Summary

We propose that Polkadot launch a community grants program of $1.85M spread across 2 quarters to fund a wide variety of teams building apps on top of Polkadot in a transparent manner. Questbook is leading Compound and Arbitrum grants program through delegated domain capital allocation model , a community run grants program.
We additionally propose that this budget be managed by 4 individuals called Domain Allocators. These domain allocators would manage grants for a domain. These domains are strategic areas of focus for which the foundation wants to disburse grants
The performance of each of these domain allocators will be publicly viewable and auditable using rich dashboards. At the end of every quarter, the Polkadot community can vote to replace, continue domain allocators or increase budgets for each domain allocator.
We Questbook will help facilitate setting up these domain allocators and provide the tooling to run the grants program in an efficient and transparent way. We have previously set up or currently setting up the grants process for Arbitrum, Compound, Polygon, Solana, Celo, and Aave.

Motivation

As we continue to experience the depth of the bear market, it is increasingly important for Polkadot to retain the mindshare of key ecosystem contributors and incentivise builders to build on top of it. Polkadot serves as a foundational layer of a decentralised web, enabling users to control their data and not be limited by trust bounds within the network. A community run grants program is a great way to attract high-quality builders, develop homegrown leadership for running and scaling grants program and grow the ecosystem more quickly. By leveraging Delegating Domain Capital Allocation Model, Polkadot will be able to strike a balance between speed and decentralisation in funding high-quality proposals in a transparent manner. This proposal details the benefit to all the stakeholders involved - token holders, builders and DAO members.

Rationale (Benefits to Polkadot)

Giving the elected domain allocators the capital and decision-making powers will increase the efficiency of the grants program, without compromising on accountability:

Individual expertise instead of collective blindspots
Distributed load instead of committee backlogs
Accountability instead of diffusion of responsibility

The proposed structure will lead to the following outcomes:

Increase in quality proposals - Measured by the number of proposals received per month and % of proposals accepted by the domain allocators. Questbook is a desired destination for 20,000+ builders each month. We also have a dedicated team who is responsible for builder sourcing, engagement and reviewing draft proposals before they are submitted to ensure high quality.

Aligned allocation of funds: By leveraging the Delegated Domain Allocator (DDA) model, Polkadot ecosystem will be able to ensure that funds are allocated to projects that align with the domain (selected by the Polkadot community), promoting efficient and effective use of resources. This approach aligns with Polkadot’s goal of enabling the distribution of grants and empower the community to build and participate in the future of the Polkadot while minimising bureaucracy.
Increased transparency: The Delegated Domain Allocator approach provides a clear and transparent process for allocating funds, ensuring stakeholders understand the decision-making process and building community confidence. Questbook, a decentralized grant management platform, provides a transparent space for teams to showcase their backgrounds and experience. In addition, Questbook’s reporting features will allow Polkadot to quickly generate monthly reports on the allocation of funds, with the details for each grant proposal.
Increased accountability: With a dedicated group of stakeholders responsible for allocating funds, the Delegated Domain Allocator approach promotes increased accountability, ensuring that the funds are used effectively and efficiently. Domain allocators can be replaced through a community vote if their performance is not up to the standards accepted by the community.
Lower Turnaround Time (TAT): The Delegated Domain Capital Allocation model will help improve proposals’ turnaround time and overall outcomes for the ecosystem. An example of this is Compound who’s already leveraging the DDA model and has a communication TAT of less than 48 hours. The performance of domain allocators will be measured using objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure goals are achieved efficiently and effectively.

High Brand Recognition : The Delegated Domain Allocator model will play a crucial role in boosting developer engagement with Polkadot, as well as forming strategic partnerships with important ecosystems to jointly fund grants in mutually beneficial areas.

Program Design

The program structure focuses on having community members as domain allocators. Polkadot community will be required to set a budget of $1.85M to be disbursed by 4 domain allocators. Each domain allocator will be an expert in their specific domain and will run their domain on-chain for full transparency. The data and performance across key metrics will be visible to the community in order to evaluate the domain allocator’s performance.

The disbursement of the grant will take place on-chain from a multi-sig wallet controlled by the program manager & the domain allocator. The domain allocator will approve or reject proposals based on their evaluation. The program manager will then coordinate with the Polkadot community to ensure that the proposal is aligned with Polkadot ecosystem growth before signing the disbursal. The sole purpose of the multi-sig is to make sure capital is not being siphoned. However, the allocators are encouraged to make independent decisions regarding the approval of the proposal based on their expertise.

