[DAO:71989f8] Freeze All non-Platform Grant Spending

Governance
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by 0x153b2252eddcb3690ae6f5e9f38be13779e1364d (Blocked)

Linked Pre-Proposal

Should the DAO institute another grant freeze?

Summary

Stop spending mana on anything other than improving the technical capabilities of the platform.

Abstract

General consensus in the community appears to be that while we all believe in the future of the platform, it is not Ready Player One.

This proposal aims to freeze grant spending on anything other than platform grants to improve the technical abilities of DCL for the entirety of 2024 or until a proposal to reverse that is enacted.

By “platform grants to improve technical abilities of DCL,” this means no Platform grants to make art, builds, or anything that isn’t primarily technical in nature.

Motivation

There is a great deal of concern in the dao around sustainability and effective use of resources. On top of that, we all agree that DCL needs to improve by an order of magnitude before it is going to be truly ready for mass adoption.

Removing the other categories will remove a great deal of the noise and stress within the DAO and allow the focus to return to building the platform.

Specification

Stop funding grants outside of the Platform category for all of 2024

Do not allow Platform grants that are primarily focused on creating art.

Do not allow the Platform grant to be used to fund private business enterprises.

Conclusion

It is in the best interest of the long-term health of Decentraland to focus on building a strong foundation. By focusing all of the Grant program energy on platform improvements we will be able to remove a lot of the noise, distraction, and bickering that currently plague the DAO.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

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while I do think platform is the most important without question, I do not think we should totally freeze all other grants. Maybe we should just reevaluate the current budgets, increase the platform budget, and reduce other budgets. voting no for now but would like to hear other opinions

3

What changed? This draft Draft is basically verbatim what you wanted when commenting on the Poll.

42sdfgs

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Talked to a lot of people. I realized that there are projects that are somewhere in between platform and in world. Same with social media, Some education grants could be considered social media (youtube videos) but some would consider that a platform grant if it comes with open source resources. Also after further thought , I fear that this would encourage people to just write their grant in the platform cat if thats all there is ( I know you mentioned this wouldnt be allowed but what is actually stopping it from happening?) I think my initial thought was a little naive considering the current state of the dao. apologies for the confusion

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Thanks for clarifying.

As for this question

The same thing that stopped injester’s grant that was submitted in the wrong category.

A community member calls out that it is not a valid grant proposal, and then the GSS recommends to the DAO Committee to revoke it if it passes.

1 Like
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voting YES. Just recently saw they might have to dump 5.5 million mana to cover the cost on grants. Thats about over a million dollars isnt it ?. We are going overboard on spending. The best is to freeze, and restructure and come up with better structure. Also, theres lots of complaints on the daos spending habits and these complaints are coming from a handful of the the community members. So its only right to move forward from what they are looking for. Give the people what they want.

1 Like
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I am going to abstain because I still believe we should have some funds available for proven creators:

9

where are you getting “indefinitely” from?

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We have to reduce spending for the simple fact we are putting too much downward pressure on Mana, and legitimately hurting the future of both the Foundation and DAOs reserves.

Creators mostly need a functioning and growing platform, more than they need funding, and without a reduction on spending, we will have neither soon.

However, I do not believe halting grants is the right move, we will only resurface this issue later on.

I believe what we really need, is a HEAVY reduction of limits on all categories that are not platform related.

I’m talking $10-20k per quarter AT MOST per category, with things like social media grants likely being even lower.

While I think halting spend would help us short-term, I worry we will simply see a barrage of coordinated extractive grants once we resume in 2025. By reducing grant limits instead, we can continue to progress each category and find methods/strategy/oversight that will enable and work for the future.

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@RobL I’m gonna delete this proposal if you don’t switch all your votes this quarter to abstain.

You have a little more then a day

You are free to vote to ban me, that’s fine.

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I think a better option is to set limits per-proposal for each category and lower the amount for most categories. We should restrict grant periods, outside of platform, to a maximum of 3 months of funding so projects are expected to be very thoughtful with their budgeting and focus on aspects required to create their content and show successful progress to receive a future grant.

Freezing other categories will inhibit activities of current grantees, potentially lose existing projects completely, and reduce the amount of quality content on the platform. We need a mix of content creation and advancing the platform, otherwise we will end up with a solid platform with nothing to do. We should enter some form of sustainability mode but I don’t think that means 0 funding. I think it means very carefully planned spending on only what is absolutely necessary.

I personally don’t believe in-world content should be judged through engagement metrics at this time, but on quality of the experience. We need to build new experiences and sustain our current projects with the least amount of funding required until our user base can expand.

2 Likes
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As others have said, this seems very short-sighted and the timing isn’t good. A lot of creators need support converting from SDK6 to SDK7 right now and this would remove one of the last chances they have to get help. I agree with @mattimus that existing content should not be judged through engagement metrics. The overall engagement numbers rise and fall in proportion to DCL’s overall engagement. And without existing scenes working well, and new and interesting scenes being developed, overall engagement will continue to fall.

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is it a bad joke? I agree that DCL has issues at least with new SDK 7 and it should be improved but freeze all grants is totally bad idea. Looking back and see ton thousands spent on everything is really not a good practice but now I see that guys w a lot of delegated MANA voting NO for any initiative without any freeze, let’s develop Decentraland and grow instead of dying with such decisions

1 Like
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We are also in a period where dumping large amount of MANA to pay those grants is pretty dumb.
Especially for projects that already got 200k+ USD each. You can create a new whole game from scratch for this amount of money.

1 Like
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Freeze All non-Platform Grant Spending

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 73% 10,024,304 VP (99 votes)
  • No 24% 3,366,417 VP (19 votes)
  • Abstain 3% 535,349 VP (14 votes)
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You guys are commenting on the already passed draft proposal @PunkPink