Funding The Cosmos Hub Grant Program
Change log • 2023-01-12 Created initial post • 2023-01-18 Added Addendum at the end of the proposal clarifying the grant program name, scope, compensation details, termination clause and conflict of interest. • 2023-01-24: a) The ask amount decreased by 18% from 721,000 to 588,000 ATOM . Updated the financials. b) Auditor in Oversight Committee announced. • 2023-01-26: The name of our grant program will be ATOM Accelerator DAO . This replaces the former name Cosmos Hub Grant Program and reflects our desire to NOT position ourselves as the canonical Cosmos Hub grant program • 2023-02-01: a) A decision made internally that all 4 validators involved in this proposal would vote Abstain b) amount of grants will be denominated in USD and not ATOM. The new range is 10,000 - 1,000,000 USD c) compensation for Program Managers was reduced by 10% following community feedback. See updated compensation document in the addendum d) following community feedback, there will be a vesting of received ATOM over 6 months with one additional 1/6th made available to the team every month. Cosmonauts, We are excited to share with you the Cosmos Hub Grant program. You’ll find below…
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I strongly agree with this proposal.
Cosmos Hub needs its own grant program with a structured evaluation process with experienced & qualified community members. I also liked
- Existence of oversight committee which can review behalf of community if CHGP is doing okay.
- Not recruiting a third party service provider to run the program. I mean, why recruit third party if cosmos hub community has enough talents to run this program? If this experiment doesn’t go well, then we can considering other actors.
I just wish that Oversight Committee extra focuses on communication with the Cosmos Hub community.
Youssef:M
I think its maybe typo?
This is awesome. Just what the Hub needs going into Interchain Security and the team is stacked. Strong support for this prop!
Youssef: For comparison purposes: | Setup | Monthly | Term | Grants | Total | Cosmos Hub | $52.5k | $73k | 9 months | $6.5M | $7.2M | Osmosis | $100k | $76k | 6 months | $9.5M | $10.5M | Youssef: A. Reviewer Committee: • Program Manager: Youssef Amrani . Core contributor Cosmos Hub, Economic Committee of IST stablecoin , previously community analyst at Messari. To lead program structuring, strategy & outreach • Program Manager: Better Future ( Ryan O. - Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) | LinkedIn ). Previously ran Ripple Accelerator. 20 years in software, incubators, accelerators and seed investing; Stanford Ph.D. To lead program structuring & team processes. • Technical Lead: Luke Saunders , Chief Technology Office at Delphi Digital (Labs). Incubated projects like Astroport & Mars Protocol on Terra. • Reviewer: Mikey L , Business Development at Cosmostation (currently also Multisig on Osmosis Grant Program) • Reviewer: Dilan Asatekin , Imperator founder also acting as Lead Data Engineer at Osmosis • Reviewer: Reena Shtedle , Head of Business Development at Citadel One •…
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- I’m personally in support of this proposal
- I reckon that notional is in support, too
- nice touch with calendly
I am in support of the general idea of this proposal, though I do have a few thoughts I’d like to add to the conversation. Before I begin, a brief statement about the Hub and DAOs in general: Optimizing for Plurality, Complexity, and Emergence • There are a variety of different crypto-political parties (for lack of a better term) operating within the Hub, and each has an unstated bias. • One of the most potent aspects of blockchain (DAO) governance is the ability to optimize for robust, complex systems that enshrine plurality and emergence via the social-infrastructure built around them. • There should not be a single canonical grants program, but a variety of funding platforms with clearly articulated platforms and values, and budgets that accommodate the inclusion of differing platforms. Reason for Support I support this proposal, due to the: • need filled by this proposal (alternative funding structures for teams seeking funding) • merit and experience of the team • oversight structures being built-in • minimal impact on the community pool (replenishment rate of the community pool) General Feedback Taking into account my above comments, here is my…
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This proposal seems good !
Nevertheless, I have a question : why choosing a validator (Imperator) who can change his mind about the Hub future after a 10mn phone call with Jae ?
This looks very well thought out. However, I would be interested to know what lessons can be drawn from the ICF’s grant program which was more active in the past. My perception is that the grants given were somewhat scattered and did not necessarily result in any new products on the Hub or long term maintenance. Maybe @hxrts can correct me on this if I’m wrong.
I guess another way to put it is- does your grant committee have any strategy or vision which will guide your granting? Or are you just going to see what cool proposals come in?
I think it’s apples and oranges. Until very recently the ICF’s sole purpose was to bootstrap the entire Cosmos ecosystem (now it’s more focused on ecosystem maturation). That means we had to take some shots knowing a decent proportion of them would fail. The ICF also has a bizarre arms length relationship with the Hub that’s structurally incapable of serving its business needs. That said, there are some basic learnings on how to run a grants program that I’m happy to share with the grants team should the proposal pass.
As far as vision goes I’m not sure what to tell you. I tried to work on the Hub vision with Port City + ATOM 2.0 with mixed results. I’ve expressed this elsewhere, but I believe the priorities are to make sure interchain security works well, get better incentive alignment with consumer chains, and (securely) deploy liquid staked ATOM absolutely everywhere. No-brainer next steps.
Overall i support this prop especially with the relative oversight that’s included. I would vote for all those mentioned if this was already a DAO (which i look forward to it becoming in the future).
ala.tusz.am: General Feedback Taking into account my above comments, here is my general feedback on the proposal in its current form: • I would like to see a clearer articulation of the values of the team that this iteration of a Cosmos Hub Grant Program seeks to fund. While it’s not perfect in this context, an example of a well-articulated values-statement is the Validator Commons Declaration . • It is unclear to me how projects that are funded would be able to interact with the Hub’s codebase and functionality. Optimally, a constitution would outline what is and is not possible here, but because we don’t have one, it would be helpful to make a tentative attempt to outline the “interventions” that would be off-limits in this regard. Feedback on Specific Items Here is my feedback about specific items within the proposal. In giving feedback, I’ve stated the concern, and followed it with the item from the original post. • The name of this iteration of a grants program should not be “ The Cosmos Hub Grant Program”, but should be related to the underlying vision and platform of the team members. • Renewal or cancellation of the program should be more clearly…
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ala.tusz.am: Optimizing for Plurality, Complexity, and Emergence • There are a variety of different crypto-political parties (for lack of a better term) operating within the Hub, and each has an unstated bias. • One of the most potent aspects of blockchain (DAO) governance is the ability to optimize for robust, complex systems that enshrine plurality and emergence via the social-infrastructure built around them. • There should not be a single canonical grants program, but a variety of funding platforms with clearly articulated platforms and values, and budgets that accommodate the inclusion of differing platforms. Thank you @ala.tusz.am for the thoughtful, well articulated comments. I very much agree with your idea that this program should NOT be seen as a canonical Grant Program. If anything, I’d say we need multiple initiatives like this one that complement each other and find convergence in the value they bring to the Cosmos Hub and beyond. A change of name to something that doesn’t sound as official maybe be a good idea to explore. ala.tusz.am: Renewal or cancellation of the program should be more clearly stated within the proposal itself. I…
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In general I support this proposal for it’s ideas and plans. When considering the ATOM 2.0 discussion a notable plan was for the Hub to become more self-sustaining and I think that a grants program is a step in the right direction. While ICF has plans to reopen their grants program I think it’s important for Cosmos Hub to have it’s own funding plan separate with an ATOM specific mandate. I appreciate the diversity of this team with a mix of members from various organizations, all of whom are separated from the ICF and other core teams. I see this as healthy decentralized collaboration and coordination in action. I’d add that it would be nice to see a validator representative coming from lower in the validator rankings (currently ranging from 13th-26th in voting power) for the sake of further decentralized representation. But that is by no means a blocker to this prop for me, I think the team listed is strong and I personally trust the members to make choices based on what’s best for the Hub. While the budget plan laid out is detailed and appreciated I do wonder if the requested funds is a bit much. I understand it will be replenished soon enough but for a first time funding it…
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Isn’t it a conflict of interest for many of the people involved. And why are we chossing amost the same people working already at some capicity.
Rather form a framework and ask people openly to apply for positions. After all you are asking for a big amount.
A framework is going to be good for long term.
My opinion might sound negative but absolute power corrupt absolutly. And i think we are slowly moving towards that.
I like the idea, and the proposed team is trustworthy to give this a shot in my mind.
My suggestions:
- Trim the sticker price on this initial ask by 25-50%. If value is proven and whatever granted funds are used efficiently, an extension with more funding can be brought up for a vote.
- Set up as much of the on-chain activity as you can in DAO DAO on Neutron.
- Provide more of a focused approach for your intended goals, and brand this DAO in the spirit of that.
tknox35:
- Set up as much of the on-chain activity as you can in DAO DAO on Neutron.
Great suggestion. Thanks.
JD-Lorax:Finding a way to make this program more domain specific will leave room for other groups to form teams targeting other areas lead by other domain experts.
The volumes and types of proposals coming into the program will be reported to the community in the monthly transparency reports.
Once the community has this data, if a concentration of domain specific proposals emerges , then a specialized grant-making committee could be proposed and approved by the community to add capacity in the area of concentration.
