Since October I have been working on restructuring the grants program and looking for a better framework for the DAO. Recently this matter has become a focus of attention to the community, so I believe it’s great timing to share a plan with you all.
I separated the restructuring into four different proposals, each of them addressing a particular aspect of the Grant Program. The goal is to scope the conversation and find alignment on each part before moving on to a Governance Proposal. To receive early feedback I’m sharing them here as Google Doc with open comments:
Here are a couple of questions/discussion points that come to my mind upon going through them:
w.r.t. Part 1 - Tiers & Thresholds - I think the new simple structure for tiers is amazing.
One thing I noticed is that the proposal threshhold for the maximum grant of 240k$ is going up from 8M VP to 13M VP according to your proposed values. This goes even more out of line with the current DAO threshholds where 6M VP is required to even get a general policy change passed (which covers changes to the rules of the grants program).
Since the Part 4 of your proposal accounts for the overspending problem, my suggestion would be to re-adjust the VP of your proposed higher tier to: [1M + TOTAL_BUDGET * 30VP/USD] which puts the VP required for the maximum grant at 8.2M
w.r.t. Part 4 - Budgeting System - I agree with the proposed overall budget, but I think an overall limit on budget and a category-wise percentage split can best be argued upon in form of 2 separate proposals.
My personal opinion is that an overall budget limit is needed, but the DAO can take decisions dynamically about which categories to allocate them to depending on the need of the hour.
PS, the overall limit is better represented as : 5,500,000 * MANA_PRICE * 0.7 per quarter as the monthly value * 3 does not account for 100,000 MANA per quarter.
This is a great step towards restructuing the Grants program, really like the VP threshold being variable based on the requested budget of the grant.
For the budgeting distrubution I would increase the platform category at least +10%, maybe even more, for the next year. To build a feature rich platform that will increase the limits of what is possible to be built in DCL, increase scaling, and just overall make it easier for developers to build in. Grants going towards improving the base platform will be a huge benefit towards maximizing the long term potential of DCL. Would increase the % going towards the platform by decreasing the % being allocated to in world content. The content will come as the base platfrom becomes more and more feature rich for developers.
Another point I would like to add is to include some more transparent accounting requirements for how the projects that receive the grants actually use those funds each month.
This is great Yemel, thank you for your time putting this together. Everything looks great except I would also like to see much more investment in platform development. I think it’s insane to spend 50% on in-world content when the platform can’t support more than 50 people in one scene without crashing and takes forever to load. MVMF was really a pain to enjoy most of the time and I think alleviating that pain point will naturally bring on more content and visitors. Thank you.
This looks great and I’d be 100% voting for it as it is presented right now. I left some comments on the first proposal, only to clarify and add more data to it. I propose one minor change:
Allowing for the possibility of avoiding the vesting contract for the lower tier. What’s the use of a one-time payment over a vesting contract for a single-time payment over a month?
Regarding the Vesting contract, I think that the resume mechanism should not “keep to the original schedule”. What is the use of it otherwise, other than warning the team? i.e.: If a grantee pauses work for a month, and then comes back and shows good progress, why would they need to be remunerated for a month when they haven’t done any progress? I know for a fact that this happened at least once.
100% aligned
I think this helps a lot with limiting the expectations of grantees. I also think it could be too complex/frictional for what’s needed (similar to the current Tier1-3 limitations and vesting times, maybe we’re over-fitting). I do think it’d be better than the current state so I support this change – but I would prioritize the Should the DAO implement a Bidding and Tendering process to allocate resources for voted projects? proposal.
This looks great, I was always worried that the DAO where dishing out more than they made which they are, but paying for results is what should happen and will protect the dao and benefit decentraland
Variable votation threshold, using the formula: 1M + TOTAL_BUDGET * 50VP/USD.
Can the formula take into account the total number of VP in circulation ?
The Grant Program should standardize payment contracts with 30 days periods and equal payment amounts for each period.
Can there also be custom payments for non-standard situations ?
Agree. Also maybe put some time limits for repeated grants? If grantee received grant then he can claim other only after certain period of time.
DAO at maximum capacity will be spending 70% of the MANA received from the vesting contract.
I think it’s too much. Crypto field is early, we don’t know what expects us in next ten years, we must have solid financial foundation, I think not more 50%.
Thank you for your great work here Yemel, and agree with your segmented approach to building consensus, well done! Will add feedback where value can be added, otherwise, thank you for this initiative.
For me, having a high amount of vp required and little time is synonymous of rejected and ignored proposals. and that is synonymous with proposals never made for not wasting time.
For example, maybe the grants for golfcraft would never have been approved…
12m vp? It is too much
For me it might be more important to have less VP required, but you need a light green from the foundation or a project leader.
For me the decentralization should take on the role of suggestions and that we have a strong leader with a clear vision and all the information (right now there are many improvements that I don’t know why they are being developed, festivals are not known where they come from, there is already a nucleus making decisions without going through the dao… why not give him more responsibility in order to have a more solid project, instead of restricting all the big proposals to 4 whales who do not have all the information or technical knowledge or what happens backstage?
