Voting Yes.
I hate voting this way, but the complete lack of direction and shared vision is too painful.
We need to set clear goals and standards.
We already had the opportunity to set this without pausing the DAO, but was voted No: Does Decentraland need its own Сonstitution?
I agree with @Seanny 's suggestions about things that should be done to improve the DAO grant process. But I don’t see a reason to pause the whole program in order to address those. Pausing would slow innovation at a critical time when we should be supporting projects that can attract and retain more players and improve user and creator experiences. The competition is coming and it’s well-funded. Let’s keep moving forward, and improve the grant process while we do it.
Will you share the data on this?
Keep in mind that this is not a stop on creating content, there are 36 projects running (37 including golfcraft paused grant), plus the current grant proposals being voted. This is just a slowdown to improve the granting process to be more efficient for the benefit of the platform.
Fundamentally what the Decentraland DAO is missing is an INNOVATION STRATEGY
This is defined as:
An innovative strategy guides decisions on how resources are to be used to meet an organization’s objectives for innovation, deliver value and build competitive advantage.
Strategies should include:
an analysis of a business’s competitive and technological environment. its external challenges and opportunities.
Based on this idea, an innovation strategy can only help the Decentraland DAO in one of the following four ways:
Improving existing products: Taking existing products and increasing their performance along dimensions of value that matter to target consumers.
Developing new products: Creating new products and services to serve existing consumers or to target entirely new markets.
Optimizing revenues: Increasing revenues and profits by implementing new pricing options or business models.
Optimizing costs: Reducing costs and overhead by implementing cost saving initiatives and streamlining operations.
I therefore fundamentally support the idea to pause - take stock - implement an innovation strategy and carry on.
I kind of feeling yes and no for the proposal, staying in the middle.
I do appreciate the goodwill of this proposal, I 100% agree that DAO grant should be used more efficiently with some new rules or processes.
However, personally,
1/ I do believe the pause needs a specific deadline to get passed.
2/ Like you said DAO grant is one of the main reasons that Decentraland can maintain its userbase in the bear market, if we cut it now, that means a lot of small communities will hardly get “fuel” to keep absorbing new players, even maintaining their existing community.
3/ Lastly, I want to say that most of the issues that you listed are in the process of self-addressing now, slowly but organically. Just think what was the DAO grant distribution look like at the very beginning? A lot of big number grants came out, but now? We can seldomly see grants large than 60k. There might be a few that can reach 120k, but really a few. And what’s gonna happen next is that it’s gonna become more and more strict, and this is sth happened organically without a pause.
I do believe in the self-correction ability of DAO and the community as we can see more people like you, HP, lordlike, dax…voting based on the benefits of DCL. And we are all learning fast how to judge a proposal.
So to summarise, I am not against the pause, and not pro it. I would follow the community decision, However, I strongly belive that if this proposal should only get passed when it has a very specific and clear plan and a deadline to put into practice considering the big impact it might have.
Hey @Seanny, I think some revision are definitely necessary but could you better explain the current state of financials? How are 99% of holdings in MANA based on this image? And how does all of this add up to $19M USD?
In my opinion things do need to be fixed but I dont see how 2-4 months of pausing new grant requests will change anything. The work to change can be done without a pause. And if we have $19M on-hand and only paying out $2.6M over the past 1.5yrs I dont really see a liquidity issue or reason to stop funding creators.
Pausing grants won’t stop the trolling. It’s not the grants that need to be paused, it’s the havoc. The grants that are being approved are the good things coming out of the DAO, not the bad things. Get rid of trolls, not grants.
Pausing things is not how the world works. We cast votes. We elect new government officials and we change legislation. Bad actors get dealt with. We dont pause the government.
The market is poor for MANA price but that’s why now is the time to build. We don’t move the ecosystem forward by pausing.
