This is a request for community members and delegates to submit comments relating to a grants framework for the Morpho DAO.
As the protocol continues to decentralize, it’s valuable to encourage builders outside of the original core contributors to build on and around the Morpho Stack.
DAOs suffer from two common problems when giving grants:
Undisciplined spending
High overhead reviewing grant proposals
To mitigate these problems, it’s important to have a clear framework for evaluating grants and their impact. I have a few recommendations to start off the conversation:
Create clear metrics for grant impact, especially:
meaningfully improving the lender, borrower, or curator experience on Morpho
exposing new users to the protocol in a measurable way
These metrics should be compared to the benefits of alternative methods for distributing the same amount of tokens, such as incentives to protocol users or DEX liquidity for MORPHO.
Condition funding on successfully meeting project goals. Avoiding awarding grant funding up front, and instead disbursing it based on the successful completion of the grant’s target metrics, can help to prevent wasteful spending and align incentives between builders and the DAO.
Evaluate grants at infrequent intervals (ie, quarterly) to reduce the overhead for delegates and the number of onchain votes.
We have quite a few experienced delegates who have expressed interest in participating in Morpho governance, including those who have served on grants committees in other protocols, so the community can look forward to receiving expert input on this topic.
I will prepare a summary and proposal to submit to the DAO in a few weeks based on the results of this discussion.
Excited to see this discussion start, and there’s a few approaches we think we’ve seen work out well across the ecosystems we’ve been involved at.
Full governance grants work well up until a certain level. At the beginning when grant applications are sparse and there’s not much activity, governance voting on specific grants makes sense and it’s pretty smooth. However, pretty quickly, as more and more projects apply, governance quickly becomes overrun with dozens of applications and a drastic increase of politicing behind the scenes to approve a grant. Quickly it goes from a grant being judged on the merit of the application and more of a who knows which delegate scenario. We think the medium to long term sustainability of a grants program tends from an appointed/elected council, gradually shifting more and more to a fully elected team.
Optimism does a great job with the issue of accountability and holding past grantees accountable to receive funds. We think it could be beneficial to split grants into two categories like OP, builders and growth. Builders grants would be for funding the development of certain projects and be used to pay for opex, given out after a grant is completed, often with a lockup (OP does 1 year for ex). Growth would be for projects that would be taking the $MORPHO and distributing it to its users, so the project itself doesn’t see any of those funds directly. This we think given out in a milestone basis with an initial tranche and further follow up tranches would work best, ensuring teams can get started and be able to request more as needed.
We like the idea of cycles, and think this could be applied to more than just grants. Even having something as simple as onchain votes start Mondays and end Fridays would allow for more delegates to plan and keep track of everything.
I do agree that a clear guideline is paramount. That way, any project trying to apply would know what would be used to evaluate them and it saves the time of both the grants committee and applicants. Also, I would suggest the grants should come in a milestone way, that way we can evaluate progress and award more funds to support successful ones.
Agree with you on this. Clear guidelines, and grants designed specifically to grow Morpho efficiently.
Perhaps the retroactive grants of Optimism is a good model. The problem with that model is that you give most grants to protocols who don’t need it, so it’s basically lost money. Grants should focus on enabling good things for the ecosystem that wouldn’t be possible without them, or at least it should be the target. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Also, the Arbitrum grant system was not good: low communication, everybody would DM delegates 1 week before the vote, delegates under water would do limited analyis, potential bribery risk, a lot of reliance on centralised third parties like fractal for example, that would lead to unfair treatment of grant recipient, etc.
The best system I have experienced so far was the Binance one, which I believe we could replicate in a decentralised manner by also taking inspiration from the Polygon one:
Give a fraction of the grant at the beginning and the rest based on the achievement of certain milestones ;
Protocol applies by sending a grant request via a form. The grant request is received by an elected grant committee that will be in charge of helping the protocol with the design of the grant (notably defining the milestones)
If the grant amount is below a certain amount TBD, the elected committee can decide to allocate or not the grant. If it decides to not allocate the grant, the protocol can submit the grant request to a public Morpho vote and the committee can always give their opinion in the public discussion
If the grant exceeds a certain amount, then the committee is here to help prepare the grant request for a public vote that will decide on the allocation or not (and maybe give an opinion? Not sure it’s a good idea as it might give too much power to the committee).
This is how I see things, something flexible, decentralised, and designed to really focus on bringing value to Morpho.
