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.