That doesn’t address this point:
JD-Lorax:the scope as it’s laid out is too broad.
To me it seems a more sensible approach is to have a mandate. A purpose driven grants program might be more effective than scattered funding (points to @jtremback questions). If we are just doing general project funding then the community pool can manage that approach with an improved spend process; which while slower comes at a lower cost with less risks than this proposal.
jaekwon: I agree with all of the points above. The name should be specific to the group, and not appear to represent the totality of Cosmos, so that other DAOs can exist as well. Thank you. Based on feedback here on Forum we will likely rename as “ATOM Orbital DAO” when we submit on-chain - open to other names if there are ideas, but so far people seem to like this one. We share the vision of an ecosystem where decentralized initiatives flourish w/ many DAOs doing work on behalf of ATOM community, including multiple DAOs serving as grant administrators. jaekwon: We do need to agree on a vision for the direction of the hub. Here are some specific questions for the committee, so the Cosmos community knows what they would be voting for: • How will the committee enforce hub minimalism? Will it? What does that mean? Minimalism refers to the practice of keeping the design and code as simple and uncluttered as possible, while still achieving the desired functionality. This can involve using minimal lines of code, simple and clear naming conventions, avoiding unnecessary features or complexities, and adhering to established design patterns and best…
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Hello, I want to know if cosmos actually support creatives initiatives to grow their ecosystem. Supporting the Musicians, Artists, Fashion and many more. Do they actually support NFts and also encourage onboarding? Please anyone should help out @Cosmic_Validator @CosmosHub.Support @Damien
Thank you for your comments. I know it might seem broad at first, but, please think about it from a workflow standpoint. From a workflow standpoint we feel the mandate is quite narrow and specific. Our workflow is to intake and process grant applications in an efficient and professional manner, and to deliver transparent reporting to the Community on the activities, and that’s it. Regarding an alternative of adding an improved spend process onto the community pool, I’m a bit skeptical tbh. Is it efficient 100,000 delegators & 150 or so validators voting on a continuous flow of small and medium spend items? As an analogy, why not have entire population of USA or entire US Congress voting every time a pothole needs filling or on every National Science Foundation proposal? We do agree with you that more specialized grant-making committees surely can, should, and will evolve, but at this stage, with no grant program of any kind, no processes around due diligence, and nothing being done to invite grantees, a good first step – also with an eye towards quickly adding value for ATOM holders – seems to be to get an initial grant program opened up, create transparency around it, and…
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I totally agree with this. We cannot have 7 people who are self-appointed to control our cosmos community and get paid so much. Also, they are requesting so much 750.000 ATOM which is a lot! 250.000 ATOM is a reasonable number.
Let’s not forget that TERRA LUNA had a committee like this for 1 year and nobody got approved or applied for any grant. What you guys are trying to do is the same thing Terra Luna did and didn’t work.
Projects who are looking for funding should request directly funds from the community pool via governance, and the community will vote!
I will vote NO for this proposal!
I completely agree with the main principles of the proposal made by Youssef Amrani.
However, I have a question about the jury: is it democratically elected by the community?
Regarding the budgetary and financial aspects, I prefer to abstain and let others speak 
Better_Future: Regarding an alternative of adding an improved spend process onto the community pool, I’m a bit skeptical tbh. Is it efficient for 150 or so validators to be voting on a continuous flow of small and medium spend items? As an analogy, why not have entire population of USA or entire US Congress voting every time a pothole needs filling or on every National Science Foundation proposal? @Damien mentioned before about ‘voters fatigue’ and it seems to be what you @Better_Future are also referring to here. However, this reasoning is incorrect for several reasons: • Most individual ATOM holders do not frequently vote in proposals, instead they delegate to validators also their voting power, so there is no ‘voting fatigue’ for them • Regarding the validators, around a third rarely vote or even some never voted. So this ‘voting fatigue’ should be asked to the group of validators that vote in most proposals • We ourselves are amongst the validators with the highest governance participation in the Cosmos Hub, do we have ‘voting fatigue’? Absolutely no, firstly the number of proposals in the Cosmos Hub is much lower than in other networks such as Osmosis for…
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Sumit_Redhu: Isn’t it a conflict of interest for many of the people involved. And why are we chossing amost the same people working already at some capicity. • imo, conflict of interest is more relevant to the projects funded than the mandate itself in this context. • The reason for choosing these people seems to be the amount of connections and experience they would bring to the table, key traits of a grant committee. Sumit_Redhu: My opinion might sound negative but absolute power corrupt absolutly. And i think we are slowly moving towards that. • This doesn’t need to be a bestowal of absolute power. We can aim toward a long-term plurality of funding platforms. Frank: I totally agree with this. We cannot have 7 people who are self-appointed to control our cosmos community and get paid so much. Also, they are requesting so much 750.000 ATOM which is a lot! 250.000 ATOM is a reasonable number. • Why would this group control the community? They would have a specific mandate with a scope to be agreed upon by the community. • The group’s mandate would be to source and fund project proposals. We can push for multiple different…
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I’m in full support of this initial proposal. We probably require a grant committee going forward especially with the Proposal that we had passed recently for increasing funding towards the community pool.
With a well defined and a well defined committee handling the grants, this will enable anyone to ask for funds.
What I like to having a committee is that they can handle most of the requests internally rather than anyone launching a proposal on chain and having so many low to medium importance governance proposals having to be voted on. Responding to @Cosmic_Validator, having a lot of proposals won’t essentially make people vote less but, ‘voters fatigue’ in my eyes is when there isn’t enough time to fully and properly go through every proposal with proper care and due dilligence and risking votes being thrown around without proper rationale.
There could be an alternative where the committee can evaluate multiple proposals and then bulk post them as a proposal.
thakyou bro turkey hello
Hi @JD-Lorax,
this is a good point. In reality, this grant program is not exclusively about ‘open grants’. If this proposal passes, the team will also identify thematic areas that need funding. This would be done in a collaborative fashion with the community.
Once those thematic areas have been identified and published on the website (or forum), teams can spontaneously form and apply for grants within the realm of those thematic areas.
Example: we define with the team and the community that the following areas need a special focus: building a liquidity layer om ICS, fund an Insurance protocol to support DeFi on the Hub etc. Following up this, the grant program team can take funding requests that match those criteria.
So in short, the ATOM Orbital DAO will ALSO support the beginnings of gathering proactive roadmap ideas, to bring inspiration for builders.
Replying to both @Better_Future and @Youssef Better_Future: Regarding an alternative of adding an improved spend process onto the community pool, I’m a bit skeptical tbh. Is it efficient 100,000 delegators & 150 or so validators voting on a continuous flow of small and medium spend items? The amount requested as it stands with no mandate is not specific towards small/medium spends. If that’s something Orbital DAO will be focusing on then it should be identified as such. That’s why I think establishing and defining the mission of the grant program first is important. Personally I think requests such as consumer chain or infrastructure funding should still go through Cosmos Hub governance directly as the validators play a key role and their opinion matters in those areas. If grants are going toward smaller things like content, marketing, education, research, governance, analytics, etc., that should be the specified intention of Orbital DAO. This narrows the scope and provides more clear intentions and purpose. I do think Cosmos Hub can manage spending more effectively and efficiently with an improved community spend process, something I think is worthwhile…
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Better_Future:Based on feedback here on Forum we will likely rename as “ATOM Orbital DAO” when we submit on-chain - open to other names if there are ideas, but so far people seem to like this one.
We share the vision of an ecosystem where decentralized initiatives flourish w/ many DAOs doing work on behalf of ATOM community, including multiple DAOs serving as grant administrators.
can you clear up one thing first ?
The DAO is going to be owned by few individualus. So it is a private projects?
And if it is a private project why should the community pay for it?
If you guys are trying the making an incubator (it looks like that ) why not build it own your own and ask for a % from the group which you help for getting the grant?
ala.tusz.am: I would agree with you if this was framed as a canonical grant program. However, there seems to be agreement to move toward a plurality of funding platforms Initially, this was presented as THE Cosmos Hub Grant program to basically manage most of the funds in the community pool to fund any kind of projects (not focused on some specific area) and receive a large salary for this, and the people to manage this self-appointed them for this. In our experience, preparing a draft proposal and answering all the questions from the overall community is hard, however we would still prefer this than 7 people controlling all funding decisions of the community pool. Could the process be improved? Definitely, but absolutely not how it is presented in this proposal, here are some ideas: -Define the funding strategy: what are the priorities for the Cosmos Hub to decide which projects to fund or what would be the sourcing strategy? Then, all these projects should be organised in many different categories. After this, the best experts from the overall Cosmos community for each funding area should be selected by the community (not self-appointed) to have the best possible…
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Thank you @Youssef and others for bringing up the prop draft. This is a much needed thing in the community. However there are certain things within the draft that make me a bit nervous.
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The asked amount from community pool over period of 9 months seems too high. I’d love to see some deeper understanding and implementation on a smaller scale before we should implement such a high amount.
