Hello, Community!
The Grant Support Squad was created to support the grantees in achieving their goals and take care of the DAO treasury.
The grantee requested a Grant under the Platform Category. However, according to the full proposal linked: Decentraland final proposal - Google Docs, this project should have requested funds under the Accelerator category. So, we recommend revoking the vesting contract and encouraging the grantee to summit when the correct category has funds.
The Platform category, as it is written in the documentation of the grants program, says: “Platform grantees create tools and applications that extend the power of the Decentraland platform or provide alternative ways to explore Decentraland’s ecosystem”. However, this project is a private company that wants to provide its tools for revenue (quote) “Revenue distribution: 80% to landlords, 17% to DAO, 3% to the project team.
Also, this category has a hard requirement. The project should be open source. And the company said that the backend of the code will not be open (quote): “ The development of the platform has been two years in the making, and the team is currently focused on finalizing the CPM and CPC models, as well as providing support for the platform. Distribution of the scene client will be open source, and the backend cloud services will be done in an open-core format, which guarantees that the resource will remain in the Decentraland metaverse. In case of any unforeseen circumstances in the Meta Ads team due to which we will not be able to maintain the code, we will change the backend cloud services distribution format to an inclusive open-source code format for Decentraland.”
There is no doubt that the project could be a good opportunity for the DAO to think about how to include ads in the ecosystem, but the Grants program (for now) only funds projects that can increase the feasibility, performance of the main code and the platform, and tools to navigate the client, not private companies to get revenue.
In conclusion, a private company requested funds for their platform, promising revenue, and the code will not be 100% open source. This means that the project has not fulfilled the Platform requirements seated.
We recommend to the Revocations Committee not to request to create a vesting contract for this project. As a preventive, we request that the DAO Committee not enact the vesting contract or enact it but pause it (this second option will cost more in swapping mana for DAI).
Regards,
GSS
cc: (@Nik @MrV / @fifitango @maryana @dax @bay @MetaDogeisme @rizk @HPrivakos @Tobik )