If the goals of the grant program are the following:
I don’t think a grant program is the best option available to you. In the latest State of Web3 Grants Report, you’ll see that any team running a grants program has at least two dedicated full-time employees working on it. That’s not counting the time of delegates, the governance lead, and of grant applicants. Very often, smaller grant programs lack in visibility from real builders but attract the attention of serial grant farmers who share new programs with each other and quickly overwhelm grants teams. Distributing money through grants in Web3 is extremely complex. We don’t have good reputation systems and finding that diamond in the rough external builder bringing a fresh perspective and building on top of the Morpho stack is unlikely, and a terrible financial investment.
It seems to be that the best way of improving the user experience on Morpho from a UI perspective will be the work of the core team. Otherwise, the best way to improve the experience on Morpho is to improve liquidity. Bringing more liquidity, new assets, new eyes to the protocol should actually be done through a programmatic system.
My apologies for talking my book a bit here, but we’ve noticed this issue at Aragon and we’ve built a solution. Through a gauge system, your token holders can programmatically distribute incentives to pools and vaults on Morpho, bringing new capital and new users to the protocol. It also represents an interesting way to activate these non-transferable tokens. Every cent being spent on this will go directly towards the objective as well, rather than having to staff and pay a grants team, professional delegates, etc.
Gauges are also a great way to get to the second point of your metrics - if you open the incentivization of gauges to external actors, you might also attract external capital and their users on the platform. Curve is obviously a great example of that in terms of attracting projects and capital to their ecosystem in this way.
This is obviously not a small governance side project I’m proposing here, and I’d be happy to discuss it in more details, I just wanted to flag this as an alternative option to the traditional grant model. I think @PGov did a great job of outlining the nepotistic tendencies that grant programs inevitably develop, and there is a chance here to avoid the drama and stick to programs.
To see what this can look like, a similar build is live on Mode for their own incentive distribution. The distribution of incentives is baked in their governance system, and users get rewarded for participating and directing incentives.
All of these make sense to me. Especially I like that the grant outlays and their impact is compared against other methods of distribution. And +1 for awarding only based on verified, completed milestones. Most grants don’t need to award anything upfront before first milestone is finished.
I’d advocate for starting small. Better to give out a few smallish grants, measure impact, and build from there. Grants are also an excellent tool for identifying highly engaged people/groups in the community, some of whom can be tapped for bigger roles as the program grows.
To counter high overhead of reviewing proposals, could specify a limit below which it can be approved by a single person or max 2 people who meet once a month for 1 hour. (For amounts above the limit, a quarterly or longer process with multiple delegates support makes sense)
I think piloting both RetroPGF and Conditional Funding Markets (CFM) would be a smart move for Morpho. At Boardroom, we’ve worked with other DAOs to streamline similar grant processes, but we’re noticing the rise in alternative funding models that rely heavily on impact metrics. RetroPGF is excellent for rewarding tangible results but might slow down funding for newer projects. Conversely, CFM dynamically allocates resources to high-potential projects but relies on accurate forecasting, which can be tricky. By running them in parallel, you can see which best balances disciplined spending and reduced overhead. These models also drastically limit backroom dealing / politics.
Can’t imagine I’m wandering around internet and find this post lol
I was a DeFi project builder and manager for a grants fund, I also managed several gitcoin rounds, so I got experience on both sides, the receiving and giving end. My perspective maybe a bit different from above replies.
First, forward looking, i.e. what you will do.
RetroPGF is not a bad model. But the retro part does not synergize well with morpho at current stage, OP reward large protocol on ETH in exchange for deployment on their chain or to thank their work for ETH as a whole, Morpho haven’t enter the appchain stage yet (maybe you will in the future like Uni), thus it’s pointless to give project like Synthetix a bunch of your own tokens. Morpho needs to expand its ecosystem, thus it has to be a forward looking grant program, this is the baseline.
Second, seperation of grants.
Since Moprho is a DeFi project, it’s actually much easier to create milestones and targets for projects, unlike normal L1 or L2s, they attract all kinds of projects, social, gaming etc, and most meliciously, education, influence and community ones - like the Bankless shitshow on arbitrum. We can easily create metrics focus on important DeFi parameters, TVLs, yields, risk-ratios etc on Morpho. And the rest of promotional and marketing grants, if exists, should be governed by the Marketing team.
Third, find experts.
One of the best way to folster ecosystem growth is to find experts, the worst experience I have when applying grants is when I met some random “governance expert” of that chain keep asking irrelevant questions to my project, who apparently has no knowledge on how a project is build. It won’t be hard to gather a small group of DeFi founders, fund managers or just individual investors willing to provide their advice for you as councillor or jury, I myself often sneak into demodays of my VC friends larping as judge, just to learn some micro innovations in new projects, and I’m definitely not alone here.
