Effective immediately upon approval, both the current Grants Program and the Bidding & Tendering process will be frozen. No new Grant, Pitch, Tender, or Bid proposals will be accepted, and no budget will be allocated.
  • Active projects (with an active Vesting Contract) will continue and will be supervised by the Grant Support Squad (GSS).
  • The Revocations Committee will be dissolved as its role in accountability becomes unnecessary without this program.
  • The Projects Dashboard will still be available on the Governance dApp and the historical information on funds allocation will still be available on the Transparency stack of the DAO.

Impacts

Deprecating the current Grants Program and the Bidding & Tendering process allows for eliminating inefficiencies and aligning funding with Decentraland’s strategic vision.

Implementation Pathways

  • Effective immediately upon approval, both the current Grants Program and the Bidding & Tendering process will be frozen. No new Grant, Pitch, Tender, or Bid proposals will be accepted, and no budget will be allocated for 2025. Since the budget for the Q4 is already allocated, the unused portion will be reallocated according to the following proposal: Decentraland DAO
  • Starting in 2025, the DAO will cease budget allocations to both the Grants Program and the Bidding and Tendering process.
  • Ongoing projects with an active vesting contract will continue under the supervision of the Grant Support Squad (GSS). In the absence of a o Revocations Committee, the DAO Committee will assume responsibility for revoking, pausing, or resuming vesting contracts as needed.
  • The Projects Dashboard will remain accessible on the Governance dApp and historical information on fund allocation will still be available via the DAO’s Transparency stack, with the GovApp team responsible for maintaining this functionality.
  • The Grants Landing Page (Decentraland DAO) and Decentraland’s official documentation will be updated to reflect that the program is temporarily frozen.

Conclusion

Deprecating the current Grants Program and the Bidding & Tendering process is vital to eliminating inefficiencies and aligning funding with Decentraland’s strategic vision. This initiative will halt resource depletion and establish a more transparent, equitable, and strategically focused funding model moving forward.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

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Once these systems are removed from the DOA there is no going back. And, Why the end of bidding and tendering doesn’t this allow one to bid on a job the foundation is hiring for or no? Does this also mean that the DOA is now responsible to build games in dcl and if so, how will they go about hiring people from our community to have a chance on building these games? And, are these games also going to be play to earn games that give prizes? How will these funds that are no longer being spent on grants be spent and who decides the budget and how much? What does the process of building in dcl without any help from grants look like. What are the expectations a new user should expect. What incentives do builders have to stay and build? Lastly, what benefits are the community members going to have in order for them to want to spend time and money here when there are 100s of platforms they could be spending their time at while earning from play to earn games.One last last question. Have you called in any professionals that have lots of experience running and working for a DOA? Have you? Because they can help to strengthen the weakness in our DOA. These changes that you are making would be a red flag and a risk. Understand people this is a permanent change and if it fails Decentraland fails then so do we. Our time and investments will be gone. As it is, I’m not sure we can survive all these huge blows one after another. It’s gonna be at least a year before client 2.0 is up and running well, and we’ve lost so many people already. Now no games at all is going to be built for unknown amounts of time? How are we going to grow? What are we going to do?

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thank for bringing up you opinions , great! will like to see more comments to vote

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I cannot vote yes on this when links in the proposal lead to this kind of thing.

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Hi @LandlordDao . Thank you for your opinion.
In that sense, the idea is to redefine the Grants Program and the Bidding and Tendering process (the two active processes to fund projects).
This proposal aims to deprecate the current programs and stop the inefficiencies (I encourage you to read the following data) to align the funding with the Shared mission for the DAO.

I would love to hear your insights to start thinking of new ways to fund projects through a new version of the Grants Program or another process that the community defines.

Thank you!

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While I totally support shutting these programs down, as demonstrated by my submitting the prop to freeze grants, and having to work with Fehz to get the support of the rest of the “core units,” I do think you would have an easier time gaining total consensus in support for this idea if the community had a better understanding of what was going to replace them.

Even some of the hotly debated summit attendees indicated uncertainty about the precise details of the consensus reached at the regenesis.

I’ll vote yes, but I would imagine more people would be more excited to join me in doing so if they were better able to incision the future.