Every quarter, the grants committee and the Polkadot community shall evaluate the performance of each domain using publicly available data. The outcomes could be as follows:

Change the domain
Change the allocator/program manager
Change the budget

Active community members can also initiate a no-confidence motion to initiate a review off-cycle. This can be initiated by one of the active delegates on Snapshot. The program manager can coordinate this, if the situation arises, along with the active community members. The unused funds from every domain will be returned to the treasury at the end of 2 quarters.

Product Screens

Invite proposals to your grants program

Anyone from the community can view and comment on the proposals

Invite community members to review proposals based on an evaluation rubric

Make milestone-based payouts directly from the multi-sig

Track the performance of the grants program

Polkadot Grants Committee

The program will consist of

A Program Manager
4 Domain Allocators

A Grants multi-sig wallet, with 4/5 signer authority, between the program manager and 4 domain allocators will be setup. We will then have 4 multi-sig wallets for each of the domains with a 2/2 signing power between the program manager and the specific domain allocator.

The funds for the grants program will flow from the treasury into the Grants multi-sig. This multi-sig wallet will hold the funds related to the grants budget and committee compensation. Funds that will be disbursed to the proposers will reside in the domain-level multi-sig wallet. The program manager will be responsible to update the community about approved proposals and their details through bi-weekly community calls and reports over discord.

We have identified the following domains based on our research and the feedback from the Polkadot team and community. We invite delegates and community members to self nominate themselves.

Domain	Credentials Needed	Why it is relevant
Chains and Pallets	Experience in Core Protocol development	This will help Polkadot encourage more developers to create innovative bridges, zkp solutions, experiences and thus onboard new users to its ecosystem
Developer tooling on Substrate	Core contributor to Polkadot and popular L1s in Web 3	This will help Polkadot build essential infrastructure, tooling for Substrate.
New Protocol Dapps and Ideas	Core contributor to Polkadot protocol	This will encourage more contributors to propose and run experiments for improving the Polkadot protocol
Education, Community growth and events	Experience in builder community growth and technical bootcamps	This will help Polkadot attract quality builders through community growth activities such as education courses, bootcamps, hackathons and sponsoring events

Once this proposal successfully garners community support and passes through a Polkadot gov, we will create a distinct forum post specifically for the nomination of domain allocators. Delegates and community members can self-nominate themselves as a reply to that post for a duration of two weeks. Following the nomination period, a voting will be conducted to elect the domain allocators.

Domain Allocator Roles & Responsibilities:

The following will be the roles and responsibilities of the selected domain allocators.

Time commitment per week: Full-time program manager and 15 hours per week for the domain allocator, which might vary based on the number of applications. The program manager will ensure that the workload is evenly distributed
Program Manager:
1. Communication:
  1. Work with the Polkadot community and the elected domain allocators to create and list out the necessary RFPs
  2. Identify key areas and relevant ecosystem partners who will co-fund grants alongside Polkadot
  3. Create marketing content for communicating RPFs to the builders
  4. Coordinate between Polkadot team and the community regarding cohort announcement and funding requirements
  5. Communicate the information regarding approval/rejection of proposals to the Polkadot community regularly
  6. Attend community calls, actively participate in the community forum, and keep the community updated and take their feedback on the program
  7. Regularly update the progress of the grants program to the Polkadot community over Discord and community calls
  8. Bi-weekly reporting of key metrics of the grants program and each selected project such as:

Metric	Details
Names and summary of accepted proposals	Total number of proposals that have been accepted by each domain allocator along with the proposal summary
Grant Amount Disbursed	Names of the proposal that have been awarded a grant amount along with the proposal summary and grant amount
Milestone Completion Rate	Each team should have a clear set of milestones and deliverables that they need to achieve. Program manager will share the status on milestone completion for each project
User Engagement	Number of users onboarded by a grantee onto their project
TVL	TVL (if applicable) of selected projects
Project Completion Rates	Number and names of projects who have completed all milestones
Growth in community engagement	Measured by number of followers of the project across different social media platforms, Discord community members
External Funding	Number of projects that have raised follow on capital after getting a grant from Arbitrum

Grants Program:
1. Source good-quality proposals from developer communities
2. Sign the transactions for the approved projects
3. Ensure a quick turnaround time for proposers regarding their proposal decision
4. Coordinate between the domain allocators to ensure that the workload is evenly distributed and take their feedback consistently
Domain Allocator:
1. Review proposals received for their domains based on the rubrics set by the domain allocator
2. Reject/Approve proposals and coordinate consistently with the program manager
3. Source applications by reaching out to developer communities in their network
4. Discuss program improvements with the other domain allocators and program manager during scheduled meetings

Compensation and Operational Expenses :

To effectively support and fund exceptional teams, domain allocators and program manager will need to invest significant time in activities such as marketing, project research, calls with proposers, preparing reviews, exchanging info/feedback with other DAs, tracking teams’ progress, and coordinating milestone based payouts. These activities demand significant expertise and time commitment. It is crucial for Polkadot ecosystem to attract top talent for the role of domain allocator, program manager and adopt transparent tooling to ensure that exceptional projects are funded.