Last, do not over-governance.
Think about who is giving out the money, Morpho is a for-profit project, so its DAO should have a playbook different from a charity DAO or public goods DAO. Ofc community is the project owner, but Bill Gates will not micro-manage on Microsoft’s day-to-day grants operations, so try to minimize the community participation hurdle, and maximize the reporting duty from the team, just like most responsible web2 entity does, publish detailed and transparent report on how the money has been used. MakerDAO actually did a decent job in this regard.
That’s my two cents, wish Morpho a bigger success.
Thank you for kicking this discussion off, OneTrueKirk. Grants are a crucial topic for protocols and it’s imperative to create a solid framework right off the bat.
You highlighted two common problems and these coincide with the two things worth considering with grants:
What are we looking to accomplish with the grants
How much funding is/would be earmarked for this initiative (quarterly/seasonally/yearly)
Regarding what we are looking to accomplish with grants, establishing clear metrics is vital. It would help shape both the protocol’s expectations and those of projects looking to be integrated.
On conditional funding, avoiding upfront disbursal sounds logical. One suggestion here would be streaming grants via Hedgey1— trusted by top protocols (Arbitrum, Vertex, ENS…). Plus, we have a connection there and can make the intro when the time comes.
Then, to your point on evaluating grants at infrequent intervals, we do agree it reduces overhead but that is till a certain point. Just as @PGov said, governance quickly becomes overrun with dozens of applications as the DAO grows, and would be worth considering setting up a committee/Council to oversee these grants early on before they get to that point.
Finally, to @NathanVDH comment on nepotistic tendencies, I see this happening with Gauges as well. A line from the blog post you linked reads:
Staking tokens exponentially increases voting power with each epoch;
I see politics eventually playing out here as well. However, open to more discussion around this idea.
I agree that in the medium to long term, a dedicated committee makes sense. In my view it would be good to start by aligning on a framework for evaluating grants, and then elect a committee as volume increases in the future.
I wonder what everyone thinks of the following:
Grant applicants should be asked to define objectively measurable performance metrics relating to the grant program goals, which could include the metrics I mentioned earlier or others defined by the community.
The DAO could start out with quarterly grant cycles, where there is a one month open window for submission at the start of each three month period, after which no further applications will be considered until the start of the next period. The first period could be set to begin around or after the transferability of the MORPHO token, assuming that the ongoing discussion proceeds to a vote, as a price for the MORPHO token will make it substantially easier to determine the correct award amount for a given proposal.
We have some experience with operations over at MakerDAO, as well as recently deploying and managing the operational software for Arbitrum’s LTIPP. We have also completed a full GrantsDAO design as well so have an understanding of how to implement scalable and compliant processes in this domain.
All of what you describe seems logical. Light touch in the beginning makes sense. Milestone based funding helps to hedge counter-party risk by paying post-performance, but it requires more resources and monitoring for compliance. It depends on the size and risk profile of the grants. For smaller grants, contracting it out to a third party can sometimes make sense due to the overhead. For larger grants programs, keeping compliance in house makes sense but is a lift.
Everything you noted on KPIs checks out. It would probably make the most sense to define the constructs we want to improve, come up with a couple of concrete measures, and then ask applications to state how they will affect these measures, by what date, what resources they need, and how they will implement the work.
Please feel free to dm; we are happy to share notes.
Second this. We need to make sure the grant program doesn’t turned out to be a “public growth program” where big integrations / established projects get majority of the fund. This will kill the purpose of grant program.
Regarding the process and overhead: my 2 cent is that “grant tiers” like Nouns funding can help somewhere in the process: it gives the council more flexible on when to move quickly with small grants + ensure thoroughness with larger grants.
I’m glad you raised this point, in my personal view “big integrations” are a separate consideration from a builder/ecosystem grants program, and can be approached in a distinct discussion + separate proposal.
Looking forward to this grant program taking shape! Interesting points have been raised and we’ll like to comment on few of them:
While this approach has merit, be flexible could also be considered. Certain grants, particularly for tech development, might require partial upfront funding. This possibility shouldn’t be ruled out if it makes sense for specific projects.
Regarding evaluation intervals
This idea makes sense. Regular follow-ups on deliverables and milestones are key to quantifying funding effectively. It strikes a balance between oversight and efficiency.
Implementing grant cycles could provide structure for applicants, funding processes, and reporting mechanisms. It will create a clear timeline for all parties involved. We are curious how @PGov would frame this idea?