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Thank you Jarod. Can I have something with a little more details and maybe some sort of time line. When can we expect to see the DOA working on building new games? What do we tell new users. This just hasn’t been super clear. I’m afraid with the unfinished client and little building going on and no clear idea when funds will be released towards building and no clear answer on when this will happen or if this will happen that is has already become hard to spend any time on the platform with so little to do. Limited navigation and so far, no success on even completing the quest on new client.

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I have always encouraged decentralization, innovation, reform, and allowing room for mistakes. Unfortunately, DCL is too centralized, with too many restrictions! I maintain an open attitude – we need to experiment in various ways, as people grow through making mistakes. Today’s DCL has become too conservative, and the once-innovative blockchain metaverse is now falling behind. Let me ask just one question: should we developed our own chain? Is the DAO slowing down the Foundation, or is the Foundation holding back the DAO? My proposal is to go all in on developing a platform that enables limitless possibilities.
Thank you @Zino

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The flow of the Pitch / Tender / Bid process feels quite adequate for the Governance needs of a Decentralized Organization, as it mirrors methodologies used by off-site teams in the Real World.

It allows the DAO members to work out further development of the platform, together via the Pitch and Tender dynamics.
Then teams can Bid on resulting contracts in the final step.

And the Grants Program should be used to onboard work that has been completed.
It should be including clauses such as “code must be made open-source”.
It should really have no time-table for future work.

Here are my responses to the concerns brought about in this Proposal:

VP Delegation is principally meant to generate a body of experts, who are not to be influenced by such “personal connections”.
It is not true that a Council is necessary for obtaining this body of experts.
There really only needs to be just a few adjustments made to the current way of doing things.

A body of experts can likewise be used to alleviate the issue of Community Tension.
The pressure to secure votes can be eliminated via VP Delegation.
And VP Delegation should be complete. It should be possible to simply re-delegate VP (as long as the original delegator is automatically notified, of course).

It seems that the Grants Program and the Pitch / Tender / Bid Process have been systematically mashed together, resulting in the start of projects that may not have been needed, and whose pitch may have been better studied had the relevant proposals gone the appropriate administrative route.

The current program absolutely prioritizes advancing Decentraland’s long-term goals !
The issue is that it has simply not been properly explained to all of its participants, especially newcomers.

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Restarting a Bidding process (with a lower amount) if no competing Bid was accepted, does not seem that overbearing.
Applicants should only be participating in the Bidding phase, mind you.

The Pitch and Tendering phases are meant to be used by DAO members who see a need in the Platform which should be addressed.

If a Pitch or a Tender has to be repeated, it is because the proposal wasn’t properly ironed out in the first place. It is absolutely normal for the DAO to request this preliminary Governance work be re-done, if it was not properly done the first time around.

It is an issue that there be stalling of Proposals due to VP Thresholds not being met. But this does not mean the whole process should be scuttled !

What should be done is simply to identify which steps to take for the proper streamlining of the processes at hand.

Perhaps the Deadline For Voting could be made flexible ?

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Reasons voted NO

  1. Uncertainty During Transition: While the proposal states that ongoing projects will receive support, there may be a short-term funding gap during the shift to the new model, potentially affecting the continuity of some projects.
  2. Reduction in Community Engagement: Eliminating the mechanism for direct community funding may reduce members’ enthusiasm for proposal submission and limit support opportunities for smaller community projects.
  3. Implementation Risks of the New Model: Although the proposal highlights that the new model will improve transparency, it lacks specific details on the new funding management and allocation mechanisms, which could lead to uncertainties in execution.
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Deprecation of the current Grants program and Bidding and Tendering process

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 83% 11,070,846 VP (24 votes)
  • No 12% 1,718,361 VP (9 votes)
  • Abstain 5% 781,662 VP (10 votes)
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Why pass this last minute?
And not put the big vote at the start?

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There was no reason to think Esteban was not going to vote in support of this. He voted yes on the draft. Crying about “last minute” is childish.

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The bigger concern is how the Voting Rationale simply does not address a whole half of the Proposal, i.e. the Bidding and Tendering process:

More than 4M USD was wasted in grants (and potentially more).

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Debatable.

Bidding and tendering is a relatively new subset of the grants program that has largely gone unused. And in what little use it has seen, much of it has demonstrated that it is as susceptible to malicious cash grabs and whale abuse as the rest of the grants program.

I wouldn’t get overly nitpicky about Esteban’s word selection and voting choices, he doesn’t tend to like that, in my experience engaging with him.

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largely gone unused

I beg to differ, I believe it has been used quite well:

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