Looking Ahead - Grants v2

Early feedback on OGP v1 indicates there are the following needs: 

• a) Activate a higher number of smaller grants whilst not swamping existing Committee member process

  • Activate the wider ecosystem to contribute to Olympus by giving clear and transparent avenues to accessing smaller amounts of funding through a nimble and efficient process
  • Proposed solution: Mycelial Method (see below).

• b) Solicit strategic developments to assist in achieving grant and DAO wide OKRs

  • Ability to proactively solicit for specific projects through a Request for Proposals process, including the ability to set scope, set up bounties and approach potential teams to help develop

  • Proposed solution: Set up Request for Proposals process and seek authority from the community for grants to set, coordinate, fund and manage projects.

• c) Form Joint Ventures with aligned ecosystems

  • Ability to form joint ventures with other grant organisations to co-fund grants which are of benefit to both Olympus and another ecosystem e.g. Olympus and Gnosis putting up 100k USD in match funding for projects of mutual benefit

  • Proposed solution: Seek authority from community to set up and lead Joint Ventures with other grants organisations

• d)  Fund internal projects, not only external

  • Ability to fund projects solicited from *within* the DAO, not just external to the DAO.

  • Proposed solution: Seek authority from the community to fund projects originating from within the DAO, not just external to DAO.

• e) Clear process for grants larger than 100k USD in scope

  • Ability to issue grants larger than 100k USD

  • Proposed solution: Enshrine that grants/projects of larger than 100k USD need to seek authority from the community via OIP in addition to 4/7 committee approval.

• f) Decentralise allocation of grants capital to a wider set of OHMies

  • Ability for grants to experiment with opening up decision making to a wider set of OHMies e.g through setting up Shark Tank style curated pitches of pre-vetted grantees to community to fund via Give - with OGP match funding 

  • Proposed solution: Seek authority from community to allow OGP Committee to fund experiments in broadening participation in grants capital allocation to community

Framework: Mycelial Method

OGP v1 was an adaptation of Uniswap Grants. The Mycelial Method iterates from this starting point and adapts and combines Lido’s grants program (which is an adaptation of Uniswaps process, which itself is an adaptation of Ethereum Foundation’s process) and the Web3Foundation’s grant program

• Sand grains (up to $1000) can be handled by a pair of stewards reporting to two OGP committee members out of their individual committee member budgets (50:50).

• Pebbles (up to $10,000) require a third OGP committee member to agree to the grant approval and participate in the evaluation of the results.

• Boulders (up to $100,000) require majority approval of the OGP committee.

• Mountains (more than $100k) additionally require a regular OIP governance process.

Quarterly budget:

The OGP Individual Committee Members will have a max quarterly aggregate budget of up to $105,000 USD, divided into individual budgets of $15,000 USD for each OGP committee member, from the total budget of the wider OGP budget of $1mm per 3 months. Budget and caps to be reassessed after the end of a quarter.

If an OGP committee member exhausts their quarterly individual committee member budget, they can still propose to the full committee that sand grains and pebbles receive grants out of the general portion of the budget, but will need to obtain approval of a majority of the OGP committee members. Committee members may delegate their share of budget to be administered by an alternate committee member.

While the goals and priorities of the grant program will be thoroughly discussed and reviewed by the community through public discourse, the decision to start the OGP by operating as a small committee is to ensure that the application and decision process will be efficient and predictable, so applicants have clear objectives and timely decisions. All OGP committee members are equal in power but have different specialties.

At the end of three months the committee makes a report on the grants program and a retrospective on how to improve it.

Accountability and Auditing:

All successful Sand-grains and Pebbles will be listed publicly in real time upon acceptance,  including which committee member/s approved the grant. Payments will not be released to the grantee until the deliverable has been completed and checked. Deliverables will also be made public in real time. This information will be communicated on the Grants notion section.

All Boulders and Mountains are listed upon committee approval and negotiation of agreements.

Summary

Grants rules and we want to keep growing the econOHMy GDP, activating our ecosystem and expanding OlympusDAO beyond web3. It’s also integral that the Grants team be empowered to be effective in the most cost efficient and impactful ways given current market conditions. We will shortly put forward an OIP requesting

• Implement the Mycelial Method to enable nimble funding of smaller grants to activate a wider number of contributors from the ecosystem to contribute to OlympusDAO

• Set up a Request for Proposals process and seek authority from the community for grants to set, initiate, coordinate, fund and manage projects.

• Lead Joint Ventures with other grants organisations up to a max of $100k per venture.

• Fund internally originated projects as well as externally.

• Ratify that projects seeking > $100k in funding require OIP in addition to majority committee vote.

• Run the program on a rolling basis with a review, report to community and OIP every 3 months.

• $1,335,916.52 from OGP v1 was not spent and remains in the DAO multisig.

• Fund Grants multisig with $180k of OHM over 3 installments of 60k USD worth of OHM over 3 months to cover administration of the program with contributors compensated commensurate with the rates approved within the DAO.