This is an engaging perspective, and we will definitely consider discussing it further. Do you mind elaborate on what elements you believe shouldn’t be included given the current DAO position?
Building on these ideas, the grant program could be enhanced by establishing a Grant Committee to manage administrative tasks and track deliverables.
Setting a range for grant amounts, with the possibility for exceptions when justified, might also be considered. Public voting and community sentiment for selected grant recipients could encourage community engagement and ensure applicants gain visibility.
As for funding, a three-stage approach or a vesting schedule (upfront, upon achieving deliverables, and at completion) could provide a balanced structure.
To begin a first approach to shape a framework, the following points can be taken into account:
From the committee side
Provide the community on grants transparency & tracking
Facilitate clear guidelines & scope
From the applicant side
Proposal:
Grant Duration (May fit in the cycles)
Payout Method
Budget Breakdown
Reporting schedule
Grant Development: The Outcome and the impact
1. Deliverable: Each deliverable is associated with one or more milestones. This include a description of the deliverable, KPI Value and a verification.
2. Milestone: How are we going to evaluate the milestone? Define when the work is done.
For cycles, it could be as simple as M0 basic gov where it’s every month some votes start or as structured as OP with all of their cycles and seasons. From the start, something as simple as “all votes start on Monday and end Friday” would be easy and create some structure.
Hi! I’m a reviewer for the Compound Grants Program (CGP). I thought it might be constructive to share some of our relevant wins and pain points at CGP to inform Morpho’s framework. Compound’s specific priorities and opportunities naturally differ from Morpho’s, but there are enough commonalities to make a comparison relevant.
A quick recap of CGP’s origins: after an ad hoc community-led trial grants program in 2021 with good outcomes but operational challenges, CGP relaunched in 2022 under a delegated domain allocation (DDA) model powered by Questbook (https://questbook.app). DDA is similar to an appointed/elected grants council but reduces overhead and friction by empowering the allocators to use their best judgment within their domains to decide whether a proposal requires multiple reviews or can be assessed adequately just by that domain’s allocator. CGP was last renewed in September 2024 for one year.
Questbook has been such an effective platform for us that I’ve started collaborating with them on growth opportunities, but my focus with this post is on wins and misses at CGP that hopefully help inform what kind of grants framework will best serve Morpho.
Comparing the MORPHO allocated to grants against other uses like LP incentives makes sense; in practice, we’ve found this difficult to do for Compound on a proposal-by-proposal basis. I would argue that this assessment is better made on a grants program as a whole and conducted at the stage where the program is authorized by governance (e.g. setting the amount of MORPHO to allocate to the program for and for what grant cycle duration).
My experiences lead me to agree strongly with @OneTrueKirk 's first two top-line recommendations:
We do this in CGP with dedicated program details and RFP documents for each domain.
We do this in CGP by establishing milestone-based funding (built into Questbook) with required KPIs attached to milestones articulated in the proposal.
Regarding evaluation of grants at infrequent intervals: this is essential if grants are all expected to be reviewed and approved by governance. Infrequent, cyclic (e.g. annual) grant review is quite common outside of web3, albeit for different reasons. However, the web3 landscape moves quickly, and we concluded for CGP that infrequent review would result in missed opportunities and a smaller, less nimble pool of builder-applicants. This is one of the major benefits of CGP’s Delegated Domain Allocation model that reduces overhead for delegates and number of onchain votes by dedicating resources to a small team of domain allocators who can take on this effort on behalf of the DAO with maximal transparency.
I’d like to signal-boost a few other comments from this thread:
From PGov: (I’ve reached my new-user quote limit)
“We think it could be beneficial to split grants into two categories like OP, builders and growth.”
Agreed with PGov here; we have four domains in CGP that are basically for different sub-categories of the OP builders’ track. Growth in Compound is managed by a different service provider.
From Hubert:
“The best system I have experienced so far was the Binance one, which I believe we could replicate in a decentralised manner by also taking inspiration from the Polygon one.”
The description following Hubert 's quote here more or less describes the functionality provided by Questbook: it’s a web3-native grant management platform for proposal intake, community feedback, review management, KYC/KYB, contracts, and milestone payouts including multisig transaction construction.
From WinVerse DAOplamats:
“On conditional funding, avoiding upfront disbursal sounds logical. One suggestion here would be streaming grants via Hedgey”
Streaming makes a lot of sense for certain grant types, especially ongoing infra/maintenance of established projects and reimbursements for DAO-related expenses. We have a dedicated domain for these types of grants at CGP. We have not implemented a streaming solution for these, but that hasn’t yet presented an issue for the folks seeking mini-grants in this area. Compound itself, however, does have streaming payments infrastructure in place for service provider agreements that can be invoked by governance.