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I have no doubt on capabilities of 7 self appointed people. However it seems unconstitutional to appoint someone without describing in detail how they were appointed. IMO there should be a fair democratic process how these people are appointed.
Lastly, as much as I love the idea, I fail to understand the need of such a Program. ICF was created for fostering such programs. TAB was created to view overall technical aspects of a project.
The intent of this grant program seems in good faith towards the community. However, I’d suggest this group be more like an advisory group without controlling too many funds. The control of approving grants to projects should rest in hands of community via governance.
Cheers!!
@Cosmic_Validator TLDR: You propose that: • we should have the community coordinate to determine a funding strategy • 7 people is an inadequate team size for making effective funding decisions • grants should bring value to the Hub I respond that: • that method of coordination is inefficient and ineffective. a better alternative is a plurality of funding platforms. this is top-down vs. bottom-up. bottom-up is preferable. • team-size is irrelevant to value creation. as an example, y-combinator was founded by four people. • yes, they should, though the draft-proposal in its current form brings us closer to that than the methodology you outlined. Cosmic_Validator: In our experience, preparing a draft proposal and answering all the questions from the overall community is hard, however we would still prefer this than 7 people controlling all funding decisions of the community pool. • Having 7 people control the community pool is a terrible idea. However, this would not be the case with the proposal in its current form, and it certainly wouldn’t be the case if there was a plurality of funding platforms. A plurality of platforms means that there…
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alijnmerchant21: • The asked amount from community pool over period of 9 months seems too high. I’d love to see some deeper understanding and implementation on a smaller scale before we should implement such a high amount. I think this approach makes a lot of sense, and echoes what @JD-Lorax said above: JD-Lorax: What about instead funding this initially as a research group that will identify those thematic areas? This can be done in phases of proposals rather than a large, broad up front spending prop. First fund research and bootstrapping then in the future after the Orbital legal entity is setup and thematic areas identified Orbital DAO comes back to Cosmos Hub governance requesting funds for a grants program focused on ( insert focus area )? The initial prop could still include an smaller grants fund for Orbital DAO to start with, while also having the option for topping up funds in the future. alijnmerchant21: • I have no doubt on capabilities of 7 self appointed people. However it seems unconstitutional to appoint someone without describing in detail how they were appointed. IMO there should be a fair democratic process how these…
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First of all want to say the authors have clearly put some thought into this and I’ve been fortunate to meet a couple of them in person and know this is something they truly believe the Cosmos community needs. I do however want to say that this proposal is the wrong answer to the problem (which is basically the dysfunctional state of public goods funding for Cosmos in general). • The proposal above references the Osmosis Grants Program (OGP) several times. For anyone thats been tracking the OGP; the data is in and it’s clearly a poor way of running a grants programme. This proposal basically seeks to recreate OGP for Cosmos and clearly not enough thought and analysis hasn’t gone into why that programme failed and of ways to avoid that in this instance. • The proposal above seeks to create gateways to funding via a self-appointed group that then basically decides everything that gets funded with a full staff of part timers all on full time salaries. As designed this circumvents community scrutiny. This might just work if this was writing small cheques designed to seed experiments but it isn’t. Clearly there’ll be big cheques being written and a narrow team of 7 isn’t the…
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It’s my understanding that the ICF funds things that may never land on the hub, and that it’s currently not funding anything.
Kind of like I was in favor of printing additional atoms to ensure that the hub can be developed sustainably, I am also in favor of the hub having a fund / grants program that originates from the hub, and does not have additional mandates.
I guess another way to put it is- does your grant committee have any strategy or vision which will guide your granting? Or are you just going to see what cool proposals come in?
Great question.
I have no doubt on capabilities of 7 self appointed people. However it seems unconstitutional to appoint someone without describing in detail how they were appointed. IMO there should be a fair democratic process how these people are appointed.
The cosmos hub does not have a constitution, and is not democratic. If the hub worked “one user one vote” I believe that our work here would have already failed.
Sumit_Redhu:If you guys are trying the making an incubator (it looks like that ) why not build it own your own and ask for a % from the group which you help for getting the grant?
Same
Thank you to everyone here for engaging in a dialogue, we are grateful for your feedback. Sumit_Redhu: If you guys are trying the making an incubator (it looks like that ) why not build it on your own and ask for a % from the group which you help for getting the grant? The lion’s share of the projects that need funding are open source and public goods, and cannot have a private investment component; the returns needs to accrue to ATOM holders. Replying to @Sumit_Redhu , @JD-Lorax , @jacobgadikian : We are viewing this as a public service activity, not a seed investing activity; that said, we do have several team members with backgrounds in investing & setting-up investment team processes, which does position us to establish a public funding function competently based on our direct experience. The DAO set-up does not allow for any beneficial ownership, and, since the stated purpose in the proposal (ie, the vision) “is to create a grant program to support small/med size projects for open source software, public goods, and ecosystem initiatives that add value for ATOM holders”, there is no possibility or intention of taking any equity interest in anything.…
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ala.tusz.am: 7 people is an inadequate team size for making effective funding decisions I never mentioned anything about the team size, investing/giving grants is very complex, and to increase the chances of success people with great expertise in specific areas should be selected by the broad Cosmos community to work full time on this. Not as @yoda mentioned correctly, part timers on a large full time salary, that are just proposing themselves for this. ala.tusz.am: Having 7 people control the community pool is a terrible idea. However, this would not be the case with the proposal in its current form Quoting from the proposal: 'We envision a group of 7 people that will figure on the Reviewer Committee in charge of allocating grants" ala.tusz.am: Calling this team self-appointed is fuzzy-logic. It is a proposed team. Well, of course they cannot self-appoint themselves and have the direct control of the community pool, it must go through governance. But in this proposal they self-appointed themselves, we are not aware of any public discussions or community votings to select these 7 members. ala.tusz.am: This is similar to…
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I wanted to take a moment to discuss the positive impact of a grant program on the ATOM community and the Hub as an ecosystem:
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Dedicated structure to channel funding for small & medium initiatives
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Offers an alternative source of funding for the Cosmos Hub and removes some of the burden on public governance. Getting funding through public governance is not always an easy process for contributors and it can evolve into a painful process, both for the community and the proposers.
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Gives more funding flexibility by allowing proactive allocation of capital (development of in-house investment themes in collaboration with the community)
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Build the ATOM pipeline of contributors by giving them access to fair compensation and attract builders from other Cosmos chains.
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Capacity to make funded initiatives accountable to the ATOM community through a built in oversight function and detailed monthly reports on the state of these projects.
Hello, I agree with this proposal.
I have a question concerning the methods of payment of the grants. Is it already defined ? I guess there will be specific rules that set objectives for the granted projects (in terms of technical performance, timetable,…), so will the payment of the grants be linked with the achievement of the objectives ? Or will it be a single payment once the project has been chosen.
If a grants regulation is created, I imagine that it will be easily consultable on your website.
Cordially,
It is very uncomfortable to mention this, but if I am to speak frankly about why this is a good idea, then I must.
It could do what the interchain foundation doesn’t, but is supposed to do.
Additionally, Orbital still would not be the right group to make security reports to, and security work cannot be disclosed in a transparency report, except after a patch or after an exploit.
Maybe orbital could work on ICF delegations, too, and maybe they know how to use GitHub.
Excellent work on the proposal. Very detailed and thought out. I like the Oversight Committee as another level, nice touch. This initiative will hopefully fill a gap holding the hub back from substantial growth and grassroots/community contributions.
My only comment is that the current cap of 100,000 ATOMs is approximately 15% of the treasury, which seems a little high. Perhaps this could be smaller to start and increase the cap on the next funding request. The community will then see the value and volume of grants you can provide within the limit. A $1m grant seems relatively high for “small to medium size projects”.
Other than that, I’m looking forward to hearing from the proposed members on the community calls/AMAs to learn about your experience, qualities, and the value you can bring to the community for the requested funds.
Rarma:Other than that, I’m looking forward to hearing from the proposed members on the community calls/AMAs to learn about your experience, qualities, and the value you can bring to the community for the requested funds.
this.
plus : their level of neutrality.
again, for me, even if i like the overall prop, i won’t be in favor of having in the committee validators which are so easily manipulable with a 10mn god phone call. (and some massive last minute delegations)
I agree fundamentaly with this proposal but requested amount is a bit huge (40% of the current community pool).
Certain amount atom should be sent per quarter for exemple with a reajustment for price of atom.
OGP should not be taken as exemple.
That doesn’t give any space to any new & others dao.
Grant should not be higher than 10000 atom = 100k.
Any amount > 10000 $Atom should be voted
Reading through all the comments; the most alarming thing about this is that it doesn’t seem to have learned from all the failed grant programs out there. OGP I think everyone will admit hasn’t really achieved its stated purpose. The Juno grants programme became a mess partly because decisions were being made by non transparent committees. I don’t know much about terra but the general sentiment seems to be the similar. The litmus test for funding of a project shouldn’t rely on their capacity to convince a self-selected 7 man panel of the validity of the project. This prop would be better setting up a panel to advise rather than decide on grants.