Voting yes for a few reasons:
Diversifying the treasury is where I somewhat disagree, putting sell pressure on Mana to ‘build the treasury’ is great, but the chance of us doing this successfully is low, it causes FUD, and if the platform is to grow, we should expect the market cap to grow also (bear market aside), selling MANA in 2018 would have netted us pennies on the dollar compared to what came soon after.
In my opinion, and this is the biggest thing, I don’t believe we should fund anything that hasn’t already found product market fit, events should already be recurring and successful, development ideas should be built and public before grant money is request, grant money should be to take successful ideas further, not a slush fund for peoples ideas and startups - this may sound harsh but it’s the reality that nearly all start ups fail, so we are not going to get a fair return on money invested if we are investing in concepts over proven and successful ideas that require funding to exponentially grow or outlast a bear market downturn.
Furthermore, how can we standardize ‘value’? It seems like the amount of money requested, while often explained with breakdowns, misses that the grants are not intended to cover ENTIRE development costs, they are a supplement fund to assist already successful models.
DG brought 10s of thousands of users to DCL daily in the bull market, and has remained the most successful land space by a wide margin. DG is still seeing thousands of active unique users per day, and is realistically the core reason we still have a 7k+ DAU count.
For 1M mana, assuming roughly 5k users/day averaged over the last year (I think this is on the lower end, but ill try get some concrete numbers), arrives to an average cost of .54 mana per day per user, with users spiking during bull (cheaper cost in mana, higher in USD) and dropping during bear (higher cost in mana, cheaper in USD) - I think people made very good arguments that this was an expensive investment, but IMO set a good baseline for user acquisition cost (which as a niche, is going to be higher than traditional game spaces).
So, let’s look at proposals, if you’re project pulls in ~100 users per day, the $240,000 tier would amount to nearly 500k mana currently, that is 13.7 mana per day / per user.
Comparing these numbers shows an extreme disconnect vs the DG grant, which was still heavily contested as ‘too expensive’ while retaining the majority of DCLs DAU.
What is our ideal user acquisition cost? How do we lower that number over time? Is it worth funding things during a bear market when there are no users to acquire?
Decentraland is a metaverse for open and public building, its full of passionate people who believe in not only developing open source and free material, but also that there are near infinite ways to profit off business ventures in the metaverse other than grant money, and that should be the focus and projects we support once established.
IMO; every grant should provide a user acquisition/retention cost breakdown, this should be the core value add of any grant that is non-technical/infrastructure based and enable us to clearly identify the expected return from the mana, if the parcel does not hit the expected numbers, the grant is reduced based on user count.
I really like this proposal @Seanny! The intention towards the best interest for the community is clear and thank you because I know the time, thought, edits and expectations it takes to put all this together. This brings attention to important issues that we as a DAO have to work on, and helps us focus the conversation. We have been discussing with the team since this poll was published, and based on each of our roles inside the squad we’ve had different opinions, so here I lay mine:
I don’t see how pausing the grants program will have the community focused and addressing these matters together. It is very hard for me to imagine that our governance problems will be gone in four months. And pausing the grants program wont make people focus more on what the DAO needs.
Creating taskforces to actively address these issues is, and there are incredibly committed people working behind most of the points you propose to address, and if any member of the community is willing to help with any of these issues, they can join these ongoing taskforces.
The point I find most relevant from your proposal, is to develop a roadmap for 2023 for the DAO. This can be addressed on a weekend kind of hackathon with a clear agenda where we have facilitators and working teams, and where the people who are interested in working on this roadmap can join us. We do not need a pausing period of the grants program to make this happen, and I have facilitated virtual hackathons during the pandemic, and would be happy to contribute to make this happen.
To take care of the DAO treasury, I suggest we wait for the next steps from this proposal to restructure the Community Grants Program, that passed with 100% of yes votes, which includes changes of VP thresholds, review grants categories and define budgets per category, that aim to take care of the DAO treasury. This would limit the “money expenditure” funnel on grants program during this financial crisis, and aligns to what your proposal is looking for.