There have already been a lot of good thoughts and observations upthread, so we’ll focus on a few in particular. In just 2024, GFX sat on grants and procurement committees commanding around $300m, and we have a wide range of past grants experience as well. A hard-earned lesson not yet fully addressed:
Grants really need to be thought of as having a lifecycle. Disorganized, “put up a proposal on the forum and get to a vote” kind of grants not only tend to be poorly designed, but they don’t take into account that a grant is more than just disbursement of funding to the grantee.
This discussion already began with an intuitive understanding of that, with milestones being prerequisite to full grant funds disbursal. But there’s also an ongoing monitoring and then closeout process. Monitoring may actually be light touch or minimal if it’s all onchain activities, the grant is small, or the grant plan is designed to be short. But a closeout process is important where grantees produce a final summary of how funds were spent, were the goals met, and why or why.
Grants programs aren’t simply a way to fund promising initiatives. They’re an opportunity to gather knowledge about the grantor’s ecosystem of users/developers and their own product.
Realistically, there will be failures, and when a grantee fails, you want to know why - was it poor execution, the grant plan was just designed poorly, incorrect assumptions about how a technical or market force would work, or something completely outside the control of Morpho and its grantee? Conversely, there will be successes, and you have to ask similar questions: was this luck or good execution, what was the cost vs the perceived benefit, and most importantly is this repeatable and scalable?
And then you also need a mechanism – such as a grants program that runs on cycles instead of being always open – to take those learnings and iterate.
Unfortunately, a good grants program will certainly require at least a part-time administrator. This is because grantees will inevitably have unaddressed questions in real time that need to be figured out, the grant plans approved will need to periodically provide updates, and someone has to think about how to improve the program and its grants giving regularly and not just one afternoon in a Zoom call. Also, if something goes wrong, having someone who owns that failure (whether it’s directly their fault or not) also means having someone motivated to prevent things going wrong in the first place.
Lots of great thoughts on this thread so far, but we wanted to emphasize that a more formal program tends to be more costly to operate, but it also tends to have better spending discipline and accumulate knowledge and expertise that persists after a user incentive program is done or a widget is already built.
I think a quarterly system is awesome, but to avoid the dearth of dead dashboards that arise, I think the DAO should consider setting “focuses” each grant quarter as priorities for applicants for grants. Could be a welcome change.
Also I think it would be valuable to set up a “continuation” fund of some sort to fund projects that the dao wants to continue and remain active. From experience on Aave, Compound, and Uniswap, there are so many well made projects that are dead due to lack of use and funding.
We should also do a better job of aggregating the projects that are funded, through perhaps the Morpho UI, to aggregate different grant projects based on project.
I dont believe the DAO needs to preemtively create a committee to understand why certain grants fail/win; at the end of the day, they fail cause no one uses them and they run out of funding. That is typically it. Coming to the conclusion that some teams have less experience than others only limits the applicant pool; crypto should be decentralized and over analysis through overfitting brings out biases.
While many fundamental points have already been addressed, we would like to share some aspects that we believe are particularly important.
Firstly, it is crucial to properly set objectives, KPIs, and actual RFPs through the foundation or similar entities. Especially, it is extremely important to align the objective of the grants program with the strategy of this project as a whole. This process is challenging to execute in a decentralized manner, so leadership from a small group of members or the Morpho Foundation is necessary to ensure clarity and direction.
Secondly, when reviewing grant proposals, expertise is essential for evaluating their significance against the objectives or the predefined indicators. Especially in the initial stages, including optimizing the review process, if a council or reviewer committee is to be formed, the selection of members should prioritize proven track records and specialized knowledge.
Drawing from the experiences of the Optimism grant system, which has developed a relatively mature model, these two points stand out as particularly important lessons learned which can also be applied in Morpho’s case.
Additionally, these are the points that have been already discussed above and we support:
To reduce the overhead of DAO governance, forming a council will inevitably become necessary at some point.
It is important to conduct reviews, including assessments of outcomes, at regular intervals. However, considering the time lag between grant delivery and the realization of its effects, quarterly reviews might be too frequent. Establishing a review cycle once every six months could be more appropriate.
It is unnecessary to disburse all grant rewards upfront. After setting a basic framework, it’s suitable to leave room for negotiation in special cases.
For efficiency, separating budgets and responsibilities by domain, or allowing small grants to be approved by only certain members of the council, can be beneficial.
These considerations aim to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the grants program, ensuring that it supports meaningful contributions to the Morpho ecosystem.