Nah, fam - I’m good…
My opinion is the grant/fund for Bonfire is a bad decision on multiple fronts that I will list in detail below. Both from the amount, the value add they bring, the grant versus investment view, and from the impact tonight community developers. For a proposal that large it should be listed separately with a supporting case/white paper on the value add that is being brought by that investment of funds. Otherwise it seems like a move to just give funds to developers we like based on a promise with no data.
The amount proposed for the Bonfire platform seems rather large based on the value that it brings at this stage. It seems barely at the alpha level of a project and there are no deliverables that I’ve seen in this proposal that would explain the level of funding. If anything this fund should be split into sections where the next amount is granted only if conditions are met. I would agree with other statements from above comments that would question this level of investment compared to both past proposals and also to the terms being deployed. It seems that many of the features promised are already available on rally via campaigns, the nft marketplace, or through currently free community developed applications. Even the email list seems trivial as I’ve been emailed by multiple Creators on Rally who got my email from Rally platform. If this is the case then maybe the funding would best be used to further develop the existing features versus paying for a third party to develop a platform that does not benefit the entire rally user base.
While the community and Rally should encourage developmental projects my belief is that those funds would be better utilized towards development on the main rally platform or advertising to increase awareness of the project and reach larger creators. At the end of the day any developmental projects business models should not rely on Rally to fund their development. If they are developed as a business such as Bonfire then they need to have a solid business model that supports their development and growth through signups fees, advertising, or similar. In Bonfires case they already are listed as having multiple groups backing them on their website. This would raise the question of what extra would this fund even bring and why give money instead of investing for a % of the company like the other groups? Again the lack of info on the “why” in the proposal is lacking. There may be very valid reasons but it’s lacking in the details and proof. Large proposals or grants are a great place for a white paper saying Creator X on Bonfire experienced % growth by using tools A & B. Without that basis its entirely open to interpretation and guesswork as the value cannot be defined.
Finally, we have many talented community developers that are investing their time and money into products for the rally platform. The last thing we want is to dissuade from the open conversation that can be had between these developers in the Discord, forums, or other channels. By choosing one developer for a large funding but not others it has the potential to create some hostility and reduce the free sharing of information and ideas. In the long run this will do more harm than good especially at this stage where community development is very needed for new ideas and growth.
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As @KevinChou mentioned, both Matt and Melissa are extremely qualified. Matt was a PM at Uber and Melissa worked with the Coinbase Engineering team. They have thought about the intersection of creators and web3 very deeply.
Matt and Melissa are dedicated to Bonfire. Building out the product, onboarding new creators, solving creator issues, etc. They have been incredibly responsive when I have reached out to them with questions about the current features and product roadmap.
The efforts of the core team are better spent on building out Rally.io and ensuring that the token mechanisms and APIs are up and running. Bringing in a partner like Bonfire also aligns with the goal of decentralization. Also, note that the grant is in RLY and not USDC. I believe this aligns incentives between the Rally Community and Bonfire. For Bonfire to win, they are encouraged to provide the best possible experience for Rally Creators.
With mainstream creators about to get on the platform, there is a massive need for tools that can scale along with Rally and handle massive transaction volumes. Issuing this developer grant to Bonfire will help the team ramp up development and ensure that the product is ready for mainstream creators and their massive communities.
Hiring a freelance dev to build out tools is useful in certain situations. I don’t think this is the best way to go about it in this case. What happens when there are 1000 creators on the platform? 5000? 10,000? A Million? A dedicated team of engineers, designers, product managers, and creator support staff that own one project will be extremely valuable in ensuring that the tools that add utility to the social tokens can be reliably used by creators.
Absolutely agree with this statement. When speaking to creators that are considering launching a social token, a question about the tools available to integrate the token within their community is raised instantly. A major selling point re. Rally has been the tools that are available for the creator to integrate across platforms (Discord Coin Bot, Twitch integrations, Clubhouse gating, Twitter bounties, Bonfire etc) compared to other social token platforms.
