I think for a test these proposed amounts make a lot of sense. We want highly motivated individuals to apply - not those looking for purely salaries. Of course compensation can be raised later on.
It’s way harder to lower comp than raise it.
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Thank you so much for this note @adam and your kind words. Excited to know the support from the Compound Labs team! I have taken these policies into consideration to come up with the iteration of the proposal and structuring. Will be sharing the final draft once the domain allocators are finalized. Thank you!
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Absolutely, that’s where the current efforts are going into. Finding the right domain allocators. Please do suggest a few names with whom we should speak to. That’d be really helpful!
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I would make an open form that community members can share, that also includes a referral section. This is what I have seen work in previous similar instances.
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Hi everyone! We are currently hunting for domain allocators for this program. If you think you would be the right person for any of the domains, please fill up the form, and we’ll connect with you. Feel free to refer someone from the community too, if you think they might be a good fit. Thank you for the support!
Link to fill up the form: https://forms.gle/W9986NiMfp96VeGj9
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Hi @harsha, thanks for your initiative.
I’m not sure if the window for the applications for the current cycle is still open, however, a couple of questions that might be relevant for future cycles too:
1/ Domain Allocator weekly effort estimate and time commitments:
- What is the basis for the estimate of 15 hours / week? Is it based on the expected volume of grant applications? Is it capped to 15 hours / week?
- What happens if the volume of applications is much higher than expected, and the Domain Allocator can’t commit more hours?
- Does the grant team collaborate entirely online, or will there be routine meetings when team members are expected to participate live? This will be a big hurdle for people with other commitments.
2/ Scope of the “Risk Parameters update research” Domain:
The name of the Domain sounds a bit narrow if it’s limited to researching the Risk Parameters. Also, Gauntlet is already deeply involved in that arena, so I’m not sure there’s much to be gained by limiting to Risk Parameters. There would be more value if this domain includes market risk management too. For example, products based on volatility recommend actions after big price movements. However, many quant firms are known to predict volatility upfront (using Machine Learning and technical / trend analysis) and take proactive actions before a volatility spike. Such a product can potentially help Compound carryout on-chain risk mitigation (without a governance vote for parameter changes in a limited range), or put out notifications alerting the community of liquidation risk levels (without necessarily adjusting risk parameters).
So, is the scope of this domain fixed (to Risk Parameters research), or is it more flexible? Expanding the scope would be a lot more interesting and valuable. I would like to know community’s thoughts too on this.
Hey - I’m @harsha 's cofounder at Questbook. Wanted to give an update - below is a blurb from Harsha :
I have undergone surgery last week, and am away from the desk for a couple of weeks.
We are almost done with the interviews for the Domain Allocators. 2 more to go. We will be going for the voting on this as a proposal next week. The proposal will be open for voting for a week. Sorry about the delay here.
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Thanks for writing this Roger.
1/ Domain Allocator weekly effort estimate and time commitments:
- The roles and responsibilities of the domain allocators are similar to CGP 1.0 and incorporated the learnings from the learnings posted by the CGP 1.0 team.
- If the volume of applications is much higher than expected, it is the grant manager’s duty to ensure that the workload is distributed. He/she might either distribute it to the existing domain allocators based on their expertise or add an additional domain allocator from the community to capture the overflow of the applications.
- The teams collaborate online only, but on a regular basis. There would be a fixed schedule decided as per the convenience of all the team members, to discuss the progress and alterations to the process.
2/ Scope of the “Risk Parameters update research” Domain:
- I have an update here, I have discussed this domain with @pauljlei - Protocol Program Manager at Gauntlet as part of Domain Allocator interviews, and we have decided to not have “Risk parameter update research” as one of the domains, since the team is already serving the DAO, conducting research on Risk Parameters and managing market risk for Compound,
Hope this answers your questions. Sorry for the delay in the response.
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I’ve had a chance to talk with the Questbook team surrounding their grants program, and I look forward to seeing it implemented within Compound. I am currently an active delegate on behalf of StableNode within Optimism in which token holders vote to provide grants to protocols and have seen many issues in transparency and efficiency.
Grant delegation and transparency are two key issues that need improvement, and hopefully, Questbook will provide those solutions.
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Hi everyone, here are the final updates on this proposal, before we go for the voting!
