What do you propose?
Establish a grant budget of 10MM MNDE and a committee to oversee and disburse it over time.
The conditions I propose are:
- Initial budget of 10MM MNDE
- A committee of 3 people, with grants passing if they get 2/3 votes.
- The committee should consist of:
- 2 Master chefs
- 1 community member Chef
- Grants up to 250K MNDE per tranche, but starting smaller (see notes on Additional considerations)
- All grants must go to enhance mSOL or MNDE value.
- The end result must be in the community’s control after it is created, to ensure continuity - that is, it must be open source and cannot rely on a closed server that the grantee runs.
- MNDE will be paid out as NFT, upon delivery of agreed-upon milestones.
- Grant proposals must be public for anyone to review and comment, but will not be sent to or require an on-chain vote.
- There will be at least 1 week between the final version of a grant proposal being posted and the committee making a decision to proceed, so that we can get comments from the community.
- Grant proposal and discussion will happen in the forum, so we can keep them around for future reference.
- Final decision on grants will be up to the committee, without an onchain vote, but the community can vote to stop any grant (see Additional considerations).
- It is the committee’s responsibility to ensure that grants are achievable, and to verify delivery before disbursement.
- The committee commits to post, once per quarter, some brief post-mortem notes on the grants that were implemented in the previous quarter (Q2 retrospective would look at the results of the grants deployed in Q1).
Any grant outside these guidelines must go through the usual onchain vote process.
What is the rationale behind the proposal?
Currently, the entire responsibility to build around mSOL and MNDE rests in the hands of the core team, along with a few volunteers contributing work like FlipsideCrypto. We want to make sure we increase Marinade’s TVL, enhance mSOL, and increase MNDE utility, however:
- We cannot expect that the team will scale up in the near future - both because of the financial cost and the coordination overhead;
- We should not assume that all good ideas will come from within the team;
- Nor can we expect external contributors to work for free.
Having a well-defined grant program helps us reward people who help build Marinade, without requiring or expecting an ongoing commitment.
We could use the existing onchain proposal process and have the community vote on grants. However, this will lead to unnecessary overhead and quorum requisites for what are ultimately small disbursements. Creating a grant committee and enabling them to operate within the guidelines the community has approved helps grants proceed faster.
What is the expected positive impact of this change?
I see multiple advantages:
- It will help lighten development load from the team. If you think that there’s a valuable ancillary product, don’t wait for the team to build it - apply for a grant and do it!
- It will bring in outside perspectives for what can be build with and upon Marinade, helping remove the risk of the team getting tunnel vision.
- It will get MNDE in the hands of those willing to build up its value.
- It will help the team and community evaluate collaborations in a speedy manner without requiring an on-chain proposal to disburse.
- It will help add value to mSOL and MNDE without forcing the team to choose between increasing its treasury burn or passing on an interesting collaboration.
Any other considerations?
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Q: What kind of projects will this fund?
- We will focus on things that directly help Marinade grow.
- Some examples: projects and tools built to drive mSOL use, dashboards, specific tools for our users, governance tool improvements.
- Core development will remain within the Master Chefs.
- We may eventually do some grants to build commons projects, but it will neither be a focus nor a priority.
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Q: Isn’t 250K MNDE kind of a lot?
- It could be, and by no means I’d recommend every grantee aims for it. While these rules enable grants up to 250K MNDE, I would strongly advise the committee to keep them smaller at the start, as we test-drive the process
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Q: What sort of project size are you looking for?
- I’d currently suggest that proposals should be executable within 4 calendar weeks - that will help keep scope small and enable a faster learning cycle.
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Q: What if there’s a grant request larger than 250K MNDE?
- We currently prefer the idea of running smaller grants, to get a shorter time to deliverable.
- Even when an idea could arguably only make sense as a large project, it’s best to split down into smaller components and milestones.
- If an applicant still thinks that a grant warrants a larger amount, there are two options: splitting the grant in smaller units, or sending it to a governance vote instead.
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Q: What if I have a large, multi-quarter project in mind?
- Consider breaking it up into smaller, more manageable pieces.
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Q: What if I think a grant is a bad idea?
- Help us out! Get involved in a proposal and give clear reasons as to why.
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Q: I still think a grant is a bad idea but the committee is for it. Shouldn’t the community have veto power?
- They do! If you think the committee is screwing up that badly, launch a governance vote to stop a grant from moving forward.
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Q: How long do you plan the MNDE to last?
- There is no fixed timeline right now, but we do not expect to rush into grants
- Even at 250K MNDE per grant that’s 40 total - it would take us a couple of years to get through it at a pace of 5 grants per quarter.
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Q: Does the “under the community’s control” clause exclude grants that depend on third-party services? For instance, would this cover Marinade-specific work that relies on Flipside data?
- This is a tricky one, since the service could disappear at some point, but I don’t think it makes sense to build everything from scratch. My suggestion would be to say that third-party services should be allowed, as long as the committee determines that it’s likely to be a long-lived service.
