These are really good comments. Thanks @arr00! Responses below.
Firstly, to echo Robert, I find the committee membership questionable. Some of members have never posted on these forums or in the Discord as far as I can tell, and I don’t believe that any member is familiar with the Compound protocol codebase.
Since we posted the proposal, we’ve had a community member reach out and volunteer to join the committee. The company they work for does understand the Compound codebase, which should improve the committee’s grasp of the technical side of things. If you’re reading this, know Compound’s codebase, and want to join the committee too, please don’t hesitate to reach out! (I’m larry#7198 on Discord).
@adam: if you’re interested in joining, let me know!
As far as some of the members not posting on forums/Discord goes — this is something we really went back and forth on. One question I have is should being an active community member be a prerequisite for being on this committee and potentially future grants committees? You can sort of argue both sides. On the one hand, active community members know what the treasury needs to provide funding for better than anyone. On the other hand, someone who is an active community member may not actually be good at running a grants program!
Then there’s this question: what does it mean to be an active community member? Is an investor who owns and thinks deeply about COMP but doesn’t have time to be part of the Discord / forums not an active community member? We certainly don’t have all the answers to these questions, but I think as a community, it’s worth thinking through them to set norms that define how future committees of this nature form.
There should be a more concrete process defined for the lead and reviewers to commit to follow
Absolutely. We didn’t post the process as part of the original proposal to keep it digestible (my sense is the longer it is, the fewer people read it in full). The original plan was to post the proposal, get community feedback, post it for an on-chain vote, and — if the proposal passes — to share a process grants applicants should expect to go through. But since you asked, here is the tentative process! It’s tentative because it hasn’t been tested in practice yet. I’m 100% sure parts of the process will change as we go about administering the program.
Grants Process
- We want to make this a speedy process for applicants. Apart from the initial ramp-up period, we want to get the time from application submission to grant disbursement to 10 days or less (8 days for lead to review and 2 days for reviewers to vote and disburse the funds)
- The lead will review every application and send an “approve” or “deny” decision along with a brief explanation to the reviewers. Reviewers are expected to review the lead’s email and reply with an “approve” or “deny” vote as per their independent judgement
- Depending on the outcome of the reviewers’ vote, the grant will either be denied (no disbursement) or approved (grant is disbursed). If the grant is approved, reviewers should send it to the recipient no longer than 2 days after they first received the lead’s email
- Multi-sig will require majority vote to pass (4/7 or more votes)
Building on the idea of processes, there should be an off-chain method for the community to vote on CGP related issues such as amendment to defined processes and changes to the committee.
That’s a great idea (I took note of it when you first mentioned it on the Clubhouse community call). We’ll work on setting up an off-chain vote for making small changes to the committee.
Something which should be considered is the practicality of distributing $1M per quarter on the Compound Ecosystem.
To your point, it’s hard to know how many applications we will receive before the fact. We may get $250k or $5mm worth of grant applications — the only way to find out is to launch the program and gather data! Our thinking was it’s better to play it safe than sorry: if $2mm is too much, we will simply return the funds to the treasury at the conclusion of the program. The outcome we wanted to avoid is we get something like $1.5mm in fantastic grant applications per quarter, which would require us to go through the governance process once more to ask the community for more funding. That would seriously slow the process down and make it less appealing to grants applicants.