Restructuring Decentraland Forums: I don’t see how this could be solved in a 4-month period and pausing the grants program. This could be a perfect ask for the Governance dApp team (and maybe they have this already in their roadmap), as they are continuously working on how to make governance discussions easier and understandable for the community.
Help grant Voting: this is a major ecosystem issue and it is a complex matter to solve. I think that a small grant in which people with the skills needed could research on how to address voting power mechanisms based on our community needs, might be a great example on how to drive focus on this by members of the community. Pausing the grants program wont bring these people together, or find the potential solution. Community research and discussion is.
On the Grants Support Squad extent, we have identified some issues that you address here such as Auditing and Managing to have an accountable grants system. We are setting up a monitoring, evaluations and learnings matrix for the grants program to be able to understand how our community projects help Decentraland thrive. A clear roadmap from the DAO for 2023 (if we make this a reality!) would be a great asset to measure which are the type of grants that are most valuable for our roadmap and make decisions from that data. But again, I don’t see how pausing the grants program could help address this.
We have also asked the dApp team to deploy some changes in the form for requesting grants (asking for an estimated budget and clear measurable expected impacts from grant prospects) and we drafted this matrix to measure the DAO grants impacts as a first step. This matrix will be always evolving based on how our grants and roadmap changes in time.
Discussions on a New Code of Ethics: This is a good ask for the facilitation team! As they are always interacting with the community and they have a good understanding of the pains on how we treat each other (I felt exactly what you are referring to in your statements regarding how the conversations escalate), they might be the perfect team to create a working group to address this and follow up on that objective. Again, pausing the grants program for 4 months wouldn’t solve this one either.
And last but not least, Discussions on the Diversification of the DAOs Treasury: There has been proposals regarding this matter in the past, and maybe we need to drive attention to this particular issue so fellow community members with financial experience can analyze which are the best ways to proceed. This also sounds like a perfect small grant proposal too, for creating a taskforce on research which are the best approaches, on the best interest of the community.
In a way we are all discussing these matters separately, and you brought focus and attention on thinking how we can make these happen. Maybe separate proposals on how to achieve these would be a constructive way of addressing them.
Thank you @Seanny for taking the time to create this poll where you could gather all the concerns that we (the Grant Support Squad) and the community have.
As @yararasita mentioned, we have discussed your points of view since the proposal was published, and we decide to give our opinions based on our roles assumed in this Taskforce created named Grant Support Squad.
So, as a Grant accountability Manager, I believe that pausing the Grant program is not a solution to mitigate the concerns regarding DAO Treasury.
However, what we need is to continue engaging with the community to keep building and developing tools a) to have more information to vote on the proposals (Conscientious Voting); b) to ensure that the projects funded are accountable; c) to have Grant´s Categories that fit correctly with the community needs; d) to review Grant´s program framework. The consequence of all these actions will be grants that bring more value to Decentraland.
my analysis in addition to what Yararasita exposed:
As the Grant Program has a dynamic process to fund projects, the analysis should be divided into periods and analyzed. To start we need to define parameters to compare between periods.
With these inputs, since the Grant program was created, the DAO has funded 126 projects representing a total of $7.5M USD.
Let’s dive deeper and divide the information between the first period of the grant program and what happened when the Tiers were increased (grant program upgrade),
The grant request size increase (grant program upgrade) happened at the same time as Facebook’s rebranding, and as Alastor reported in their grant this “set off a rush of land sales and a spike in token price…The effects of this announcement lasted ~6 months before cooling down and beginning to return to pre-spike levels, roughly coinciding with the broader market downturn”.
This is a clear example of how a piece of news related to WEB 3 Ecosystem could impact directly our token. So, if the next announcement will be “Decentraland has paused the Grant Program to take care of the DAO Treasury”, how could this “headline” impact us?
From my point of view, it will affect us in a negative way and it could be worse than keeping alive the Gran ¨rogram to still work to resolve the concerns and create a better DAO that could be used as an example for other communities.
