RLY Community,
On September 30, @bvajresh, @ayao and I shared the “Upcoming Proposal: $RLY Ecosystem DAO Structure” on the Forum. After gathering and incorporating feedback, soliciting reviewers and identifying a lead and 7-person review panel, we are ready to submit an updated proposal which includes both the initial structure and panel. We’re really excited by the amazing panel (1 lead + 7 reviewers) that have come together and will help us get the Ecosystem DAO launched and get $RLY grants flowing. All feedback welcome, after which we hope to push it to a vote on Snapshot by Wednesday Dec 8th.
Best,
Gary
$RLY Ecosystem Grants DAO Summary and Purpose:
- Summary: A decentralized, autonomous organization run directly by $RLY token holders to govern and distribute a periodically refreshed budget for the benefit of the $RLY network.
- Objectives: Foster an organic, rich community-driven ecosystem of developers, creators, businesses, and service providers for the $RLY Network ecosystem.
- Business Model: Annual grants from the Association, with the first grant totalling 20M $RLY and $2M USDC.
Primary DAO Activities: Distributing grants to fund projects, companies or individuals to build on top of the $RLY Ecosystem, which includes:
- Specific Projects: Build on $RLY, support existing projects for specific purposes, etc.
- Community (Education): Get grants to build elements of the $RLY ecosystem that will help current and future members.
- Product Launches: Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. The DAO would provide a ~100k $RLY equity-free contribution based on specific milestones for your application.
- Events and Hackathons: Sponsoring events and hackathons for people to learn about $RLY and build in the $RLY ecosystem.
- Bounties: Funding $RLY ecosystem specific bounties.
Wave 1 RFP Priorities: This list will evolve over time as the ecosystem develops and categories are added based on various needs:
- Applications and Integrations
- Full-Feature Products
- Open-Source Solutions
- Content (Marketing, Educational and Research)
- Events and Hackathons
- Bounties (“we’re looking for someone to build X”)
Operating Goals:
- Onboard New Users: Onboard new uses measured by wallet growth
- Optimize for Speed & Experimentation: Use the first grant to experiment, fund a bunch of concepts and work through potential governance issues so that the DAO can iterate as needed.
- Right-sized Governance: Ideally enable faster approval processes for smaller resource activities and more standard voting/consensus for larger grants or activities
DAO Tooling: The DAO will be using DAOHaus for our on-chain distribution of grants funding for this first version. Many existing DAOs utilize the Moloch DAO framework and it will allow the $RLY ecosystem to interact with and access other DAOs in the Web3 ecosystem.
Governance:
- Objectives: Reduce friction, ensure the RLY community is easily able to participate, while also figuring out which decisions can be made faster vs. via token voting.
- Selected Approach: After considering multiple options, we’ve landed on a “Hybrid” model with “Committee Governance” for grants <500k $RLY and “Community Token Holder Governance” for grant requests >500k $RLY.
- Committee Governance: Vote on an initial committee of ~8 members: 1 lead and 7 reviewers.
- Reviewers process applications and operate a 4 of 7 multisig to disburse funds to grantees.
- Members can be replaced if they are not able to meet the expectations of the governance process.
- Community Token Holder Governance: Use a token holder governance process where the community votes on Snapshot with their $RLY holdings to approve grants. The funds are disbursed by the Ecosystem Grants DAO multisig holders.
- Committee Governance: Vote on an initial committee of ~8 members: 1 lead and 7 reviewers.
- Proposed Thresholds for Grants Funding and Review:
- Micro Grants: up to 50,000 $RLY, 4/7 reviewers approved
- Rapid Grants: 50,001 - 500,000 $RLY, 5/7 reviewers approved
- Community Grants: 500,001 - 1,000,000 $RLY, initial application to a form, posting the proposal on governance forum, community vote to approve.
- Note: Governance is subject to iterative changes and requests will be submitted
Proposed Timeline / Process:
- The DAO will organize grant recipients into four 3-month funding rounds. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis and any grants disbursed during a given 3-month period become part of the corresponding round. Round 1 will be for three months from the day the grants DAO proposal has been approved. For example, if the proposal is approved on 11/1/2021, Round 1 of the grants program will be from 11/1/2021 to 2/1/2021 and Round 2 of the grants program will be from 2/2/2022 to 5/2/2022.
- As a condition of each grant, the DAO will receive a quarterly report from each grantee until grant milestones are completed. At the start of the next season the DAO will share the report of what happened the previous season and set the stage for the next season.
- Initial Committee Composition: Over the last two months we received referrals and solicited volunteers for reviewers and leads, evaluated candidates, and selected the initial panel. The panel was chosen optimizing for prior DAO Contribution, experience in grant/investment evaluation (Crypto or Non-Crypto Tech), product background, finance background, technical background,and familiarity with RLY Community. The following lead and seven reviewers have been contacted and agreed to join assuming the proposal passes.
- Lead (1): Sydney Lai (Twitter: @sydneylai):
- Sydney Lai is an engineer with both web2 and web3 experience. She was named an LGBT Technology Leader by The White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy.
- Sydney served as the Head of Strategy for the Token Foundry at Consensys where she helped build sustainable decentralized networks. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at Baruch College where she teaches the Blockchain Technologies and Applications class that is offered as part of their Masters in Information Systems curriculum.
- Sydney has helped early-stage startups raise $41m and currently sits as an LP for a Private Equity Fund.