The grant budget will be $1.85M with $400k for each domain.
Questbook will provide the Program Manager along with its decentralised grants orchestration tool ($15000/month) - $45k per quarter
Domain Allocators : $80/hour (est. $14.4K per quarter at 15 hours/week per domain allocator) - $60k per quarter for 4 domains
Legal fees and KYC expenses facilitated by the Program Manager. We propose using Synapse for KYC services and Docusign for all contractual agreements, as we have been using these services for CGP 2.0. - $25K for 6 months

All unallocated funds from every domain and committee compensation will be returned to the treasury.

P.S

Once this proposal successfully garners community support and passes through a Polkadot gov, we will create a distinct forum post specifically for the nomination of domain allocators. Delegates and community members can self-nominate themselves as a reply to that post for a duration of two weeks. Following the nomination period, a voting will be conducted to elect the domain allocators.

We are inviting applications for all domain allocator roles. Once this proposal passes through vote, we will create a separate forum post for the nomination of domain allocators. Delegates and community members can self-nominate themselves under the post for two weeks. After the nomination period, a final vote will be conducted.

Conclusion

What does success look like?

Objective
- The prime objective of this model is to have domains that align with Polkadot’s priorities. This way the contribution of the projects as part of the grants program is directly adding value to the DAO and the token holders.
- Increase in the number of builders, proposals, and funded projects
- Number of partners who are co-funding grants alongside Polkadot in mutually beneficial areas
- Increase in the community members’ participation to keep grant programs accountable (measured by the number of people looking at the dashboard and participating in the program)
- Diversity in projects being funded across technologies, geographies, and demographics, to name a few. We encourage the community to regularly review the project domains during Polkadot’s community call
- Increased engagement in builder community’s
  - Discourse
  - Discord, Telegram
  - Social media (Twitter, Reddit)
  - GitHub
Subjective
- Improved community involvement in the grants program
- Strengthened builders’ sentiment towards Polkadot
- Enhanced Polkadot’s brand recognition in builder circles

KPIs

Each domain allocator is required to work alongside program manager and come up with domain-specific rubrics similar to the following in order to evaluate the proposals. If the identified rubrics are not in line with the domain or Polkadot’s roadmap, anyone from the community can openly suggest changes or question them on the forum.
Total number of proposals received, number of proposals received for each domain, number of proposals funded, turn around time to take a decision and for disbursal, milestone and project completion rates
The program manager will share reports and conduct AMAs once every two weeks to ensure transparency and accountability.
We welcome any suggestions for additional qualitative or quantitative metrics not included above
Questbook product is a decentralized on-chain grants orchestration tool. Anyone from the community can view the data and create custom dashboards using the on chain data relevant to Polkadot Grants Program in a permissionless manner.

Track the performance of the grants program

Anyone from the community can track the number of proposals, funding available for builders for a particular domain, and accepted proposals from the Homepage.

About Questbook:

Questbook’s role in Polkadot’s Grant Program

Questbook will be the program manager. Questbook has previously worked very closely with the Program Manager of Polygon, where they facilitated the disbursement of approximately $1 million in grants. Questbook has received grants from Solana and IoTeX to establish its grant program, and we also manage the Compound Grants Program 2.0. We have spoken to more than 100 builders and teams over the last 6-8 months and understand what it takes to make a grant program successful from both the program manager and builder perspectives.
Questbook Grants tool will make sure the workflows are systematic and transparent.

Product Flows

Posting a grant - Link
Reviewing and Funding Proposals - Link
Settings - Link
Communicating with Builders - Link
Funding Builders - Link

Credentials

Questbook (YC-W21) is a decentralized grant orchestration tool, currently being used by Compound, Polygon, AAVE, Celo & Solana Ecosystem
Questbook will be the program manager. Questbook has previously worked very closely with the Program Manager of Polygon, where they facilitated the disbursement of approximately $1 million in grants. Questbook has received grants from Solana and IoTeX to establish its grant program, and we also manage the Compound Grants Program 2.0. We have spoken to more than 100 builders and teams over the last 6-8 months and understand what it takes to make a grant program successful from both the program manager and builder perspectives.

Community Buy - in and Next Steps

We welcome any comments on our proposal from the Polkadot community and would love to seek suggestions/answer any questions.