Anyone wanting to build for Decentraland should agree to only receive grants paid in MANA.
MANA is the currency of the all-mighty Genesis City…
What business do businesses wanting to do business with the DAO land-owners have of requesting payment in a tender from a different sovereignty ?
The DAO must seek to curtail any economic force that drives down the value of MANA.
This includes the selling of MANA for DAI !
This is arguably the path to reverting Freeze All non-Platform Grant Spending.
Vying to start a discussion on this first, before wading into Pre-Proposal Poll territory !
Is there any meaningful difference between the DAO selling MANA to provide a grant in DAI and a grantee selling the MANA themselves? Seems like there would be downward pressure on the price of MANA either way. I always found it odd that we don’t allow larger grants to be paid out in MANA though. I think that should be an option, but I’m not familiar with the rationale used to restrict larger grants to DAI in the first place. Would love to find out more.
Here’s a thought: what if we try to let go of the idea that our work here should enrich us with real world currency?
Maybe doing work for the platform is seen as a way to enrich yourself with MANA, which gives you more voting power in the DAO and allows you to stimulate our economy by paying community members for goods and services.
We’d have to determine how we enforce this though, and this really wouldn’t be practical for situations where a grantee is asking for funding to cover various infrastructure costs that they have to pay in fiat.
In one case, there is unequivocal sale of the totality of the MANA by the DAO.
In the other case, the grantee may or may not sell the MANA straight away…
If economic conditions permit, the grantee may decide that the price of MANA is too low at the given time to be selling the totality of the received tokens.
Not to mention how some grantees may desire to maintain the consequential VP !
I had that thought too, and it led me to write this Proposal suggestion 
This is a very good point, it is rather important for a business to be able to properly anticipate operational costs.
While I still believe the DAO should only be paying grantees in MANA, it may indeed be necessary to have that value be variable in this case, and pegged to an originally determined DAI value.
In order for people to want to be paid in MANA and not sell it for USD there would need to be more mana sinks in terms of gamifying and having an economy. There is way more to it though… like more than begging for a grant in order to earn mana.
There’s no way to stake if I am not mistaken? If there is, it is hard to find. No incentive to provide liquidity. If there’s any kind of APR it isnt easy to find.
Maybe MANA Coupons can help incentivize scene creators to build those engaging experiences on which users would actually be interested to be spending their real MANA too…
Yes, in the first case the grantee is guaranteed to get paid what he was awared, while in the second case he get fucked when the price of MANA crashes 2 weeks into his 6 months grant.
For grants that are delivered in installments, it may indeed be necessary to have the MANA amount be variable, and pegged to the corresponding original DAI value. But even then that should still be denominated in MANA.
For one-time grants, the grantees are still free to sell the MANA on their own as soon as it is received, of course.
Yeah, that would be my main concern if the purpose of the grant was to cover costs that are priced in fiat. But it could also work in the opposite direction, and it seems like there would be some value in only funding grantees that believe in the platform enough to endure the ups and downs with us.
That said, I sure wouldn’t want to be the grantee that has to explain that the project I proposed is no longer feasible with the budget I had in mind because the MANA being vested ended up being worth a fraction of the actual project cost.
I’m not sure if defining MANA is the best approach, especially for more than 1 month agreements; or maybe ok if it’s for spare time work, but not as a main occupation.
But I think it would be good to get track of the spent MANA.
There’s a big difference between funding 1$ in MANA when the price was 5$ and today at 0.26$
From one point to see the amount of MANA being spent, but also, it’s not the same for a creator who committed to investing job salary savings on LAND and MANA, who will be in a bad situation when the price is low.
An informative report at least could be helpful to bring awareness and it is doable.
Each grant report also could show the amount of MANA, and the amount in $ with the price today and the day of transfer, just like etherscan does.