- She has worked for several crypto protocols and DAOs including Filecoin, Polkadot, 0x, The Graph and MetaCartel
- Reviewers (7):
- Amin Iman (Twitter: @aminiman89):
- Michael ran Startup Weekend hackathons for 6 years in CA, an incredible community builder with exposure to great teams and startups
- Michael’s background includes legal, data science, consumer and is now a BD Manager at Anheuser Busch
- An early bitcoin adopter class of 2014, an early adopter of tech
- Idan Levin (Twitter: @levin_idan):
- Idan Levin is the Principal at Collider Ventures, an early stage blockchain and crypto fund. He has deep Venture Capital expertise working at the likes of KPMGs’ Deal Advisory Practise and an Associate at Next47, a $1.2B fund backed by Siemens that invests in B2B startups. He currently also serves as an Advisor to Solidus Labs, a crypto risk management and transaction surveillance startup led by veteran Wall Street Fintech Engineers.
- Idan has also been an active governance contributor for the RLY Project: Profile - Idan_Levin - RLY Discussion Forums
- Ishaan Hiranandani (Twitter: @ishaan0x):
- Ishaan is an Investor at Jump Capital helping founders advance the future of crypto infrastructure, DAOs and Decentralized Finance. He was the Head of Governance for Blockchain at Michigan, a student organization at the University of Michigan that has a blockchain curriculum and an active consulting practice that offers students the ability to develop solutions for organizations in the blockchain space. He has also worked with PayPal, Avalanche Labs and was a Board Member for the Blockchain Acceleration Foundation.
- Ishaan is an active governance participant for the Compound and Uniswap Protocols through Blockchain at Michigan which has received 50k $COMP and 2.5m $UNI in delegations from a16z.
- Links
- Jennifer Tran (Twitter: @JKim_Tran):
- Jennifer Tran is the Co-Founder of MintGate, a token gating service that was incubated at the Tachyon Accelerator by Consensys and Protocol Labs. She is a Software Developer and Data Analyst with expertise in logistics and supply chain digitization.
- She is a founding member of AlchemistDAO, a community of Data Scientists within the Covalent Network. Jennifer is also a Gitcoin Kernel Fellow and won the Sustainability Prize awarded to the top team at the CryptoChicks Hatchery Program, a year long incubator program for women-led blockchain and AI Projects.
- Jennifer is an active governance participant for the RLY Project and is a Rally.io grant recipient for MintGate Profile - jennifer_tran - RLY Discussion Forums
- Mike Huang (Twitter: @MikeXHuang):
- Mike is a Product Manager at FanDuel, he drives the roadmap with payments and compliance in the gaming and sports betting arena.
- He is a venture partner at GoingVC and and manager at ReChain Capital with access to deal-flow and a track record with an exit.
- Competitive Axie Infinity player
- Nader Dabit (Twitter: @dabit3):
- Nader is currently a Developer Relations Engineer at Edge and Node, the team behind The Graph Protocol. Previously, Nader was a Senior Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services leading Developer Advocacy for Front End Web and Mobile at AWS.
- He has written and published “Full Stack Serverless: Modern Application Development with React, AWS and GraphQL” with O’Reilly and “React Native in Action: Developing iOS and Android apps with JavaScript” with Manning Publications. These books are widely known in the AWS and React communities.
- Nader founded DeveloperDAO, a community of 10,000 developers accelerating the education and impact of a new wave of web3 builders.
- Stephen Chou (Twitter: @sschou12):
- Stephen Chou is a Principal at Translink Capital where he focuses on investing in early stage interactive media, consumer, and crypto companies. He has led investments in Forte, Rally.io and is a Board Observer at Penrose and Supernatural, two startups in the VR/AR space.
- Prior to Translink Capital, Stephen worked with founders as an Associate at Cisco Investments and had advised executives on strategic transactions and capital raises at Credit Suisse across the internet, mobile and gaming sectors.
- Amin Iman (Twitter: @aminiman89):
- Lead (1): Sydney Lai (Twitter: @sydneylai):
Committee Compensation
- Lead: Compensation roughly in line with the initial Uniswap and Compound proposals: 15,000 $RLY / month (expected ~20 hrs/week)
- Reviewers: The compensation for reviewers will be 5,000 $RLY / month (expected ~ 5 hrs/week) for each reviewer (up to a maximum of 7 reviewers).
- Comp Review: Compensation will be reviewed every six months to ensure it’s right-sized given potential fluctuations of the market.
- Term Duration: Two quarters, with multiple terms allowed.
Defining Success
- Quantitative Criteria
- Growth in Grant Applications over seasons
- Growth in number of projects funded
- Growth in new $RLY wallets resulting from new projects
- Community Engagement (Discourse, Discord, activity, etc)
- Qualitative Criteria
- Improvement to RLY Network’s positioning in the market
- Quality of funded project outcomes
Grant Proposal Format
- Your proposal should include:
- What you want to build
- Why you want to build it
- The overall goal of your project
- A detailed technical description of your project
- A schedule including milestones and overall timeframe
- How much funding you’d like to request
- Your programming portfolio
- A brief description of your team
- Where you’ve applied for other sources of funding if applicable
- A roadmap/plan for ongoing maintenance and development, as well as your business model, so the DAO can understand if the project is set up for long term success
- A commitment to provide adequate documentation and/or product marketing
- The team will catalogue all submitted grant proposals and make them open to the community, to help guide future grant requests.