• Proposal
  • OIP-135: Olympus Grants Program 1-Year Review & Path Forward

Summary

This OIP seeks authority from the community continue the Grants Program, whilst making adjustments to operations, namely:

  • Do not allocate more funds to the program at this time

  • Fold the Grants Program into Partnerships, and dissolve the committee in favor of partnership team review with council’s ability to veto

  • Cadence for community OIP and review to move from 3 month cycle to when additional funding would be requested

  • Transfer existing grants funds (~$500k of gOHM) from previous grants OIPs (55, 90, 108) to the Olympus Association which will become the entity granting funds on behalf of the DAO (though still administered by the Grants Working Group)

Accelerating OHM’s Use as a Unit of Account
It’s been one year since the Olympus community approved the creation of the Grants Program in OIP-55 (forum, snapshot). OIP-55 stipulated that the grant program be run for a trial period of 3.3 months. The program was then renewed by community governance as part of OIP-90 (forum, snapshot) and OIP-108 (forum, snapshot).

The Grants Program aimed to benefit Olympus and OHM by helping to support aligned protocols that drive OHM’s core mission of becoming Web3’s reserve currency and supporting key Olympus12 goals.

At this time it is the recommendation of the Grants Working Group that merging efforts with the Partnerships team would be the most effective use of resources to achieve further adoption of OHM use as a Unit of Account and expand OHM’s utility throughout DeFi. The high level success came from internal referrals, so reducing the current time spent on intake given the macro environment is the recommended course of action.

Grantee Achievement Highlights

Here are a few highlights Grants has enabled within the econOHMy since our public launch on 14th February 2022:

  • Total of 37,536.5 OHM (worth 629,447 USD at time of sending, current value of 375,365 USD) awarded across 20 grants.

  • High level successes:

    • Education

    • Artemis

    • Of 17 students trained, 2 have built on OHM with a total of 13 capstone projects done in the two bootcamps, from which 6 are being developed as real products to deploy on mainnet

    • Olympus Scholars Program

    • Asfi of WAGMI Labs says: “Our goal was to make interactive educational content that delivers comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment. A grant from Olympus helped us deliver on that and community feedback (big shout out to Relwyn) helped us improve our prototype a lot. We have signed on two more customers since then. Thank you Ohmies!”

    • Utility

    • MoverDAO

    • A non-custodial debit card that allows you to spend gOHM via MoverDAO (yes you are reading that correctly - now known as HolyHeld).

    • On the way to delivering an Olympus mobile payments App (think OHM Venmo). Majin never needing to leave OHM!

    • Infra

    • Playgrounds

    • Empowering users with on-chain data analytics tools which will help drive utility and adoption for Onchain Governance

    • Built data and metrics interface for Olympus Pro (now Bond Protocol) here’s a quote from Edgecaser, the Data and Metrics lead, “We contracted the PG Subgrounds team to build a data feed for Olympus Pro bond performance, which needed to be built in as short a time as possible. Their team showed utmost professionalism, discipline, and talent in their craft. They delivered on time and to spec; with impeccable documentation. I look forward to working with them again.

    • And then Edgecaser again from a more recent collab: “Playgrounds helped the Olympus Data and Metrics group monitor bond releases on day 1 with 5 minutes of setup. Their team made sure everything was up to snuff and problem-free. I would happily work with them again anytime.”

    • OHM-EPNS integration

    • Will enable information and updates to be sent to OHM token holders directly to EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification Service)-enabled wallets. According to the EPNS documentation: “EPNS is a notifications protocol which enables users (wallet addresses) to receive notifications. Using the protocol, any dApp, smart contract or service can send notifications to users (wallet addresses) in a platform agnostic fashion (mobile, web, or user wallets).”

    • EPNS will be immediately beneficial to the Olympus ecosystem, especially as we move towards on-chain governance.

Ensuring a tight link between Grants activities and Olympus12 priorities
The Grants program has had requests for more than $13mm in funding across 100 unique applications. Over the last quarter 5 additional applicants have been identified as being within remit of current priorities of the protocol. These are:

*

  1. Olympus Scholars Program by Asfi of WAGMI Labs ($30,000)

  2. 20 active students. Check lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/@WagmiNerds

  3. Content is here: https://rise.articulate.com/share/SzmSjROPlHfmftfbu7XmgIGSAigm3bMI#/

*

  1. Investigating the Interaction between MEV Bots and Olympus POL ($5,000)

  2. Research document into MEV Bots impact on Olympus POL with research conclusions which can inform Policy.

*

  1. Elastic Finance DAO ($25,000)

  2. Utilities include integrating OHM into the Elastic Vault and pairing the vault’s reward token EEFI with OHM, and engaging in other product development activities.