Fully agree with almost every word.
TS - That said. Citizen Cosmos would like to support a hub grant program, just not designed in a centralized manner AND does not have such tremendously high costs.
I have been working in blockchains since 2015, including running and organizing several such programs, hubs and grants. It simply, doesn’t need to be so costly and bite off such a huge chunk of the CP or take away the ability of on chain governance to have a final say in where is THEIR money gonna go
Having a grant program sounds like a good idea, but it’s current form seems like a bad idea because it is:
- Much too costly
- Much too centralized
I would prefer a more decentralized DAO-like structure, but my main gripe is that this should be more of a startup-like approach. I don’t think something akin to a startup should get that much money for something that is unproven. Whoever that does this should shoulder some of the initial risk, be scrappy and then when having a proven track record come back and ask for more. Or perhaps some money should be paid after-the-fact instead to have a continued incentive to do good work. Or something - the point is that it should be more scrappy in the beginning until proven.
Some good thought have clearly gone into this, but 700k is a lot. Both Osmosis and Juno has recklessly spent a lot of money with little real value to show for it (at least compared to the cost gone into it), so for something similar I would expect a more humble approach.
Maybe good idea, but 7 people asking for currently half of the community pool and most of them only part time. They request a high income for having nothing delivered yet.
I would like to see, what the income of each person in the proposal should be.
I see only 2 fulltime and 5 part time.
How many hours per week will a part time work for this? How do we track the things are done? A full time employee works 40h a week, how will it be proved that they where working 40h per week for the good of the Hub?
As said: a breakdown of the salary per person is needed, a proof of work is needed, and even more a control of salary if nothing happens.
A monthly payout might make sense and it must also reflect price increases of Atom. Imagine if atom will go above 20$, that would make over 20.000$ per person per Month.
For me it looks like some persons want to get Atom for nothing…
Sorry, my vote is NO! Even if the proposal would ask only for 250.000 Atom
i agree on fondemantaly but i think the amount is too huge and it shoud segment by quarter and based on market condition.
Youssef & Co. Thank you for all of the time you’ve dedicated to thoughtfully crafting this proposal and constructively addressing the feedback you’ve been receiving. I fully support this proposal!
Our take on this proposal:
- We need a Grant Program on CosmosHub. We are glad someone is proposing one.
- We will support it as is if this is the only proposal. We encourage other community members to submit competing proposals ASAP.
- The Grant Program managers should be paid well. In fact, we want to pay them more with well-defined performance incentives.
- The main criticism is that it costs too much to manage. If so, we encourage those critics to submit competing proposals with cheaper cost.
Polkachu:The main criticism is that it costs too much to manage. If so, we encourage those critics to submit competing proposals with cheaper cost.
Yes, this is entirely correct. Criticism, without action is a hollow thing. I like the idea about performance incentives although I would like to voice some concern about public goods, those don’t necessarily directly have price impacts that can be measured in the manner that traditional performance incentives can be. Although, I suppose that in that case we could just be looking at completion and adoption of public goods work.
Polkachu:The main criticism is that it costs too much to manage. If so, we encourage those critics to submit competing proposals with cheaper cost.
My main criticism is that 710,000 ATOM is far too much for an initial grant program fund allocation. I think 100-200k ATOM is plenty to start with, even that might be a bit much for an unproven program.
Not directed at Polkachu I would also point out that none of my questions posted above were answered - will quote them as a bump:
JD-Lorax:Questions:
- Will there be a contingency plan in the event a grants funded project fails to deliver on expectations/milestones but has been paid?
- Will this grants program be focusing on core software support such as SDK, CosmWasm, IBC or BFT consensus development?
- How will cases where members of the team can no longer participate be addressed? Suppose someone left the ecosystem or had other conflicts that prevent them from being able to participate, how would the grants team move forward?
- Does the community have the ability to request and/or vote for the removal of members?
JD-Lorax:Will this grants program be focusing on core software support such as SDK, CosmWasm, IBC or BFT consensus development?
Unfair of me to say “none” were answered… this one as been addressed indirectly. I think this answer depends on if this program will have a mandate toward small/medium projects rather than being involved with core infra. Which I think should be the case. Replicated Security consumer chains for example should be funded from the pool directly, and not through a grants program, because validators need to weigh in on if the chain is worth them running or not. As mentioned above we already took a risk with prop 72 funding chains that are not guaranteed to launch as consumers as governance may not approve them.
@JD-Lorax sorry that we missed answering your questions. On smaller projects this shouldn’t be an issue as milestones are unlikely to be useful (it is either done or not). Important to recognise that failure is a difficult term in the area of development as not all incomplete projects are failures and not all examples of a team not shipping should prevent future funding so there is so needed transparent nuance as we get into the reality of things. Having said that, in broad terms if a project fails to meet its milestones no future payments are made and the community will be informed of the position - this transparency is important for everyone but also helpful to other grant funds. In the event that someone from the DAO leaves the ecosystem and no longer wants to be involved or has a conflict of interest that prevents them from taking part on the majority of votes then we will replace them. If improved gov tooling exists at the time this could be do via election etc. Yes we’re the community to vote that someone leave the team then the team would respect that vote. Again in future this might be easier to do with better tooling. I am not going to answer the more technical…
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Polkachu: We need a Grant Program on CosmosHub. We are glad someone is proposing one. Anyone can present a proposal to the Cosmos community via governance to receive a grant. Then the whole Cosmos Community including validators, delegators and other stakeholders review the proposal and vote. And here the risk and work is for those asking for grants since they need to put the ATOM for the proposal deposit and answer questions from the broad Cosmos community. The over $700k costs to pay 7 part timers to have the full decision control of around half of the total community pool funds could instead be used to give grants to many projects. I mean, having such great decision power and control over the community pool funds, they should be actually paying for the privilege of having such huge decision power and control. Having full decision power of over half of the community pool is already very valuable, and on top of this they request $700k additionally for having this privilege? Polkachu: We will support it as is if this is the only proposal. We encourage other community members to submit competing proposals ASAP. Interesting logic, ‘we support because it…
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I think that
- You need an external auditor. You need to consider auditor independence.
- You should add a conflict of interest policy.
I sometimes feel that this kind of proposal has too brief plan considering its huge budget, although this one is better than prop #82.
I think the ambition behind this proposal requires a significant amount of Atom. The amount requested does not shock me so much if everything is transparent. I don’t know if it would make sense to have a discount grant program.
I think something people should keep in mind is that you need people to advocate, market, manage, etc. if you want a good grants program with the goal of improving the hub. I can’t speak for everyone, but with the way discourse happens on even the smallest of proposals, I bet it scares off people who want to contribute. Personal attacks, aggressiveness, threats, etc. are all pretty common from what i’ve seen. I’ve seen people already who have written this off because Youssef (gasp) WAS PART OF THE ATOM 2.0 INITIATIVE!!! THE HORROR!!! We need people dedicated to the advancement of the hub who can actively search for contributors, negotiate terms and make people feel like building around the Cosmos hub ecosystem is a fulfilling experience. Otherwise, they’ll find somewhere else to contribute and we’ll just be stuck in this perpetual loop with the embarrassing founding organizations playing tug of war and core developers feeling alienated. As I said in an earlier post, I do think the ask is high for an initial round, but I have zero qualms with the people who have stepped forward. Voters shouldn’t be choosing individuals for each position because this DAO isn’t structured like…
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We are grateful to the community for all of the terrific posts, feedback, & ideas for improvement. Replying to doctor who: doctorwho: • You need an external auditor. You need to consider auditor independence. Did you see our plan for the Oversight Committee which includes an independent Certified Public Accountant (CPA)? See here: OVERSIGHT & ACCOUNTABILITY - Google Docs doctorwho: • You should add a conflict of interest policy. Thank you - we are working on a Conflict Policy and will release it soon. doctorwho: I sometimes feel that this kind of proposal has too brief plan considering its huge budget, although this one is better than prop #82 . What else would you like to see? Replying to JD-Lorax: JD-Lorax: • Will there be a contingency plan in the event a grants funded project fails to deliver on expectations/milestones but has been paid? The short answer is: we expect there will be a few failures along the way. Yet, at the same time, if we can internalize lessons learned and grow in our personal individual capacities thru failure, still, the ecosystem can strengthen. Even failed…
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Hi, thank you for the proposal.
Where will the grant money come from? Is it funded again by the community pool or already included in your proposal? If via community pool, then if approved it doesn’t need to be voted again by Cosmos stakeholders?
And what’s your target for the number of projects getting funded during those 9 months?
Someone here mentioning about project incentives, I think it’s a cool approach.
Thanks.