Back to the numbers. Between Nov 2021 to May 2022 (period analyzed above) the DAO has funded 54 projects representing $4.7M a 63,57% of the total projects financed, so the greater percentage of the treasury spending was during that period. 5 ($676.000) of these projects are actually active (the vesting contract is not over) and 49 have finished their vesting contract period. So, The question would be what happened with these last grants?
Let´s see what happens with the last 49 Grants mentioned,
So, the DAO has invested $3.1M in projects that the grantees could finish and complete. In other words, 41% of the total projects were completed.
But you will be wondering where goes the rest of the money. A total of 39 projects are actually ACTIVE (the grantees are still working to achieve their goals) representing $2.9M, 40% of the total projects funded by de DAO. So, at this point, we can’t categorize them as incomplete or not, but we can affirm that most of them are on track.
Another thing to consider is that the DAO has recovered $565.842 representing 7.52% but the important thing here is, this could be a way to mitigate spending funds that have not been located in a proper way according to the Grant Program Framework. In other words, we are creating tools to monitor what´s going on with the active grants and we keep working on this as you may know with the New Committee.
Conclusion:
In the first 6 months of the Grant Program, the DAO funded almost $4.8M. Then, during the next 6 months, $2.9M. So the tendency is going down and the reason for this is because the community is having more vote conscience. That means that “better” proposals are passing the threshold because the community believes not all the grants could give value to Decentraland.
As @yararasita exposed, pausing the grants program is not a solution for the concerns that Seanny raised, however, this poll should work as a kicks start to push the topics mentioned at the beginning of this answer. In a few words, the core units and the community don´t have to lose focus on:
designing a Framework for New Committee who decides when to revoke grants, to provide transparency, decentralizing the role of the Grant Support Squad and the DAO Committee, and start our role as providers of information to the New Committee.
Debating the Code of ethics.
Restructuring the Grant framework: we are working on requests for changes to the form for requesting grants that follow the Grants Framework, with the objective of giving the DAO more information about the grant being requested to have better context for voting. We will implement a Final Report for the grants finished, to understand how our grantees add value to Decentraland, and how our Grants program adds value to the community contributors. Measuring these impacts will help us understand the changes needed to make the Grants Program better in the future. All this information is in our renewal
Restructuring the Grant program: as Yemel Jardi published in the following poll, we are working side by side to create new categories with other requirements, which includes changes of VP thresholds, review grants categories and defining budgets per category, that aim to take care of the DAO treasury. This would limit the “money expenditure” funnel on grants programs during this financial crisis and aligns with what your proposal is looking for and in what we are working on (Conscientious Voting)
Diversification of the DAO Treasury: The community has voted here and the diversification is implemented. However, don´t forget that the Grant program funded a project to have more clarity on this topic, and everyone could see the results here.
In short, we need to keep building and developing more tools to mitigate concerns and not pause a key asset that our DAO has that creates engagement in our community.
Hi everyone! Here is Pablo, in charge of promotion, partnerships and support, from the Grant Support Squad. I add more information to what Gia and Zino already commented, and thanks @seanny and @esteban for your work and for getting this conversation going again!
First, I’d like to highlight that we are all working on improving the system. I’m not sure if you all are aware of all the initiatives that are ongoing, but I would love the community to know that everything is work in progress:
That aside… I was thinking: What’s the risk of the pause?
How the impact of the news and social media could affect the DCL community and the MANA prize?
I’m not sure what the implications would be, but I think it would impact negatively on the ecosystem.
Regarding the treasury: if we see the tendency that @zino explained, we’ve spent=invested less than 3MM in 6 months. It means that pausing the program (if the tendency continues) will save us approximately 1.5MM from the treasury (It’s not little, but it’s not that much either, and some great projects could arise if we don’t pause).
So… is it justified enough to pause the programme, understanding the whole work that the community is doing to improve it? I think the risk is bigger than the possible loss.
I’m bringing these points to the conversation because I think the value of @seanny’s and @Esteban pre poll is huge and also a lot of contributions that I’ve read here are very important to make the decision.
