Grant proposal for further developing chef NFTs ranking for fun and utility on solrank.app

I’m the developer of solrank.app. It’s a niche site for Solana NFTs and includes a ranking engine that employs a statistical rarity algorithm, like Moonrank. The niche I envision for Solrank two fold. 1) I want to provide a tool for projects that wants to get up and running with a third party ranking site. 2) I want to provide projects additional utilities specific to their project.

Marinade is uniquely architected in a number of ways:

  1. Being able to lock their own token and have the NFT level up
  2. Being able to burn and retrieve the locked the tokens
  3. Burned tokens affect ranking due to changes in how many rarities are present
  4. Unintended, but never the less a reality, the slow minting makes it fun to check on your ranking when new mints occur.

For Marinade, I’ve made two ranking pages, one for burned and and one for “active”, for lock of a better word, and a number of toggles to switch between rarities, locked mnde etc.

Going forward, one idea that was presented to me was to make a weekly leaderboard showing changes. Other ideas are to present the top five in each “category” (eg. top by rarity, top by locked MNDE, most unique burned etc).

Also, once the chefs are burned and sharks are introduced, the same system will be applied to those. This means that the ranking, and the leader boards will be ever changing. All of these will have a section on the front page, even if other collections should show up on the site.

My proposal is then to allow for a grant for what’s already been developed and for the work that will be made in the future. I would ask for the governors to discuss and suggest a grant amount that is appropriate in this thread.

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Hi Octo, congratulations on being the first to post something grant-related! You even beat us to the actual forming of the committee, which I have pushed back to let the recent governance discussions play out, but it’s good to get the ball rolling if what you want is feedback.

I’ll make a new category and move this post there.

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How does this help Marinade with growing its TVL and/or promoting decentralisation? I don’t feel like every Marinade related project should receive a grant because they do something.

I’d rather see the amount asked for come from the poster and not the community.

It’s unclear to me why Marinade would invest in this and not some more general VC fund.

I’d need to see some audience numbers and maybe some kind of enhanced marketing for Marinade as a result of the grant but that seems a long ways away at this point.

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On the other hand, having community members building “comfort of life” products for MNDE and mSOL holders frees up the team to work on projects that make those points move forward. If not for community, those products that enhance the experience without being game-changing would never see the light, as the priority will always be on “more important” projects on Marinade’s side.

I personally feel that a grant for such a tool would be deserved, as long as it’s somewhat correlated to the amount of time and work that has been put into it. It’s useful to a subset of MNDE holders (the ones interested in rarity of Chef NFTs, for example) and the tool could probably be improved easily (eg: displaying the amount of MNDE locked at the first glance, offering an easier way to arbitrage on NFT marketplaces)

To be completely honest, I doubt that it’s products receiving grants that will bring the most to TVL, at least in the short-term future. But I do think that products receiving grants can and will enhance the experience of holding a Chef NFT.

If you/we feel that the product in the current state is not worthy of a grant, could some improvements to it change your mind for example? Or as Btuck mentions, could the audience it built and brought be a data that changes the situation?

Maybe that’s also a good way to look at it (and future grants moving forward).

This project is aimed at bringing interest and visibility for holders. It gives you an easy way to look up the stats for a single CHEF (amount locked in particular). You can of course look up individual pieces of the data and piece them together yourself, but this takes time and effort, and you will not be able to do a comparative ranking either without the complete dataset and the ranking algorithm. On the other hand, the data could be fed back to the Marinade Discord if you want to setup a bot with a webhook to show the stats inline.

As for only supporting grants that increase Marinade’s TVL, then you’re targeting a very special niche and you’ll mostly get submissions from existing marketplaces, LP pools etc. Building the brand can’t be quantified by simply looking at how much this project or any other similar ones contribute to an increase in TVL.

Time and effort wise, building this has consumed a lot of hours - weeks of coding and tweaking. It’s also hosted and updated daily, which consumes CPU time (but more generally I don’t quantify this in CPU time per se, but look at this as a monthly expenditure).

I’ve a positive view of this, but it depends on the amount requested.
A big part of decentralization of Marinade itself, is to put MNDE in the hands of thousands of individuals, and of course, for grants, we should try to choose the ones that genuinely care for Marinade.

Between 50 to 100K is what I had in mind. Hopefully on the upper end so I could sport a Level 4 Chef. I would never sell it though, so it’s not about the monetary value per se.