from Osmocon Video Part 1: 01:30:20 - 01:59:50
@derek_hsue, @fededaffina, @calilyliu
tl;dr
The Osmosis Grants Program has funded and continues to fund projects that add value to Osmosis. The Reverie team, which is running the program for the Osmosis DAO, is focused on bringing aboard dedicated, skilled community members across creative, technical, analytical fields, and more. If it can add value, the Reverie team will recommend to the multi-sig that it be approved. Tracking the progress of grantees is extremely important, and Reverie funds projects by milestones, and also has grantees publicize their work, open-source it, and regularly make themselves available to the Osmosis community for feedback. The Reverie team has been very impressed with Osmosis governance, and with the level of projects that have submitted.
Intro:
Lily: Reverie works with devs to run grants programs:
-an innovative project vs. foundation with lots of tokens that issues grants from the core team
-Osmosis has one of the most active DAOs in crypto, plus Marketing, Support, and Grants
Derek: we (Derek, Federico, and @MylesOneil) have been working for about 6 months:
-running full-time for about 2 months
-Osmosis is one of the most fun to work on bc of the breadth of what’s happening
Lily: What was your motivation for setting up OGP?
Derek: Osmosis benefits from having an enormous amount of community contributors
-many of them are tinkering on nights and weekends
-some want to scale up what they’re doing, and they deserve incentives
-goal is to find and recruit people that can contribute in any way outside of the core team
-make the funnel as big as possible, find people, and help them succeed
Lily: What are you looking for right now in grant applicants?
Fed: it’s important for people to be passionate about Osmosis —> long-term contributors
-past accomplishments can help us understand the quality of their work and whether they can execute
-e.g. teams that have contributed to Osmosis before without compensation
-communication skills are also important: keep OGP apprised of progress & explain what they’re doing to the community
Derek: want to fund as much as possible people/teams with an existing history with of Osmosis (or are LPs and traders, etc.) — people that want to go deeper
-age, location, existing commitments don’t matter: just commitment to Osmosis
Lily: How do you determine grant sizing?
(particularly with gaming projects getting huge grants)
Derek: yeah, some L1s are throwing out pretty crazy amounts
-we want to be more targeted
-provide ample but not excessive funding
-highest ROI projects
-doesn’t have to be direct value accrual to token holders
-there has to be an understanding of how long-term value (direct or indirect) to Osmosis
-e.g. trading volume, liquidity
-can be analytics, education — in addition to trading tools, apps
-how big is team? how much time will be spent on the project?
-we use milestones to make sure that there are incentives to keep working to completion
Lily: with the Terra collapse, there are a number of orphaned CosmWasm developers, which has been an opportunity for Osmosis: how has Grants been thinking about attracting these teams?
Fed: #1 has been announcements on Twitter
-also announcements after each batch of grants
-increased # of grant applications after each announcement
-reach out to active devs on Twitter
-have also asked Osmosis community members for referrals
-also looking to fund lots of CosmWasm tooling to make it easier for devs to develop on Osmosis
-also looking for Osmosis/CosmWasm educational materials to onboard new devs into the system
Lily: What are some other areas that you are excited about funding?
Fed: focus right now is on funding apps that want to build on Osmosis to enhance the AMM
-goal is to make Osmosis a fully integrated stack where users can go to a single venue to lend, borrow, trade perps, spot, derivatives, etc.
-another area is Cosmos SDK and CosmWasm tooling
-further developing the Cosmos SDK will help
-e.g. facilitating a new governance module: rank-choice voting would have helped something like the bridge vote
-research initiatives: new AMM designs, incentive research, how superfluid staking enhances Osmosis security
Derek: on the Grants Website, there are 50-70 RFPs at this point: https://grants.osmosis.zone/request-for-proposals
-another thing on the governance side, re: Osmosis as one of most active crypto governance
-with things like lending and other things added, this will only increase
-it is important to balance quantity of proposals with more efficient/quicker ways of updating these parameters
-we’re looking to fund people who are knowledgeable about these things and can provide analysis and research and help optimize them
Lily: How do you see Reverie interacting with DAOs in the future?
Derek: we started Reverie bc we saw the level of activity/interest and the importance of governance in DeFi protocols—in the last 18 months or so
-it has only been in this period that DeFi apps have found product-market fit
-before that, governance was somewhat important for L1s, but not as much as now
-the current state of dapp governance is nowhere near complete
-our work at Reverie is to navigate through this idea space & be hands on, and learn and improve these systems along with the DAOs we work with
-the Grants Program is a good starting point as a launchpad and an idea generator
-in 3-6 months, we’ll have a better sense of the types of things people are building and if they are working: we’ll double down on what’s working