First and foremost i want to say that this proposal is a step in the right direction. Community pools are insanely inefficient and bad allocators of capital, especially small grants should not be decided on by a full-chain governance imo. Below i will share some points i think the proposal can improve on. • Id like to see formal knowledge in the proposal highlighting that at any moment in time one can also request to the community pool for funding instead. This also counts for proposals that dont pass the grant committee. This way the community pool can act as a backstop for the grant program. • Id like to see a more detailed breakdown of the expenses going to human capital stating with a denotes per-person compensation instead of the aggregate. • I think language needs to be added to the proposal regarding the maximum grant amount, 100.000 atom seems like an absurd high number to give out in a grant. Grant recipients will be forced to sell on the open market to cover expenses and I dont think spending 1M (even for supurb products) is in our best interest as a pure ATOM expense. Id like to see the program capped at a more reasonable number like ~100k USD with the option…
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The proposal is good and the background of the members is good.
A recommendation:
Several verification nodes who have doubts about this proposal, please invite them to join “THE OVERSIGHT and ACCOUNTABILITY COMMITTEE” as committee members. Oversee DAO operations.
Hey @Youssef, This proposal has covered all the details. I will like to support the proposal. I also have some doubts; I have scheduled a call with you and would like to talk to you.
Hi everyone, Based on community feedback, the DAO team is amending its original proposal with the following points. These changes will also be integrated to the original post in the addendum section: • The applicant submitting the proposal is a DAO with name “DAO NAME (TBD)” and the name of the project shall be “DAO NAME Grant Program”. • The DAO’s vision “is to create a grant program to support small/med size projects for open source software, public goods, and ecosystem initiatives that add value for ATOM holders.” • The program is not intended to be the canonical grant program at the Hub, and by creating transparency around program status, KPIs, and application flow via Oversight Committee it is anticipated that a plurality of more specialized grant programs will emerge organically within the ecosystem. • The program is not intended to make or recommend any upgrades to the canonical codebase at the Hub; this decision to upgrade the canonical codebase will continue to rest with community gov and we would hope should adhere to the principle of minimalism at the Hub. • As requested by the community, line item compensation details are presented here in a document •…
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Youssef:As requested by the community, line item compensation details are presented here in a document:
FYI, not seeing the document anywhere. Maybe need to re-upload?
Edit: There is a link in original post, though it does require us to ask permission. Not sure if intended.
Hey! Document is in open mode now. Thanks for pointing that out 
regarding point 4, i guess you make it yourself too easy. Saying to propose something else and if not the proposed is okay, that is not a argument to vote yes for this approach. That would mean if i propose to give me 1m Atom and if nobody says that i only should get 100k Atom my proposal will pass?! I would bring another idea into discussion. A more or less performance dependent payment. A full-time manager shall receive an equivalent of 1.200$ per month in Atom (approx.110 Atom at the moment) as a base salary. With an estimated 160h work (40h per week) that is a base payment of 7.5$ per hour. A part-time member will receive corresponding 7.5$ per/ x hour he workes. If they propose a project for funding, they help the team and workout the proposal (including KPI and traget the project will acheive one year after start), where the community can vote on with governance. If the Proposal passes, the 7 Member will receive a bonus of 700 Atom to share. Once the Projekt is live, they will receive additional 700 Atom. One year after go live of the project the 7 member will receive additional 700 Atom as bonus. The amount must not be 700 Atom, could be more ore less also maybe…
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I’d personally like to see a significantly smaller pool allocation request in this amended proposal. 721,000 ATOM is too much for an initial, what can still be considered experimental phase, grant program. A more reasonable and modest starting allocation with the option for additional funding to extend the program after proven success in 9 months is a sensible approach to me.
You say that not intended to be the canonical grant program at the Hub but you are asking for 700K atom.
Let say that in one month, we have 2.1M atom in the CP, this is 30% of community pool.
How can a another grant program can make it if you ask so much.
Grant program should be 30% MAX of the community pool then by your logic, if there is other grant program, let say 3. Amount requested should be much lower…
I hope there is a competing proposition.
I see nobody replied to my concerns, it’s fair, they are quite subjective, and controversial.
People are ok with validator(s) being bribed to switch their gov votes then. Or is it a taboo topic ?
__
. About the pool allocation : it should be lower. as many said here. If there is a need for more some day → gov.
. About the Validators members : Nobody seems to worry. I do worry. I would advocate for a rotative selection. There are 175 validators. Only 2, even 4, of them participating in this committee all along the process is not enough. Not fair. And it looks like there have been a deal under the woods with some 82 NWV voters - even if not.
. Has the recently created TAB a role somehow regarding this grant program ?
They are asking too much money for monthly compensation the members. Look at Juno Growth Fund, they don’t have these big salaries as you guys! Also, you are asking a lot from the community poll. 100,000k atom is enogh to start! If not, create a DAO on Juno network and there is no need for all these costs.
Youssef: As requested by the community, line item compensation details are presented here in a document After reviewing this document, this is the summary about the compensation: • 20% Part time Technical Lead: $30k/month equivalent full time monthly salary • 20% Part time Community Review Panel Participants (4) (these are the validators): $15k/month equivalent full time monthly salary, likely higher than in their current full time validator jobs • Oversight Committee 20% Part time Senior member: $27k/month equivalent full time monthly salary All these part time members listed above have much higher equivalent full time salaries than the only 2 full time people that would work on this grant program at $12k/month (out of ~10 people listed, just 2 will work full time, all the others mostly 20-35% part time). These salaries are huge, start asking for much less and then when there are good results you can ask for more. This is huge financial gains for you, the self appointed committees, for 9 months, while putting all the risks and costs on the Cosmos community. Youssef: • The applicant submitting the proposal is a DAO with name “DAO NAME…
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You have missed the by-far biggest complaint: the cost. The cost needs to be significantly less.
The current state, even with the updates, puts all the risk on the community. If you aren’t willing to take some risk yourself, you shouldn’t be doing this. Ask for much less, show results, then ask for more.
AN FAQ FOR THOSE WHO WANTS TO GET DISCUSSION TL;DR Why does Cosmos need a grant program? A specialized workflow for grant funding evaluation and approval will make the process easier and encourage teams who are willing to build public goods for the ecosystem as the current funding through governance is not at all efficient and lacks necessary due diligence. Grant program will: • make criteria more perceivable • make sure that the grants are efficiently sized • find proposals that deliver value for ATOM holders Why are the members self-appointed? Building an efficient organization requires recruiting team members who have the necessary skills and experience to achieve the vision, and it is the most efficient way for the Community to move things forward for a contractor team to self-organize. The team is experienced with Cosmos governance and is committed to driving value for ATOM holders. We are looking to work on inclusivity & will do our best to come up with a design for it. By the way, the team is looking to hire community members who have experience as coordinators or auditors. What is an Oversight Committee? Separate team of three will: • keep track…
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So unfortunately reading from the reactions here ATOM is still on its way of democracising itself into fragmented nothingness. Not able to protect itself, it will continue to see it’s usecases looted and rugpulled in fratercide style. A real pitty of such a wonderful tech and project.
Hi lorax,
JD-Lorax:As mentioned above we already took a risk with prop 72 funding chains that are not guaranteed to launch as consumers as governance may not approve them.
I think that this is a really good point and that it may make sense to have a policy where consumer chains can only ask for funding from global governance.
They need to work for far less amount of money! You guys are asking a lot of money to pay your salaries for something you haven’t delivered! We should pay them per hour, as Upwork!
Not necessarily! Debate is and discussion is healthy for the future of Atom! Lower your salaries, pay the members of the committee per hour, and lower the amount of ATMOM you need to give grants! 100k-200k ATOM should be enough for the start!