I’m in favour of this proposal.
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Is the Rally community offering to buy the Bonfire IP and employ them as staff? If so, then what you say here makes perfect sense. If we are offering to employ them as staff for a full year, then that amount as two salaries make sense given their history. But given that the purpose of the developer grants is to allow independent parties to quickly get their own personal business up and running, then it does not. The purpose is to get them up and running and on the path to profitability. Otherwise this is effectively Rally saying “I like you, so you get to succeed regardless; everyone else can fight it out on the free market.”
My biggest problem with this entire thing is that the CEO of Rally absolutely should not be proposing community funding for independent parties. And that it’s thrown in casually alongside a proposal that likely will (and should be) passed just further makes it seem like a kick-back. It reeks of cronyism; it is irrelevant that he asks us to trust him that he has no relationship with them, even if I believe him. The entire point of crypto and the ledger is that trust should be minimized (or ideally not required at all)!
Hi All I would like to raise a few concerns that I repeatedly see here as well as offer my thoughts.
First off, I would like to express my concern around the behavior that I repeatedly see whenever a proposal is brought up on the forum. Every funding proposal lately has faced an extreme amount of pushback. It is normal (and quite healthy) to have discourse but a lot of the discourse lately has centered around things like how much these deals are for and also that Rally would be better off building this out themselves. I think that it is important to note that unless my assumptions here are wrong, Rally does not currently have the staff required to build out all of these integrations and apps. Additionally, without these integrations, Rally will miss out on the growth from creators that do not have the proper integrations. Without the advantage of enabling the community through these grants, Rally will begin to lose their market edge. This i believe is the most important thing and is worth repeating.
Without passing grants and spending money to outsource work for integrations and apps, Rally will not meet its fullest potential.
The selfishness of people in the forum that are pushing back on these proposals in the hope that the funds will be spent on them in the future are shooting their value in the foot long term by inhibiting the growth of the Rally platform. We ALL win by enabling great people such as Matt and Melissa to work on Rally projects.
I think that Matt and Melissa’s project would be a great add to the rally economy. Yes it is a steep ask especially when you consider the potential future growth of rally but I think that the price is well worth it when we consider the caliber of these engineers as well as the growth that this project will provide rally.
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It is possible that greed is a motive for being upset by large funding requests. But it wouldn’t be a very good one. Roughly 20% of RLY’s total supply is meant for community spending on initiatives. A much smarter play if one were greedy would be to support large payouts for enough development proposals to establish a precedent, and then submit a large proposal of one’s own. As long as not all the community treasury is spent before that person’s own large proposal got to a vote, it would be much easier to get a much higher payment than if that person had demanded each previous dollar be justified.
I mean that is one way of doing things. I also think that it is worth considering that having a few larger projects that are fully flushed out will be better long term than having many small projects with small funding that half-ass their use cases and are glorified MVPs.
Good points, I’d like to address in order.
Point 1 seems to be that Bonfire is “getting too much” - @mrq02 brought up three proposals, one for coin gating functionality, one for Clubhouse gating, and one for creating new media content. What I’m hearing is heavy anchoring to these precedents, and none of which have raised venture funding to build on Rally Network.
One of my goals of this proposal is to re-anchor (and I’m not sure that this is high enough frankly) and assess other dimensions of our decision making as a community. What are some of these dimensions?
- What is the environment these days for venture fundable teams?
Answer - as @Idan_Levin brought up, it’s very good. We need to compete with other opportunities for great developers and startups which are raising millions of dollars, not just focusing on hourly rates. - What is the budget in the community for funding developers?
Answer - 750 million $RLY tokens, of which 500K represents a tiny fraction - What is the value of creating a platform where 3rd party developers are building businesses that independent investors think are good enough to invest in?
Answer - easily 10’s or hundreds of billions.