• Fund Grants multisig with $1mm in DAO owned OHM from DAO multisig (OHM rate set at time of OIP-90 snapshot passing (Time Weighted Average Price or similar)) within 7 days of OIP-90 Snapshot passing.

• Unused funds contribute towards the next OGP OIP budget or returned to DAO multisig if OGP is not renewed.

Having a community approved budget means that there will be transparency and accountability for the program - if we aren’t performing we will have to turn up here next quarter and tell you why and provide you the opportunity to cut our funding.

Supporting Docs

• Launch post

• Olympus Grants Community Update_March Final.pdf

• Grants Improvements Doc (Mycelial Method): OGP Improvements - Public

• Grants OKRs - Public

• Grants February Update

• Grants March Update

• Grantees Funded Status

• Key Tweet threads:

  • Grants launch announcement post 

  • Meet the OHMies making grants happen

  • Grants “ShroomScaling” post a.k.a what’s with all the mushrooms

  • Grants ‘Utensils Model’ explained 

Polling period

The temperature-check polling period commences now and will run for at least 72 hours. The temperature check may then be followed by a Snapshot vote which will last at least 72 hours.

Poll 

For: Approve the program as specified

Against: Do not approve the program as specified

0xNah that's very kind, thank you. I'd be remiss not to point out the many processes and frameworks that the OGP has iterated upon that originated elsewhere in the DAO. To name a few:

• The onboarding and process documentation developed by Partnerships/Olympus Pro which often has partners saying that their experiences are the most professional they have experienced in the space. Here's one from a partner which I just came across yesterday: " thanks for your support throughout this process, can't say enough how professional you guys are we've worked with several projects and you guys run OP super smoothly"
• Grants has adapted Incubators project evaluation benchmark framework which itself is an adapted version of Policy's Treasury Asset Evaluation framework.
• All of the maintenance work which Engineering and Ops do in the background, often invisibly and thanklessly, that allow all teams to work as seamlessly as they do across 100+ contributors…

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The above are just some snapshots from what the contributors are up to, let alone everything that the core team is whipping up in the kitchen. A refrain I often here in free and open source communities / projects is that we stand on the shoulders of giants, which is a sentiment which also lands here at Olympus.

All that being said - thank you for your support!

crud From my perspective it would make more sense to extend this program indefinitely and post a report like this every quarter to keep the community informed on what is happening. imho. in the governance process of such programs the ones who actually do the job should have the full power of execution without permission as long as certain level of transparency on the why and how is established and community should only vote not to do something…

Thank you for this feedback Crud. What you're proposing is inline with what is the proposed course of action for Working Groups within Olympus. The cadence of rolling Projects/verticals/Working Groups who report back to stakeholders/community every 3 months is a standard which is emerging best practice in the ecosystem. We see the same over at MakerDAO for example.

Given we've so recently setup the Working Group some of these early OIPs will be fairly detailed as they are setting the foundations for furthering the decentralization of the DAO. To this end it is then about requesting explicit authority from the community/token holders to ensure each Working Groups jurisdiction is established clearly. As time passes and we mature as Working Groups the Reports back to community / OIP renewals will get much more succinct and standardized where we'll simply be communicating:

• What progress has been made on OKRs
• What projects have been funded and how are they contributing to WG OKRs and DAO-wide OKRs
• What has been the positive impact for Olympus / the econOHMy

This is a long way of saying - future reports/updates/OIPs will be much shorter! In any case - thank you for your support!

In case commenting on forums is not your Jam we'll be running a concurrent twitter thread in case you have a preference for commenting there:

https://twitter.com/wollemipine/status/1509671147306364930?s=20&t=eJAXjHMUcdW4dNRNA0_g_A

In case listening is more your thing you could check out this agora spaces from about 30 mins in we talk about the grants OIP-90 and some of how it fits into @OlympusDAO's broader moves towards decentralisation

https://twitter.com/wollemipine/status/1509671151458750464?s=20&t=eJAXjHMUcdW4dNRNA0_g_A

Just joined the Odyssey spaces and spoke about some of the innovations in the Grants x Give. You can hear that in the last 20 mins of the spaces here: https://twitter.com/OdysseyOlympus/status/1509670624997822473?s=20&t=6rV8k8upAu3qwS7RetIfrA

Mark11 Big supporter of the grants program - aside from funding things which will drive value and adoption to Olympus - the reputational dividends alone would make it worthwhile

Agree Mark11 - and thanks for your support. Setting up effective grants programs is no small feat. There are a large number of protocols who have been around for much longer than Olympus who struggle to get grants departments set up and run effectively / consistently. Having effective programs, such as grants, an incubator, an accelerator, a media/podcast/news program, a partnerships team, product teams such as Olympus Pro etc etc are all strong positive signals to the market.

danner What we are currently struggling with is that the conversation didn’t really nail a total grant amount. This was really our oversight, and we were probably too cautious in our communications.

We would welcome a more formalized acceptance process, where the payout schedule and the amounts due are set out, because that would allow us to plan better.