Hi all, I’m submitting the following because I completely understanding the argument of “Too much complaining, not enough proposing of alternatives or revisions.” I would also like to make clear that I do not think any of the issues I will raise here were created out of malicious intent. Far too often I think it’s easy for perspectives to be misaligned, and for people who hold different positions in a larger system (i.e. cosmos) to see things differently when it comes to how to best do things and accomplish shared goals. This does not mean anyone involved doesn’t have the best intentions in mind. That being said, the following is a revised version of the recent proposal for funding of a Cosmos Hub grants program. This is how I, as a community member first and foremost, would have liked to see something like this brought to the public discussion in future. I will blockquote (the format this text is in) my own changes and input throughout, and will denote my comments with a & bold text , and revisions with “…” Again, I thank those in involved for getting the ball rolling on something important like this, just as i admire the community who have called it out in its current…
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Hi @Youssef . Thanks for your work on this. In general, I think this is something that is needed for the Hub and support this initiative. Grant programs are not easy to establish, but can bring tremendous value if executed correctly. That being said, I do think there should be some consideration to some changes and also have a few questions of my own that may not have been touched on. Forgive me if some of this has been answered and it slipped by me. • Lets get the obvious out of the way, the issue is not so much the total amount but the amount relative to what is currently in the community pool. It would be more responsible to cut this ask in half, and then at a certain milestone that takes into account time passed just request for a second round of funding as needed. $3M+ should be enough to have impact over a 3-5 month period or even just the first few grants given out. • I’m curious as to the separation of duties of the reviewers and the oversight committee. I think the salaries are reasonable, but wondering if there is any crossover in responsibilities and how things will be separated. More details on some roles and their compensation I think would help with some…
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Hello @Tricky ! Thank you for your questions. Here are my answers Tricky | Cosmos Spaces: Lets get the obvious out of the way, the issue is not so much the total amount but the amount relative to what is currently in the community pool. It would be more responsible to cut this ask in half, and then at a certain milestone that takes into account time passed just request for a second round of funding as needed. $3M+ should be enough to have impact over a 3-5 month period or even just the first few grants given out. I’d push back a little on the argument of the requested amount relative to the size of the community pool. What we are asking to run a solid grant program for almost a year (9 months) represents 2 months of community pool replenishment rate. Each month, on average 343,000 ATOM gets added to the community pool following prop 88 and the tax increase from 2 to 10%. So, in short, each 2 months, the community pool would be able the fund the equivalent of an entire grant program. By the end of the 9 months and at the spending rate of the last 6 months that includes the requested amount for the grant program DAO, the community pool should be much richer…
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Thank you for time spent on writing this proposal. TLDR: No. Although I do agree the need for a Grant Program, it won’t be anywhere near a YES, here. Not until we, or say this accredited group, or better yet TOGETHER, as an entire community, prioritize and focus our gaze at what is most important here. If we don’t, we’ll just continue circling back to this same issue down the line, maybe just a few levels higher (anyone watch The Platform). Finding a foundation, a common ground - ATOM one constitution should be where any sort of funding be allocated (Decentralist Cosmos Hub DAO), before any further proposal is set forth. The need for the Decentralist Cosmos Hub DAO is evident. A true COSMOS native decentralized autonomous org to first be formed to ensure proper allocation of any $ATOM funding. This proposal, alongside many recent proposals, makes it EVIDENTLY clear, that the need for a ATOM One constitution is here, and it MUST be the focus. For the marathon we’re here for, or at least, the “real” cosmosnauts. Clearly the COSMOS is filled with brilliance! No doubt about it. Read this proposal. Yet, the FOUNDER is saying it’s important, so why not actually take that lead…
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“We need to follow MY god”
omg. what an argument.
Indeed 
Bc clearly, you present a much different stance from your end, dear internet aquaintence. Who’s is yours, may I ask?
Hey @Youssef !
Thanks for bringing this proposal to the table.
We strongly agree with this prop since we have detected so many inefficiencies with how governance is currently used to fund small grant proposals.
Happy to help in the coordinator role, should you still be looking to recruit for that position.
Cheers,
Hector from ZKV
ZKV_Hector: We strongly agree with this prop since we have detected so many inefficiencies with how governance is currently used to fund small grant proposals. Could you elaborate about all these inefficiencies that you have detected? ZKV_Hector: Happy to help in the coordinator role, should you still be looking to recruit for that position. We guess any validator or community member would also be happy to receive a ~$11.1k full time monthly salary equivalent for this help as Oversight Committee 50% FTE Coordinator, probably many Cosmonauts would need this salary more than an employee of a top 4 Cosmos Hub validator. Also, this is a 50% part time role, with your current full time role at ZK Validator it doesn’t seem very feasible, especially since in your LinkedIn you list additionally another part time role. Moreover, you mention that you are based in Madrid, where most salaries are around 1-2k/month not +$11k. 'Oversight Committee #2 - Coordinator • To prepare the monthly transparency, program activities, and KPIs report • Relationship management with grant recipients: to gather grantee project status and progress information for monthly…
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Hello ser,
Thank you for your support!
Regarding the coordinator position, it hasn’t been filled yet so we can schedule a time to meet. You can find my Calendly link at the end of the proposal.
Cosmic_Validator:it is clearly a conflict of interest that representatives from validators
There is always going to be conflict of interest. But they will keep denying. when(not if) the prop will be up for voting we will see how the validators related to people involved will vote.
Putting up a competing proposal today. Would love to have a discussion around how to work together.
I will vote NO to using this company. It seems to me you guys are here to money grab our community funds. I need to see some numbers and results on paper what have you done for others projects?
Don’t be too idealistic. With the existence of human beings, it is impossible to have a truly decentralized organization.
I would agree with this proposal 100%. The team is very nice and will help build a dozen or so protocols on the cosmos hub. In the long run, this will help increase the value of ATOM tokens.
Currently, ATOM is only a governance token. Although with ICS, it can be upgraded to an economic token, but the market value of ICS alone is not enough to enter the top ten. Some good teams are also needed to help increase the value of ATOM.
Hope all community members and validators support this proposal.
Good luck finding teams with a full track record who want to deal with being verbally beaten by hub politics.
People need to be given a chance to prove themselves or we’ll just be stuck governing the hub in to uselessness.
We need this for the cosmos hub, it’s just the amount requested it’s too high! Reduce it by at least 25% and we will vote Yes! Osmosis and Juno network already have this commitie in place and working for them! The members are strong.
Idk. It’s a big number to me because i’m just a pleb, but I have no real basis for what a quality grant program run by competent people should cost. Everyone involved is fully doxxed, so they have a responsibility to themselves to do well just as much as they do the hub community. There’s also no guarantee we will get enough grant applications to use up all of the funds, so excess can be returned.
I think it’s worth giving them a chance to prove themselves, and we can hold them accountable along the way (the advantage of them being fully doxxed). Experiment out in the open and adjust as we go along. It won’t be perfect, but I fully believe stagnation is more of a risk to the hub’s long term moat than anything a DAO could ever do to it.
Thank you for your comment and your support. Actually, following community feedback, we’ve reduced the ask amount by 18.4%. It was previously 721K ATOM. It is now 588K ATOM. Y
You can refer to the change log at the very beginning of the original post to see the various changes we made.
I would agree to submit it to vote. We need this council for Atom to move forward. We need to use these funds to support projects building on the cosmos.
To be honest I still think that 588,000 ATOM is too much for this initial period of bootstrapping the grants program. Start conservative and when we see it works we can increase the funding accordingly. 250,000 ATOM seems like enough of a starting point to work with for both setting up and funding a first round of projects via the grants program. After the first 9 months this would give the community a sense of how successful the program may be, and if agreed it can be extended.
Agreed. Most would be perfectly fine with giving more, however it is hard to justify giving so much initially. Starting small and refilling as necessary, with community approval is absolutely the best way to go. Even at 200,000 ATOMs that’s $2.6 million at current prices. I can’t imagine we could do some good funding in a nine month window, on $2.6 million.
we should write a policy in black and white and visible to all in order to make the points related to funding clear. We should perhaps start by asking for the composition of the team that is requesting funding. The work already done in the past (to establish an amount in line with the past performance of the team. If the team is new … I don’t see why it would ask for an astronomical sum but it should not necessarily be a rejection for fund them). To encourage the team to work well, we should therefore agree on a starting percentage for the first release of funds (example 10% of the request). Then unlock as and when not time … but the work done. Imagine that the team wants to be funded for 5 tasks, we could imagine that upon delivery of each task the partial release of funds is executed. So once the last task is delivered the payment would then be complete.
One potential difficulty with this idea is that there must be a threshold where too few funds = decreased program efficacy. I imagine that some of the projects funded won’t come to fruition as planned. That can still be valuable, but I think that it makes sense for the program funds to be able to compensate for the unknowability of the work. Ie, the committee should feel that they have enough funding to fund a wide array of projects, knowing (at least abstractly) that their success rate is variable.
In other words, it becomes more difficult to judge the success of the program without a sufficient data-set of projects funded. And to generate a sufficient data-set, there needs to be an adequately sized treasury.
I guess the question is:
- what is an adequately sized treasury and how do we determine it?
All of these numbers seem arbitrary to me.
Again, I don’t presume to know what it takes to run such a program (which may invalidate my opinion), but just my 2c on the amount and nature of this type of program.
For one, i would love to see you guys at least acknowledge the massive post that you insisted i post here, found above.
However, I’m here on an unrelated thought,
How would people feel about @alphagrowth serving AS the oversight & review committee for the CHGP structure outlined here? In my eyes, as long as there was no increased cost, this could only be a benefit as it creates more oversight and accountability both ways, and brings in a wider range of talent relative to the task at hand.
@ala.tusz.am brought up some very good points and asked some good questions in their post. With this in mind I don’t think that AlphaGrowth would be suited to act as the oversight & review committee as they don’t seem to fully understand Cosmos, Cosmos Hub, IBC and the role of ATOM. I would not be in favour of them being involved in such a capacity. The current members proposed here have plenty of experience combined in Cosmos, Web3 and beyond.
Replying to @TendermintTimmy Hi TendermintTimmy, thank you for your detailed comments. TendermintTimmy: How can you not have major details about your ask up front in the summary? We will add the funding details to the summary of the proposal when we go on-chain, this is a good suggestion, thank you ser. TendermintTimmy: There needs to be more info on what Ben’s role would be, what his compensation would be, etc. It is a coordinator role within the DAO, with initial primary focus to assist with putting up program website & proposal intake system, copywriting, etc. These are tasks that are consistent with his professional background in digital marketing and mgmt of creative agencies. The comp plan was published earlier, you can find it here . Our general approach has been to size comp for these public service roles at 65-80% of market rates. TendermintTimmy: It would be good to either detail what you mean by “focus” on, and if it’s expanded on later, then make sure to state that. Is it exclusively for Open Source stuff? If not what is the criteria? And what defines an “ecosystem” initiative? The primary focus is to…
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@Youssef the original post still shows the budget breakdown to the old ask amount. Could you please update it? I am not sure where the decrease in ask came from (has anything been taken out or is compensation lowered, etc?)