1000% love the scale feature of scaling VP requirement relevant to Grant amount. It will incentivize people to focus more on a project cost rather than trying to fit in a 60k, 120k or 240k box. Only catch 22 I have is that 13M VP is a lot and have not seen many proposals get that in history of DCL DAO. This will continue to only incentivize value that fit into small grant amounts like 60k to 120k budget amounts instead of focusing on what can provide the most value and the cost be just scaled to the workload it will take. I don’t have an idea yet on solution for that part yet. regardless everyoen I tell about the VP scale to budget loves it too so graet idea and job!
Amazes me wanting to raise vp just cause more smaller entities are rising and gaining vp. Raising the thresholds to high literally eclipsing small mana holders and those who have been slowly acquiring. Why the hell would anyone want to come to a platform that boasts a dao when they feel like there voice or vp wont matter. Throwing us right back into a problem we already seen for a year or more with whales manipulating certain things and shooting down anything they want. Now i know a lot of development has been made and people have changed but its crazy to me to think this is needed. Id like to see the number of grants in dao history that have ever even hit 13mil vp.
As for grants i dont see why they couldnt be broken down into tens 1-10k for tier 1 10.001 to 20k for tier 2. Tier 3 30k tier 4 60k tier 5 120k tier 6 240k i dont think we should do what we did with dg ever again with a mil unless its strictly for mana stabilization in a real bad situation or to secure the dao or foundation.
personally i think that’s all very nice to find out the way of have in improvement in the grants request, i think that we are thinking in this for the actual vesting. The tiers 1, 2, 3 represent 2.5% of the money granted. The tier 4 is the most easily approved one, with an acceptance rate of 45%.
Tier 4 have 60,000 usd would be equal to 20 grants of 3000usd or 40 grants of 1500 usd.`
its hard to have the approvation for small tier projects of the members for the NONAMED players even if a whale hits ur proposal with a high negative points, that’s not stop the growth of the team, (personally i am pushing hard for learning the framework and the actual tools) all big projects start with a draft but of course it is dismotivating not only not have the founds… the knowing of who hits ur initiative, in some parts of the threshold mechanics i saw in a simple way of talk about it… as a democratic system it depents of the mayority of the votes YES/NO but in a democracy the cost of everyone = 1, here we have an other type of counting. I am not saying that the vote of every one have the same size of course, the effort of every builder resides in what he do but there’s start to appear some bugs like in every system and it could stop the growth of the comunity as content creator (what is the main incentive to attract builder-people that build tools in this metaverse to gain the critical mass of USERS to generate usability and value in the token and nfts (wearables/parcels)).
I would also like to ask that the voting time be extended to a minimum of 10 days… right now I have one day a week that I set aside to read and comment on grants… but sometimes I can’t get to it on Tuesday mornings and by the time I get back the voting period has already ended. If we are to incrase the thresholds we should also increase the voting period to allow for greater participation. Thank you.
Thank you for all the feedback, comments, and questions.
I’ve made the following changes to the originally posted documents:
Adjusted the slope of the threshold function.
Grantee can pick starting date on the 1st or 15th day.
Reviewed performance indicators for categories.
Increase platform budget and social content budgets.
I’ll move on to publishing the DRAFT proposals in the governance dapp.
Find below my answers to your questions and comments:
Agree that 50 VP/USD ratio was too steep. Let’s move on with the function: [1.2M + TOTAL_BUDGET * 40] which puts the VP required for the maximum grant at 10.8M.
Agree, let’s separate them.
Agree, let’s bump platform.
Agree, I added the requirement to all grantees.
The benefit of the vesting contract is using the cliff period of 30 days. Giving time to the community and the Grant Support Squad to connect with the grantee and rise any concerns if they find them. It’s like a one-time payment but delayed 30 days.
The pause is used to preventively stop the vesting if there are concerns with the project, as you said to “warn” the team. It’s like a reversible revocation.
In any other situation, such as a long delay and pick-up months later, the initial vesting contract should be revoked and a new vesting contract should be deployed using an updated/agreed schedule, as we do today.
This is an interesting idea. I’m afraid it can be too complex for this iteration.
Also the amount of circulating VP could be “hacked” by moving MANA from one address to another, so we should work on how to account for that metric very well.
Maybe this is a topic for the next version of the grants and the VP thresholds conversation in general.
The vesting contract can support custom payments such as different amounts per period, but those situations should be reviewed case by case.
I don’t see the problem with a repeated grant per se. Maybe we need a poll to test this out?
70% is the maximum allocated budget, we might not reach it every month. I think it’s a good starting point and it can be revisited later in the future (for the next quarter).
Agree with reducing the VP required from what was proposed initially. I agree with @Eibriel, “The VP distribution issue will need to be addressed soon.”
Votation periods as proposed here are 2 weeks for all grants.