What I think I’m seeing is a strong reaction to unfairness or inequity – why does Bonfire get this grant, and why not other community participants? I think the solution here is to ensure we help many other developers, not constrain the issue with Bonfire. I’ve proposed a 10M $RLY funding for a new RallyDAO that is meant for other strong community members and developers to earn sizable grants for their work. Instead of no one getting anything, I think we should make sure we start with accelerating Bonfire and then address the system broadly with the DAO.
Point 2 is that funds are better spent elsewhere.
- We are not $RLY funding constrained on core development; we are talent constrained. There’s no $RLY funding that will speed up core development, as we simply need to hire more engineering, product and vendorized talent (which we’re doing). On advertising, we cannot spend $RLY on creating more awareness, as media companies only take USD. But besides that point, we have plenty of budget that Bremner has already gotten approval for here, and we’re constrained on doing great marketing work not by budgets at the moment.
Point 3 is that we don’t want to send the wrong message to developers.
- This seems illogical; if we think developers are creating significant value we should be finding more ways to accelerate developers. This point argues that we already have some traction with teams investing their own time and money, and that’s enough; let’s not rock the boat. I think this is a cautious and conservative approach, which for some platforms may be fine.
- For Rally, I strongly advocate for an approach where Rally is playing the game to be the clear market leader. Rally has an opportunity not just to build a new web3 Creator platform, but I believe to change even how web2 companies approach the space. Let’s not be cautious and conservative; that almost never changes the world and creates massive value. Let’s take the bulls by the horn together and play to be market leaders.
Thanks everyone for weighing in. It seems like there’s different starting perspectives, and I’ll give it another day or two for comments before starting the vote. In general we’re not looking to get consensus here in the forums; the whole point is that certain $RLY community votes may not have clear consensus and that the vote will determine the outcome. This is normal governance, and I’m pleased to see many new voices in the community debating this issue.
My only ask is that we keep personal attacks out of the equation. I’m saddened to see accusations of cronyism in this debate; I must be the stupidest founder in the world if I’m using a forum like this to try to pass 500K $RLY funds over to friends, which anyone looking at my background and Matt and Mel’s background can see there’s zero overlap. While it’s no big deal in this particular case, it does make it daunting for others in the community to want to post their big ideas here if toxicity and personal attacks become the norm. I will be asking community moderators to enforce this more closely going forward
Kevin
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Governance minimization is definitely worth striving for, and it’s an exciting area we and all of the crypto industry are exploring.
Here’s a really good piece on governance minimization by Fred Ehrsam - Governance Minimization — Fred Ehrsam
Note that on-chain treasury management is an area that many are thinking deeply about, but will likely not be trust minimized for the foreseeable future which I agree with.
And finally, while I appreciate 90% of your thoughts and debate in this thread, this is a warning on personal attacks. While I’m a public figure, and you can accuse me of cronyism in whichever other public social channels you choose, this forum will not tolerate personal attacks.
If more and more toxicity seeps into these forums, this will not be a safe space for people in the community to propose big ideas that can take this project forward.
Kevin
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Kevin,
Thanks for taking the time to answer it and explain some of the Rally funding info as that is always good to hear along with your and others views on it.
I am used to more corporate presentations and proposal’s from my day job so that is where I find it odd to propose a grant without a white paper or researched justification. Crypto is a new space for me, as are tech startups so may just have to temper/adjust my expectations.
With that being said if the goal is to integrate their platform into Rally tightly for mutual success it would be good to have part of that fund dedicated or tied with project deliverables. This could be determined later but I would love to see that level before voting.
Again thanks to everyone for the friendly discussions.
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I also like the idea of having part of it tied to deliverables / progress. The amount can be approved at full level, and the last significant part of funding goes out after a certain level of progress is made. That way there is a level of trust on all sides, developers, managment and the community. I have seen too many times where a project gets fully funded, and those receiving the reward suddenly have other projects to work on, and the funded project becomes a side job.
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I like your explanation above. I didn’t like your explanation regarding the cheap money though. Since crypto is down about 45% from its high, and it has a relatively high institutional holding level right now, I am not sure it has much further to fall outside of an outlier, many more countries trying to ban it outright in a short time period.