Firstly, apologies for the delay, as I was away from work for a couple of weeks due to my medical treatment and it took some time to schedule all the calls with the domain allocator applicants.
Please find the updates as below:
-
Domain Allocators
Thanks to the tweet from @rleshner we had 20+ applications for the domain allocator roles. Post a thorough evaluation, the following domain allocators have been chosen as below.
-
Domain: New protocol ideas and dapps, Miscellaneous
- Allocator: allthecolors (@allthecolors )
- Details
- Domain: Security Analysis Tools & Security Bounties
-
Domain: Developer Tooling
- Allocator: Madhavan, Questbook’s CEO (Pro-bono basis)
- Details
- P.S: Madhavan is operating as an interim Domain Allocator for “Developer Tooling” since we did not find any qualified applicant yet. This role is still open for applications.
-
Domain: Multichain Strategy
- Allocator : Bobby Bola from Stablenode ( @Bobbay_StableNode)
- Details
-
Domain: New protocol ideas and dapps, Miscellaneous
-
Domains
The finalized domains for the grants program are as follows, as per the voting results:
- New protocol ideas and dapps
- Security Analysis Tools & Security Bounties
- Developer Tooling
- Multichain Strategy
Though “Risk Parameters Updates Research” has been one of the top-5 voted domains from the community, we will not have it as one of the domains. Post the conversation with @pauljlei, Protocol Program Manager at Gauntlet as part of Domain Allocator interviews, we have decided not to have “Risk parameter update research” as one of the domains, since the team is already serving the DAO, conducting research on Risk Parameters and managing market risk for Compound.
-
Changes in the Committee Org Structure:
As mentioned by @adam here and as per the guidelines of the compound labs team, the organization structure of the grants program had to be changed. The onus is now on the program manager to communicate regarding the approved projects to the community and the lab’s team through bi-weekly community developer calls and regular communication over discord.
So there will be a Grants SAFE, with 3/5 multi-sig, between the program manager and the 4 domain allocators. We will then have 4 SAFEs for each of the domains with a 2/2 between the program manager and the specific domain allocator.
Grants SAFE is where all the initial funds flow from the treasury for the grants program. This SAFE holds funds related to operational costs, committee compensation, and the grants budget initially. The domain level SAFEs will have funds only for the disbursal to the approved applications
-
Budget and Committee Compensation:
There are a couple of updates from the previously discussed compensation here:
- The number of domains and domain allocators is reduced to 4 from the initially proposed 5.
- Compound Labs cannot take up a paid role.
Therefore the updated grant budget is $1.2M with $300K for each domain.
The updated committee compensation is $200K for 4 Domain Allocators and one Program manager.
P.S: Madhavan from Questbook will be operating on a pro-bono basis as an interim domain allocator for “Developer Tooling”, till we find another qualified domain allocator.
Thank you,
Harsha
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The updates to the proposal look good to me. Excited to see if this moves forward from here.
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Update on Legal Compliances of CGP 2.0:
We’re working with BLG - Blockchain Lawyers Group for the CGP 2.0 legal compliances. Among the founding members of this group are:
- eaglelex: Law Professor and EU licensed Attorney, Polygon Technology Advisor, Legal advisor for the Polygon Grants Program.
- MDLawyer: Corporate and Venture Capital Lawyer in London
- ByianMienert: Crypto Lawyer, first-ever Ph.D. written on DAO law
- LarryFlorio: GC Delphia; Corporate Lawyer with Securities expertise
The BLG independent Legal Advisors will support CGP 2.0 for the contractual drafting, the application of KYC standards, and every legal issue that may arise during the grant disbursement phase. They will also be available for early-stage legal support to the selected projects.
Accepted grant applicants of CGP 2.0 will sign a contract (sample) post the KYC to ensure that the grant fund isn’t misused. BLG will receive a contribution of $3K USD for the above-mentioned tasks, payment will be made from the operation fund budget received as part of this program. We are working with Synaps for the KYC/KYB of the grant applicants.
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Thank you for the updates and consistent progress!
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Talked with the team at Questbook and we’re excited to see this come to a vote! We missed the CGP 1.0 but are excited to see this newer revamped program come live!
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I’m excited to see this grant proposal come to a vote so Compound can start building more security tooling as part of the domain I’ll be managing!
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What’s cooking here, any progress?