@danner thank you do much for taking the time to feedback. We're really boolish on Metrics and how it can feed into various programs and departments we have within Olympus. You're absolutely correct that there is alot of room for improvement with being able to formalize and predict things such as payment schedules etc. We're very hopeful that the iterative improvements outlined in this proposal will lay the foundations to allow us to achieve these necessary improvements. For example, once the grants multisig is funded post snapshot this will then mean the Grants WG will be in funds when contracts and milestones are being drawn up which then means there is not an additional step, of unknown length, which we'll be dependent on.

So, thanks for yours and all grantees in this first cohorts patience, understanding and support. All start ups have growing pains but we're very glad you are on this journey with us. LFG!

tex I think that the "Request for Proposals" outlined in Grants v2 can help hone in on a similar list for Olympus Grants. The current scope of Education, Infrastructure, and Utility is quite broad and may not provide the granularity to solicit technical grant applications.

Thanks for the feedback @tex. +1 on refining eligible funding categories. I think where we landed on this is that the eligible funding categories / request for proposals process can sit within the jurisdiction of (3) and (4) of the Grants 'How we Work' process. You can see that outlined in the Grants section of notion (publicly available here). In other words eligible funding categories / request for proposals would be steered by the Grants commitee in consultation with Core and DAO-wide Strategos/Leads. My read is that the current OIP could adopt such an iteration without needing any materially change the OIP. wdyt?

tex I'm not sure how we should be thinking about administration costs as a DAO and think there are issues with the incentive structures for baselining on approved/distributed funds. Given the proposed quarterly budget of $180k, I would appreciate some more information on how we should perceive admin costs and best practices from other programs.

There are a few moving parts here worth expanding upon.

1. Progressive decentralization of the DAO
2. Benchmarking against other departments within the DAO
3. Benchmarking against other grants departments in other protocols

(1) Progressive decentralization of the DAO
Our understanding is that the vision for the future of the DAO is that it be as lean as possible to manage the core products of Olympus. An analogy here might be the Linux Foundation, which has few workers, and most contributions to the Linux ecosystem happen from outside the Foundation. A step in that direction is having Working Groups, such as Grants, be responsible for their own budget, receive authority from the tokenholders to run/renew the program and with the DAO having oversight, auditing and holding WG's accountable (this is a rough overview of how a 'Leadership Council' might play out). The proposed budget of $180k sits within that context and comes out of consultation with Shadow (who is proposed to oversee budget within the Leadership Council framework) as well as strategos and leads of other departments/WG's within the DAO. Having WG's manage their own budgets, which they receive authority for from the token holders, then allows for more predictable budgeting throughout the DAO.

To break that budget down it assumes there is a 3 month remit via OIP and then a month between the end of the OIP and a renewal of the program. For example Grants had this OIP prepared by March 16th on the day the period outlined in OIP-55 concluded. We then need to factor in that the consultation process through the DAO can take time - this is the nature of decentralised organisations - but it would be good if we could work as a DAO to refine the consultation processes so that there's a tighter turn around. Assuming then this amount needs to cover 4 months this is $45k per month, which is lower than the average cost of similarly sized departments in the DAO. Grants comp costs in March came to 39k USD. We've left some room for movement as there is currently some restructuring happening around Marketing which may mean that marketing budget needs to be allowed for within WG's.

(2) Benchmarking against other departments within the DAO
As touched upon in point (1). Average cost of grants department was below average for comparable departments in the DAO. The budget of $180k requires that we budget for 4 months and ensure we remain below average compared to similar sized departments in the DAO.

(3) Benchmarking against other grants departments in other protocols
This is an interesting one. Our grants department is about the equivalent of 4 contributors full time. Compared purely on that level we're comparable to most other grants departments of major protocols with a few notable caveats

a. many grants departments have legal departments that they can pass all contract related work to (drafting contracts, due diligence with grantees, arranging payment details, archiving and documentation of all materials in a legally robust way in case of future audits relating to regulators etc). currently this is done internally within the grants team
b. the purpose of OlympusDAOs grants department is to Grow the EconOHMy; expand the ecosystem & increase EconOHMy GDP, Activate the ecosystem - Reduce friction for building in the econOHMy, Quantify Olympus’ Value Proposition - Establish Olympus Grants as a strong Web3 or crypto brand. This mission goes deeper than just writing cheques and leaving builders to build (which is the predominant approach taken by many grants departments in the space). The grants department seeks to approach the program through the lens of (3,3) and to make sure each project that we support compounds on work of other grantees and of the other departments within the DAO and the network of partners which Olympus is building up.
c. As a department a core value is decentralisation. In line with Olympus aspiring to be a leader in the field of decentralisation we want to go above and beyond what other grants departments are doing. We've listened to the shortcomings and critiques of other programs and built out processes which are designed to assist in the success of the grantees and to make sure their work is folded in to expanding the econOHMy.

Thanks for the feedback @tex lmk if there's anything which you feel needs covering more.