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Funding for grassroot teams
Hi All,
Given the market conditions and the difficulty teams have faced to access funding through traditional means, there have been various discussions around the ecosystem on how grassroots teams can access funding from the treasury. Following this reply from Raul - Myself, Raul, Rich, Otar and a few key stakeholders from the Substrate Builders Programme have attempted to define some guidelines for parachain teams to gain the necessary funding they need to bring value and utility and most importantly, drive adoption and growth into the ecosystem
The underlying goal of these guidelines is initially aimed at grassroots parachain teams which are connected to a relay network and establish a framework for teams and the community to assess whether teams should get funding and whether or not the proposal adds value to the ecosystem
Please feel free to leave your comments as we want this guide to be community-driven
The proposed guidelines can be found here
Comments (8)
These seem like sound guidelines, Thank you Sam. Should there be something about having a registered company?
Thanks for the feedback! I am not against it, but I also know some teams might just focus on the tech and not have registered the company anywhere. We at Imbue started that way, and I am sure various other grassroots teams did. The goal here is to reduce barriers of entry not increase them. That would be the only possible drawback of that
Thank you very much for sharing this document, @samelamin ! I'm glad to see things moving forward re: Treasury-funded parachains paradigm. 👍🏿
Just a few questions:
Going by a definition from the Oxford Dictionary, Grassroot = "involving ordinary people in a society or in an organisation". Currently, we have a few projects in the Kusama ecosystem with a strong following that are running parachains, although their use-cases might be directed at a niche of Web3 users rather than real-world users. We often informally call these "Community parachains" (smaller share of VC funding) as opposed to "Commercial parachains" (larger share of VC funding).
Q. How would you differentiate grassroot projects from community projects in this context?
I struggle to understand what will be happening at this stage in practice, because the two parts highlighted in bold appear to contradict each other.
Given that the Treasury will be disbursing DOTs (and USDC?) and that each parachain could have its own native token, there might need to be some intermediary on-chain service to ensure that the funds are delivered to parachain teams in a form that is most suitable to their endeavours (i.e for Liquidity Pools, for salary payments, for XCM channels deposits, for community programmes, etc.), and with as little friction/delay as possible.
Given that grassroot teams tend to experience a lot of staff movement in their initial iterations (i.e because people's priorities change and also because projects' directions evolve whenever there is money involved), further recommendations might be needed during periods of internal restructuring or HR issues.
Q. Which setups do you envision in these circumstances?
Thank you for your time! 😀
Thanks for the great questions!
I see them being equal. In both scenarios, they are a group of individuals with little to no backing who want to bring value to the ecosystem but require the support of the treasury because they have no other recourse. The question to the community is whether this value is a benefit to the overall ecosystem
The simplest thing to do would be 1, and transfer the funds to the sovereign parachain account. I.e. where all parachain funds are stored. e.g. reserve backed asset transfers in XCM
We can then iterate towards a better alternative if the need is there