Hi, yes, there’s been a lot of progress in the last 15 days, thanks for asking. This is what happened in the last 15 days:
- Had calls with blockchain clubs at various universities, and some of the major comp token holders to take their feedback on the proposal. Incorporated this feedback into the latest proposal.
- With the help of the compound community members, evaluated various ways in which the proposal can be put up for voting, and met a couple of them at ethBagota to understand the process in detail.
- Requested to whitelist me in order to put up the proposal for voting, based on the last update I received from the compound team, we are almost ready. So most likely we will have the proposal up for voting next week!
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awesome! looking forward to it.
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Harsha, thanks for keeping the program moving forward.
Before a proposal is created & voted on, I have a few observations & questions to help ensure the CGP 2.0 is more successful than CGP 1.0:
- Over the course of the original grants program, there was a shift towards “RFP” and deliverable based funding. This helped ensure that grants went towards outcomes, instead of being delivered up-front with varying (and in many cases, very little) progress. Beyond the contract (above), how will CGP 2.0 ensure that grant recipients deliver on their stated goals? Will there be presentations on community calls, progress reports, or incremental disbursements?
- The original grants program returned approximately half of its allocated COMP back to the community as unused after six months. If a domain is unallocated after six months, will it’s unused portion be returned to the community?
- As grants manager, how will the program be marketed? Will you be able to take over the compoundgrants Twitter account and website, etc?
- How will the time spent by the allocators and manager be tracked?
In general, I would strongly suggest a smaller initial budget for each domain (e.g. $200k over 6 months) knowing that the community can easily increase funding for any domain on an as-needed basis, especially if it is showing results.
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Thanks for asking these questions @rleshner , please find the responses below:
Over the course of the original grants program, there was a shift towards “RFP” and deliverable based funding. This helped ensure that grants went towards outcomes, instead of being delivered up-front with varying (and in many cases, very little) progress. Beyond the contract (above), how will CGP 2.0 ensure that grant recipients deliver on their stated goals? Will there be presentations on community calls, progress reports, or incremental disbursements?
Spot on. To precisely address the same issue, we would be giving out Milestone-based payouts through the tool. The entire grant amount would not be disbursed immediately when an application gets approved. The payouts will be done per milestone. Please find the detailed product wiki for making milestone-based payments here.
Milestone-based payout product screens for the allocators:
The grant proposal has a structure where the applicant must share the milestones and the deliverables to receive the specific payouts.
Grant Application Sample:
Each approved applicant will be required to share their work & progress with the community on regular grants calls (Will be setup exclusively apart from the compound community dev calls if there are too many grant applications). They also use the grants channel on discord to share their work and take the feedback or support from the community.
- The original grants program returned approximately half of its allocated COMP back to the community as unused after six months. If a domain is unallocated after six months, will it’s unused portion be returned to the community?
That’s right, all the remaining funds from the grants program will be returned to the treasury at the end of the program. Also, if there is a domain that is seeing a lot of applications over the other, we might be shifting the funds between the domains accordingly on a case-to-case basis.
- As grants manager, how will the program be marketed? Will you be able to take over the compoundgrants Twitter account and website, etc?
If it is possible to do that, that would be great. Since there is an existing audience for the compound grants twitter page already, Would love to take it over and re-activate it. We planned to do twitter spaces with grant applicants and reviewers and also spread the word in the developer communities regularly. The chosen domain allocators have also mentioned how they would spread the word and source applications in their one-pagers. The Questbook tool also has 20K MAU who come to the tool to apply for the grants programs.
Ref: https://www.similarweb.com/website/questbook.app/#traffic
- How will the time spent by the allocators and manager be tracked?
The allocators and the manager clock their hours and submit their weekly reports, which can be publicly viewed. This report has specific details like:
- Proposal reviewed | Hours clocked
- Activities performed to market the grants program | Hours clocked
- Miscellaneous | Hours clocked
In general, I would strongly suggest a smaller initial budget for each domain (e.g. $200k over 6 months) knowing that the community can easily increase funding for any domain on an as-needed basis, especially if it is showing results.
We understand the suggestion of $200K instead of $300K for the initial budget for each domain for 6 months Robert, and we agree to it. Will update the proposal and in case more funds are needed, we will request them accordingly.
Most of the concerns here are addressed in the Delegator Onboarding Documentation which will be shared once the program is live. Have shared the relevant parts above for now.
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