Vote: NO
Work needs to be done and is being done to improve the DAO. There are active discussions in the DCL DAO Discord, here in governance and in the forums. A pause is not needed to continue this work. Having time with no new proposals does create relative calm in which to discuss and enact reforms. It’s a “nice to have” thing.
A downside to pausing grants is that no new, large-scale projects are likely to begin during this period. One does not need funding to experiment and complete work in this space. However, projects of a certain complexity or ambition would not begin without access to grants through the DCL DAO. As @palewin points out above ≈ $1.5M
I had not considered a negative public reaction as @zino opined here:
I think that turning off the flow of grants would be viewed with suspicion and concern. It would be a clarion call that something is wrong.
I think of the stock market circuit breakers and why they are needed. If there is a significant level drop, trading is halted for a period of time to prevent a free fall. As shown in the above total amounts citations, there has been nothing close to a 7% draw down of DAO treasury much less the 13% or 20% drop that triggers a halt in trading of the U.S. stock market. And those result in, at most, a halt until the following day.
Surely we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can always revisit the possibility of this kind of action in the future should the situation worsen. But if we take this action now, we can’t unring the bell.
Let’s continue the discussion and the work to improve this magnificent experiment.
I have read through all the comments… thanx all for your time to express and reveal your thoughts…
So 40% of me for agree. But 60% of me definitely for disagree with an idea of this proposal 
LET PEOPLES BUILD!
And for active involved community peoples is a good reason to find some decision sooner than later to resolve most important issues asap… because all we know that with every new day our treasury become less and less if there is no adequate government consensus and decisions.
Despite the TRUE fact that some of proposals really ridiculous, there is still plenty of really good one! and I think its much better to continue provide funding to cultivate good stuff… with sometimes expensive price in form of bad stuff…
I hope we will find and execute some nice solutions within upcoming 4 months…
If not - then WE ARE is one of the issues which should be fixed, not the grants mechanism :)))
i think a fee to post request would help but same time would suck for the less fortunate to pay fee and not make it. Thats risk tho. If someone wants burn 5-10 dollars in mana to troll screw um. Thats 5 or ten more or x amount mana for the dao.
Really appreciate this and @palewin post this really puts a different perspective on things and gives a analytical full view thanks for sharing. It also helps to get some of us who are not up to speed on task and tracking.
I agree with @AwedJob and @Zino here. I don’t think we need to pause, as we are doing the work in the DAO discord with conversations. Maybe we need more actioning and testing to happen like what @ile is attempting with their VP distribution idea.
I also have to say, and sorry @Seanny, I hope you don’t take offense personally here, as you’ve for the most part been nice and friendly to me — but I still have major issues with the same person that once was actually draining the DAO of funds as a whale, being the same one who is now looking to push forward the reform of the system.
Plus I don’t see the value or benefit in pausing grants for a month and half or so to talk it out. I think at this point we should be taking the ideas and convos we’ve been having in working groups and start testing some solutions. Or creating actionable items, that possibly come from outside of the grants system, relating to VP, or other areas too.
My personal opinion: We really need more project managers in this space, there’s a lot of ppl with ideas, or who like to talk, but not enough people willing to do the work. And the grants squad, is only so many people to handle all the work.
really great discussion in this whole thread, but wow @Zino you bring up some very good points!
After reading through this whole thread I think that I’m with @1eye - a big part of me agrees with this, but with the points put forth, a larger part of me disagrees - so I have changed my vote to “no”
@yararasita also brought up very good points about concrete steps we can take and are in the process of taking. I also very much agree with @ckbubbles about needing more project management teams.
thanks again everyone for the discussion here
" The Decentraland DAO - the metaverse platform’s community decision-making tool - is holding a vote on whether to temporarily pause its grant program and reassess its structure. "
" The grants program has shown to be a key aspect and fantastic addition to Decentraland, however, the time might be right to pause and review its current structure, identifying valuable lessons from its shortcomings…"
