Initialize the Drift Foundation Grant Program

Summary

This proposal requests 100,000 DRIFT to carry out the initial iteration of the Drift Grants Program.

The funds will be managed by ⅔ multi sig governed by the Decision Council.

The proposal is designed to kickstart the foundation grants program with the goal of helping efficiently allocate capital and figure out the best process and structure for a more robust grants program going forward.

Overview

A robust ecosystem can serve as a key competitive advantage in the DeFi space. Given the relatively undifferentiated products and open-source culture, a strong community and ecosystem are both crucial for a protocol’s sustained success. The launch of DRIFT token will enable the foundation to accelerate ecosystem growth and fortify the Drift community through grants. The purpose of this proposal is to initialise the process of creating a grants system that effectively aligns and supports Drift’s community and ecosystem.

Objectives

Supporting Community Initiatives

• Short-term: Short term the objective is to increase community engagement and help grow the size of the community by providing easy and open access to community members to lead community initiatives.
• Vision: Long term it is about aligning incentives in a way fosters a robust and active community.

Developing Ecosystem

• Short-term: Over the next two months we want to start to push integration and figure out a process to source and support teams building on top of drift. We want this proposal to serve to help support people looking to build on Drift.
• Vision: The long-term vision is to have Drift become a foundational layer that supports a flourishing ecosystem of projects.

Answer key questions about the Grants program

• Do people want small grants?
  • Figuring out if there is demand for smaller grant sizes that may not make sense for Futarchic markets and figure out if the proposed proposal structure makes sense to handle them.
• Do we need to source?
  • The current structure is passive/supporting, is there enough quality inbound where this model works, or do we need to scale up the grant program to support sourcing.

What does success look like?

• Supporting Community initiatives: Figure out a system to evaluate and support initiatives.
• Developing Ecosystem: Figure out the best way to support projects going through the futarchic system.
• Testing Grants program: Answer the two objective questions.
• Overall: Have a clearer vision for direction of the Foundation Grants Program and have confidence drafting and supporting a more substantial future proposal.

Review

At the end of the 2 month period the analyst will put together a comprehensive report reviewing all activities done by the team, all grants funded/proposed and come up with a recommendation for the program moving forward. The report will include an evaluation of how the grants program completed all objectives, where it fell short and how it should be changed. Ultimate goal is to be able to use learnings from the initial program to draft a more substantial follow up proposal.

Details

Timeframe: 2months, starting on July 1st ending on August 31st.

Looking at other protocols grants programs, we believe it is important to commit heavily in effort and capital. The goal of the initial program is to quickly get started and experiment in design, operations, and best practices so that we can figure out what works best in order to iterate and commit with conviction for v2.

Initiation: This proposal will be decided on through the Futarchic markets. [JH comment: Why do this through Futarchy? Why not execute without then use futarch markets to decide extension?]

Team: 4 People

Ultimately, to have a successful grant program you need a strong and representative team to drive it. Part of the goal for the initial proposal is to figure out the workload/workflow for team members.

• Decision Council: The decision council consists of 3 people and votes on the approval of small proposals. Expectations for the council include voting on each proposal, describing their reasoning behind their vote and working with the analyst to help create a brief summary report analysing each proposal. Expected commitment 0-6hrs per week. The members of the decision council will not be able to vote on proposals in which they are direct beneficiaries from in order to prevent conflicts of interest.

  • Members: Personal info is hidden for privacy, all members are active community members that the team has vetted.
    • Spidey
    • Maskara
    • James

• Analyst: The analyst will be a team member responsible for managing inbound, helping teams draft proposals, supporting throughout the proposal process. The analyst will also be responsible for creating a summary report for each proposal and a final report reviewing success of the initial grants program along with recommendations for the next iteration. To start, Squid from the Drift ecosystem team will do the analyst role to help better explore what are the requirements for the role and the next steps program overall.

• There will be 1 analyst initially. Depending on how the initial proposal goes there may need to be more analysts for future iterations of the grant program depending on the amount of work and the importance of sourcing.

The initial member selection for this proposal was done by looking for contributors and core community members who are motivated and have the skills to excel in their respective positions. Part of the reason for doing a shorter trial grant period was to test run the team and help us figure out what to select for going forward.

Compensation

The majority of the work will fall onto the analyst and since Squid already works with Drift no compensation is necessary. Given the initial iteration of the grants program is designed to test requirements demand and workflows, the initial workload for the Decision Council is uncertain. For the initial grants program there will be no compensation for the Decision Council.

• Note: We expect the initial grants program to give clarity on workload and flush out expectations for roles. If the grants program is continued or scaled up it is expected that both Analyst and Decision Council roles will be compensated.

Amount: 100,000 DRIFT

We believe 100,000 DRIFT (~$40,000) will be enough to support the upside scenario of grant interest in the next two months. Any Drift not distributed will be returned to the DAO.

Use of funds

• Up to 100,000 Drift will be used to fund proposals supporting the community and ecosystem.

Process

The initial creation of the grants program will be decided upon in the futarchal markets. If passed, the process of approving grants will depend on the size of the grant.

• Community Initiative (Defined as <10,000 DRIFT)

  • The approval will be fully decided by the Decision Council to retain operational efficiency.

• Project (Defined as >10,000 DRIFT)

  • The approval will be decided by pushing the grant as a proposal in the futarchic markets.
    • The Decision Council will vote to support these proposals. If supported the Analyst will work to help draft, market and support the proposal through the futarchic markets.

In both scenarios the team would be responsible for fulfilling the grant commitment and would be expected to support the grantee post approval.