What a great program. I’ll do my best to apply. Thanks for this information.
Is there no spending cap per grant in the proposal? At least it is not mentioned on chain, it seems.
Hello ser,
Yes there is a spending cap on grants. Please refer to the original post on the forum.
Grants will range from 1,000 to 100,000 ATOM, although we don’t expect (given the budget constraints) to give more than two or three 100,000 ATOM grants.
Hi @gjermundgaraba and thank you for your question. The OpEx budget is unchanged: for compensation, it remains the same as the amount of efforts to run the program is unchanged. If there are divergences on projected vs actuals on the other expenses ( and we do expect some), they will be reflected on our transparency reports. The only changes are the total amount going to grants (now 5.2 M at 10 ATOM price) , the ratio of expenses vs total budget (went from 10 to 12%) and the ratios of grants vs total ask amount (went from 90 to 88%). These are not hard numbers since ATOM price is volatile. You can refer to the table where we compare our program to the Osmosis program, it features updated amounts. In short, the numbers you see on the original post are already updated. As previously noted, any program funds remaining at the end of the program will be returned to the community pool in case the program is not renewed as per the Termination Clause. FYI, here is the Termination clause: At the end of the 9 month period, none of the leftover funding will be used for any purpose and a renewal proposal will be raised on the Cosmos Forum within 4 weeks of the completion of the…
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Oh, that is unfortunate and a little misleading in the updates honestly.
In any case, I am sorry to see that the cost question was not once seriously considered and just brushed away. In the end, we do need this kind of program, but I am sad to see that the cost question is not taken seriously.
Seems like there is no point in discussing with you guys on this anymore, so I will just leave with my take on funding proposals in general and hope we can do better than this in the future:
"My take on funding proposals: have clear goals and outcomes. And behave like a startup: be scrappy and set expectations that you will be well-rewarded if you do exceptionally well.
Asking for funds to cover high salaries for unproven ideas is not something I will support.
If we want these funds to create value we need hungry teams (not as in food…). Complacent teams will rarely strive to achieve amazing things. Why would they?"
You’re being paid too much too soon to really want to achieve amazing things. In my opinion obviously. If this goes through and you get to do this, I sure hope to be proven wrong In any case, good luck!
While I appreciate the reasoning, I don’t see the comparison of a single Cosmos Hub grant funding initiative comparable to Solana or Ethereum. Cosmos is built in a modular fashion, and this modularity should lead to more grant initiatives, for various grant programs or other treasury funding that helps build out this modular architecture, unlike ETH and Solana, which seek to build strictly on their monolithic blockchain architecture. Personally, I still do not see this proposal as comparable in purpose, when comparing the Hubs vision to the goals of Solana or Ethereum in their monolithic design. While I want you to have enough to fund projects, I believe check and balances are necessary in this case and a smaller amount should be received, and if this grants program does a sufficient job, then a refill can be requested. Like I said, I get your reasoning, however, I still disagree with the amount. The treasury should have many different grant funds, and many different stated objectives for these grant funds. Obviously this requires more initiative from the community, which I hope will happen, and would be happy to take initiative myself, if I had guidance from other in how I…
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Where it’s the professionalism, you guys? You don’t know how to write such an important proposal? I submitted an on-chain proposal on the Juno blockchain and tested it before also Mintscan and ping.pub. This is due diligence. It’s this the way you will allocate funds as well?? Lack of professionalism from you guys! For this mistake, I will vote NO!
You guys live in another world. 10.000 ATOM grant is a lot in the real world. Wake up!
Imagine unironically seething about page formatting issues. Grow up. Looks fine here: Ping Dashboard
thank you for putting this together! The whole cosmos ecosystem is really going to benefit from having an official grants program. 
I’m interested in setting up a quick chat but none of the calendar links above seem to have any availability. @Youssef do you think we could set up a time to chat either this week or early next week? My team is building on top of agoric, and I’d love to grab a minute to discuss what we’re working on.
@tgrecojs: my email is [email protected] happy to find a time to connect. 
While I see the need for a grant program like this. I am a little bit uneasy about 100,000 ATOM grants being given at a small number of peoples discretion. Should larger projects like this not rely on consensus? I would like to hear the justification for why we would want to have these larger decisions in the hands of a select number of people instead of the community.
A Call for Re-iteration Summary After much thought, I do not support proposal 95 in its current iteration. I believe that the risks outweigh the benefits. A better alternative path exists, one which also fulfills the base-requirement of “doing something” that many have expressed. My concern is not the capability of the team, but that the structure of the proposal has a low chance of leading to optimal outcomes for stakeholders, and additionally, that there is no certainty that the grants will lead to sustainable infrastructure that addresses known foundational issues. This is not a case of doing something vs. doing nothing. It is a case of doing something right. In my mind, a better approach is to iterate on the proposal, unbundle it, and work on more sustainable solutions at smaller, more-defined scales . Rationale There is an incongruity between the program operations, the duration of the program, community expectations, and the requested funding amount. This is a spend proposal that requests 588,000 ATOM from the community pool. In a period of 9 months the team plans to create a bespoke entity to manage foundational organizational needs, build a website and…
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ala.tusz.am:For those wondering why I didn’t publish this before it was on-chain, I was in the process of gathering and composing these thoughts when the proposal was broadcast to the chain. As a note going forward, it’s always helpful to announce a last-call date on all submitted proposals.
It seems that when there was another competing grant program proposal draft shared on the forum they rushed to put their proposal on-chain first.
Edit: @Youssef & Team, did you not even read the guidelines in the forum? After a proposal is on-chain it CANNOT be changed or edited and a pdf snapshot of the forum post should be taken and pinned to IPFS before going on-chain, which seems you didn’t do? This seems kind of an obvious thing to do, how could you be allowed to modify the proposal after putting it on-chain?
Hello everyone,
We added a new change log today. Here are the main modifications:
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All 4 validators involved in this proposal will vote Abstain given the involvement of some of their contributors in Prop 95
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Amount of grants will be denominated in USD and not ATOM. The range is 10,000 - 1,000,000 USD. Although grants will be delivered in ATOM, the amount will be decided in USD terms, which makes more sense given the volatile nature of ATOM.
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Compensation for Program Managers was reduced by 10% following community feedback. See updated compensation document in the addendum.
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Following community feedback, there will be a lockup of received ATOM over 6 months with one additional 1/6th made available to the team every month.
ala.tusz.am:However, if that is the case, this proposal should be unbundled in order to be more direct about which projects it plans to fund. This will build trust and help establish appropriate expectations in the community.
I think this point is very important for consideration. If there are already projects lined up and planned they should be made known for the sake of transparency, as quoted; to build trust.
As for the change log it’s nice to see something even though it’s a little late to finally be making further changes. But the 588,000 ATOM elephant in the room is not addressed. There is still no consideration to the fact that even when written as $1million that is a significant amount for a single grants spends. Amounts that large should go probably go through governance instead of being a decision made by 7 people. The cap is too high.
The prop is on-chain so these concerns hardly matter at this point. Would’ve been nice if the proposers took the community concerns more seriously before hastily putting this prop up to vote.
A strong no with veto from me. Report are full of buzz words and figures that’s too good to be true without backing facts. How about one steps at a time instead of asking 588,000 lump sum that cannot be held accountable after delivery.
Cosmos Hub Proposal #95 - ATOM Accelerator DAO
I vote: Agree
The reasons are as follows:
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The team members are excellent and have a good understanding of the cosmos ecology.
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The Cosmos Hub does nothing at all, ATOM is just a MEME token and a governance token.
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If Accelerator DAO successfully introduces more than ten protocols, it may bring value to ATOM holders.
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If the COSMOS HUB community does not move forward, it will starve to death in place.
Although I agree with the problem statement and believe that a Hub specific grants program could theoretically work, I am voting no on this proposal for two primary reasons that I feel haven’t been adequately addressed by the authors, even though several users have pointed this out:
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There is no clear guidance on which goals to achieve and projects to provide grants to. The criteria of “what brings the most value to the Hub” is too subjective. Before a grants program can be approved by a community, voters should agree on a direction. This agreement is currently clearly lacking after the ATOM 2.0 proposal failed. In the current format, this grants program is a headless chicken.
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Without clear goals and a proven track record of a team, the amount requested is (still) too high. This isn’t about how soon this amount will be replenished, but about how much money (expressed in dollars) is simply at risk of being misspent.
Can we hear some justification of why a 1 million USD grant needs to be decided on by a small number of people as opposed to going through community governance that is already in place?