I think your selling point should be specifically, that rally should be built to have the most usability before other similar tokens / coins are able to catch up and steal the PR thunder and potential. EX) Calaxy CLXY
Hey folks,
Matt here from Bonfire. First off, Mel and I just wanted to thank you all for the support, and say that we’re truly honored to even be considered for a grant. It’s been an absolute pleasure being a part of this community, and we couldn’t be more excited about the future for Rally. We’re committed to continuing to build tools to help creator coins/NFTs reach the full potential we all believe in, and in doing so hope to create meaningful value for the community and network more broadly.
If you’re interested in following along more closely, you can check out our upcoming roadmap here! And Discord DMs (malston#7447, melzhang#8594) always open 
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I do like the first proposal Kevin, I think momentum is there / need to speed up.
I do agree however with @JBaines as well. In my agency work for my clients and/or starting up new ventures, I DO need to give more extensive insights, validations, set kpi’s, milestones, etc. I’d expect it on the approval of these budgets as well. Event though it’s only a small part of total available budget.
Now it’s only explained in 1) delivering functionalities x, y, z and 2) “creating long team value.
Happy to hear from Matt or Melissa on kpi’s / when successful, usage by creators, etc. more concretely in order to have some stick in the ground to validate budget being made available.
On the second proposal, harder to judge - I’ll better do a deepdive in the references you made. My knowledge level not up to speed yet on this part.
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Hey guys,
Responding to both of the above proposals:
As a fan of Bonfire and a big supporter of @mattalston and Melissa, I’m fully in favor of supporting this team with a RLY grant.
It’s clear to me that Bonfire serves as a crucial tool for all Rally creators and will very quickly become a standard part of the creator stack when it comes to the access, distribution and social standing of Creator Coins.
This feels like a great pilot to expand the wider network of teams building on top of Rally, and feels like a no-brainer to me. Will personally be voting in favor of this!
Fully agreed with the sentiment here. I would see the RallyDAO acting as a community-run grants program, similar to Uniswap, Compound, Aave and Uniswap.
As someone also participating Syndicate, I see a lot of synergies with digital working groups geared at furthering the Rally ecosystem.
Would support this vote and be keen to contribute to conversations on how get this set up as someone sitting on multiple DAO boards (FWB, PleasrDAO, etc.)
Nice proposals @KevinChou 
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Hey all,
I very much agree with @coopahtroopa’s comments re: Bonfire’s potential to become a critical part of the creator stack. We’ve been having a lot of conversations with some very notable creators who are strongly considering Rally as their platform of choice and tooling / integrations is one of the most pressing topics in pretty much all of our discussions.
Rally is in such an incredible position to be the market leader in this space and I view this as another great opportunity to further that lead on other platforms/teams trying to build similar capabilities. The inevitability of tokenized communities and creator coins is starting to grab the attention of some of the world’s most influential artists, brands, etc. so any initiative that keeps Rally at the forefront is worth strong consideration in my opinion, even if the cost is at a bit of a premium to market rate for similar services.
I’m certainly in favor of having more defined milestones and KPIs but I think priority should be getting Matt and Mel off and running.
As a quick aside - the level of discourse taking place when vetting these proposals only strengthens my conviction in Rally; you can’t teach passion and it’s very obvious this community is teeming with it!
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Also fully support @KevinChou’s RallyDAO proposal but that seems to be a less contentious topic.
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Thanks for all the hard work you do! Awesome post!
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@coopahtroopa I don’t know how you do everything, but you do! I’d love you to help the community make a decision on what DAO platform to use to enable community-based investing in our growing ecosystem. Do you think Syndicate is the lead candidate, or should we be evaluating other platforms?
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Syndicate is definitely the lead if we’re looking to build an investment fund.
If we’re looking to set up a grants program, running it through a multisig or using something like DAOhaus feels more applicable.
Syndicate definitely feels the most well-equipped for what’s been pitched and I would be in favor of supporting a Rally Community Fund on there.
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