*

  1. TripsTrade ($25,000)

  2. Building an open source payments SDK which will allow merchants to accept OHM as payment and keep it as OHM. Also integrating OHM as a payment method on the TT site.

*

  1. Asphodel ($25,000)

  2. Building an economic controller system needed for proper integration of external tokens with their game smart-contracts. This would be turned into an open source SDK allowing other games to easily utilise OHM.

Budget to date

Since launching in early December 2021 the Grants program has been operating during an ongoing down trend in the markets. As such the USD value of OHM granted to the program via OIPs 55, 90 and 108 has seen a significant decrease in value requiring various difficult negotiations and compromises to manage these facts.

Grants supported

  • Total of 629,447 USD of OHM awarded over the lifespan of the Grants Program.

  • On December 6th the community granted $1.5mm via OIP-50 (OGPv1) of which 164,083.48 USD was distributed. The remaining $1,335,916.52 worth of OHM remained in the DAO multisig.

  • OGPv1 committed to a total of $824,999.00 USD across 13 grantees.

  • On April 10th the community granted $1mm via OIP-90 which would cover the remaining $660,915.52 USD of obligations, new grants and operating costs for the program.

  • Over this period there was a further 50% drop in the market price of $OHM.

  • Due to these adverse market conditions the figure of $660,915.52 was negotiated down to a total of $271,363.61 which was paid out at a rate of $32USD per $OHM (the operating rate set by OIP-90) for grantees carrying over from OGPv1. This had the effect of a reduction in the USD value of the grants.

  • On August 21st the community granted $333,000 USD via OIP-108.

  • With Artemis ($50k) and OHM-EPNS ($9k), Olympus Scholars ($30k), MEV Olympus POL Research ($5k), Elastic Finance DAO ($25k), TripsTrade ($25k) and Asphodel ($25k) grants, this puts remaining funds available to the program at ~200 gOHM (~$500k)

Legals and Governance

Given the launch of the Olympus Association (OIP-124 snapshot), it is proposed to transfer the remaining grants funds and contributor compensation budget to the Association.

Summary

  • Do not add additional funds to the Grants Program at this time.

  • Cadence for community OIP and review to move from 3 month cycle to when additional funding would be requested

  • Fold Grants Program efforts under Partnerships using existing funds allocated as part of OIPs 55, 90, 108. Dissolve the Grants Committee, Partnerships team to review with Council’s ability to veto.

  • Transfer existing grants funds from OIPs 55, 90, 108 to the Olympus Association which will become the entity granting funds on behalf of the DAO

  • Existing and recently confirmed Grants will be stewarded beyond the tenure of this OIP.

  • Unused funds allocated to the program may be reallocated within the DAO should the program not continue.

Polling period

The RFC polling period commences now and will run for 24 hours. The RFC may be followed by a forum temperature check which may then be followed by a Snapshot vote which will last at least 72 hours.

Poll

For: Approve the changes as specified

Against: Do not approve the changes as specified

How do we proceed?

This poll has ended.

    Thank you for posting!! I think it makes sense at this point in time to fold grants into partnerships while still supporting the current grantees.

    I think the proposed new set-up makes sense and will reduce overall operational overhead. It would also allow for a more targeted approach. For example, rather than reviewing external applications, grants could come through referrals or by setting up bounties for specific use cases/integrations the protocol needs.

    Makes sense from an efficiency and priority POV. Thanks for the hardwork by those who have been given grants so far and delivered on them. If this is folded into Partnerships will there be any push-activities to encourage grant applications, or will it be passive and wait for enquiries? I think there is a positive perception associated with the offering of grants to build in the ecosystem and would like to see this continued in some way so it has some visibility, even if it is just small.

      I think this proposal makes sense. Didn't realize so many of these projects had been started, some very exciting ones in there! Would be worthwhile to wind down grants and focus on the shipping and integration of those projects ASAP and then revisit grants sometime in the future when appropriate.

      thomasscovell our greatest success has been referring folks to complete the grants process! We'll still keep things open, but we'll also encourage new applicants.

      Noted on HolyHeld!

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