This seems like more centralization. The idea, or how I thought it to be, of the communict governance is to give power to the holders to make decisions on the future of the project. This appears to be asking us to relinquish that ability and to give it to "smarter’ and “more qualified” individuals or groups
Address your #3 please. In what way is any value being brought to the table with this move. It seems to be taking money off the table and not showing any path to making any. Continuing to pay others to use the product/system will indeed bring your #4 to reality. Let us come up with a plan utilizing all of the community rather than a few that can accidently or intentionally destroy it.
holders always make decision by voting into the gov.
Hi @ala.tusz.am , thanks for your feedback. We will reflect on the points that are specific in nature and can allow us to implement constructive changes. This idea that “well the process wasn’t perfectly optimal so therefore the best thing is to scrap it & re-do the whole effort to make it optimal” is indeed nice in principle, but opportunity cost, momentum, and community morale also have value to ATOM holders in a highly competitive space in 2023, and everything in life is about balance. We are all working towards ideals of permissionless systems, but until we have better tooling ready, we’re going to need to rely on humans to fill in gaps, unfortunately. Hi @Noam , We would love to be able to give you a specific list of proposals builders will submit to ATOM Accelerator DAO in 2023, but it is impossible to know in advance what ideas builders will propose, especially in such a large & decentralized community. Osmosis grant program currently receives ~50 proposals per month. For reference, here is a list of projects Osmosis grant program has funded: https://grants.osmosis.zone/grant-recipients I’d encourage you to browse through this list to get a sense for…
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TL;DR:
- vote yes.
- better to have a good enough funding mechanism, the arguing for months how to fund projects
- it can always improve
- small teams are known to be more efficient. The proposed committee looks solid enough
- 588k ATOM is not that much given the size of the ecosystem, the needs (more tools please, on all levels: dev, user, testing!) and that it will replenishment in 2 months. I don’t believe anyone in in the committee will trade their reputation for colluding / doing a bad job.
Let’s move on!
Of course you cannot predict what proposals are coming. You’re missing my point.
What’s lacking is a northstar. An agreed upon set of goals for the Cosmos Hub to use as a starting point in establishing criteria for a grants program. You cannot decide what’s good for the Hub without knowing what it’s supposed to be doing. So far, besides anything ICS related, nobody is in agreement on the Hub’s future.
This is why I would propose to reduce scope and focus entirely on Interchain Security and everything around it as we know that’s pretty much the only thing the community seems to agree on.
Once we’ve gotten some kind of ATOM 2.0 agreement, expand the scope & budget of the grants program.
I agree with this point. One of the main issues I have with the accelerator DAO, is I’m not sure what part of Cosmos it intends to accelerate. I prefer to have a stated objective. I prefer that these ATOMs go directly towards ICS exclusively (albeit, I do wish it was a smaller amount), and new initiatives with different governance models can come up and provide grant funding for different parts of the Hub. An example of what I’d like stated, for this grant program: • We are to use this 588,000 ATOMs to fund projects that are building or intend to build on Interchain Security, and use our social influence to try to gain more meaningful consumer chains. (This can also give ICS chains a central point of funding, and in turn, this grant program can keep these chains on track in the building phase, and would also be able to lock chains into ICS better than what we currently have now. Not that this program becomes a central point of ICS, but rather a mediator, making it easier for chains that wish to become a Hub consumer chain.) • We will use these 588,000 ATOMs to help fund research initiatives to make ICS more effective and efficient, giving forward momentum to bring V2/V3 of…
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Is funding a grants program team for 9 months necessary? If we voted to spend 588k ATOM on grants for the 1st half of the year, couldnt we make a proposal deadline for teams to submit grants proposals to funding tiers like $1k, $5k, $10k, 100k, etc. then hire a large dev dominated review panel for 1 month/year. the panel makes recommendations to exclude proposals for being spam or frivolous and the like, leaving a field of 20 or 50 or however many proposals each tier and then regular governance uses ranked choice voting to fund half or 1/3 of the proposals. The voting doesnt determine whether or not to fund things, its voting on what the community most wants to see funded. then we only pay for the month of panel oversight instead of 9 months of market rate salaries.
Thank you, @Noam.
Creating a globally-competitive economic agglomeration effect around the hub is likely to be a medium- to long-term endeavor.
For building of bottoms-up economic systems, the idea of incrementalism is important.
It took 50+ years and many rounds of top-down planning and bottoms-up investments by individual players to build Singapore or Hollywood or Silicon Valley into a ‘holonic sympatheia’ (not sure if this is grammatically correct term, but I am using it here as a noun).
Beyond completion of the ICS vision, as far as building out ATOM economic zone goes, do you foresee a way to short-circuit the bottoms-up part of the process?
If anything, the Hub’s priority should be to develop a better framework to reach common agreement. In my personal view this is not through a giant long term plan via a whitepaper, but an incremental process that adapts as the ecosystem evolves. We have to acknowledge that the original design of the Hub was flawed. The Interchain is not shaping as a hub and spoke model. And once we do get to 1000+ chains, hubs will be everywhere, but the Cosmos Hub is not positioned to be among them currently as chains do not actually have a reason to connect to it besides fiat on-ramping (which is an advantage we can expect others to have as well soon) and its “brand”. The current design of ICS does not scale, nor has there been considerable thought given to how this aims to compete successfully and sustainably with upcoming alternative shared security models. Hub minimalism killed the Hub. The Hub should have been Axelar, Gravity, Babylon, whatever. Anything that solves a real infra problem now, not one that we may (incorrectly) think will be there in 5 years. But to answer your actual question: I don’t think you can actually short-circuit the bottom-up part of this process. Fund multiple…
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Not really related to the grants program, but I’ll have to take issue with the claim that “there has not been considerable thought given to how this [ICS] aims to compete successfully and sustainably with upcoming alternative shared security models”
The Cosmos Hub team has put a lot of thought into how ICS aims to compete successfully. So much thought, in fact, that for example we are the only team to have published an analysis on what security Mesh Security even provides!
We are working on similar analyses comparing Opt-in Security (ICS v2) to rollups, and answering once and for all whether Mesh Security can be secure without fraud proofs. These are almost ready but we’ve been so busy with the launch of RS that we haven’t yet put the final touches on them.
Are there any other competing forms of shared security that need to be given more thought?
What I was referring to is how the Hub itself isn’t positioned to compete compared to other chains. Whichever configuration is chosen (Replicated Security, Mesh, or something else), other chains can easily do the same. So long as the Hub doesn’t have an intrinsic value accrual mechanism besides ICS, nor a good reason to be at the center of significant IBC transactions, it won’t be able to compete in the long term because other chains will provide better reasons to act as provider chains (via a larger market cap, better IBC connectivity, better access to liquidity, etc).
If the only reason to hold ATOM is to receive tokens from consumer chains, the Hub effectively becomes a glorified ETF paying out dividends to delegators. To be fair, this alone could potentially function (if we do away with any regulatory concerns), but it leaves the Hub at the whims of other protocols and off-chain sales efforts to get the best chains to join the network. Not exactly what I personally think is the most future-proof strategy.
I personally see two mid-term potential paths for the Hub. Either
A) it’s an interchain service aggregator so users stay on the Hub where each consumer chain is a service that interacts with the rest of the interchain (abstracts away cross-chain activity for better UX). These are consumer-facing applications (where historically most value accrues).
Or
B) Create infrastructure that allows for atomic cross chain composability, and incubates new chains. These were the Scheduler and Allocator. I would heavily support these being funded.
Regardless, the Hub does need a future vision of where it fits in a modular world (settlement? DAS? Sequencing?). A grant for R&D specifically on this subject would be nice, and the Hub needs to start thinking about its next phase…because it won’t include RS in its current capacity.
At a cost each vote. Anyone asking to be given tokens or money from a community should have to show a return prior to asking for that donation.
As to the R&D, why not utilize the community in brainstorming for this? Paying out smaller rewards this way and getting people involved that have skin in the game would quite possibly yield far better results than an external think tank that would gain with no risk
given the open source nature of the hub and the public good centric mandate of the ICF in combination with ranked choice voting i roughly summarized previously to fund projects the community would most like to see without relying on the opinions and administration of a few funding gatekeepers on the communities dime, is it not the case that the hub should change slowly and deliberately based on cyclical market conditions where the hub funds experimental and innovative initiatives and once they successfully demonstrate their value the hub appropriates them into their hub and spoke model?
Gm Cosmos Community, I’m Kaushik from PYOR, a crypto research and analytics company backed by Coinbase Ventures and Castle Island Ventures. We specialize in leveraging on-chain data to address critical business questions for institutional investors and protocols. Given our extensive experience in the blockchain space, we believe we could bring significant value to the Cosmos ecosystem. Some of our notable contributions include: • Providing data-driven insights for institutional investors such as Ribbit Capital and M31 Capital. • Developing a governance participation reward dashboard for Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). • Creating a v3 Dashboard for Compound, featuring a yield and fees simulator. • Building a comprehensive analytics dashboard for Eigenlayer. • Currently collaborating with Arbitrum to analyze the grant efficacy of the LTIPP program. we would greatly appreciate clarification on the following points: • Is the ATOM Accelerator DAO grant program currently active and accepting new applications? • If so, does the scope of the program include projects focused on technical documentation and educational resources? • Are there any specific areas within…
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