I would like to express my thoughts regarding the proposal at hand. I believe that any interaction within the community should be aimed at enhancing the functioning of all initiatives.
This is a Request for Comments, not a Request for Praises.
Despite my rocky relationship with Reverie, I will strive to remain objective. I suggest we discuss the highly relevant grants and refrain from delving into the distant past, which has already been extensively commented upon.
Strategic Initiatives
Let me begin with strategic initiatives. I will only describe those which I understand well. I clearly see the benefits of the grant program in such strategic initiatives as:
- Chaos Reward Program
- Numia Bigquery database
- Mintscan integration
- Testnet Indexer
- MEV monitoring
- CCTP relayer
I can’t say how cost-effective these grants are, I can only speak about the end product.
Overall, I believe Reverie has done an excellent job in this part of the grant program, and undoubtedly their expertise and networking enable them to continue this work effectively.
Research
When it comes to funding Research initiatives, assessing results is quite challenging. Some papers were indeed very successful and cost-effective. Notable examples include MEV research by ChorusOne, V4 governance on Cosmos by Flipside, Funding rate bounding research and Risk parameter framework by 0xCLR, along with a few early papers by Xenophon Labs. However, some research papers such as the recent one from XenophonLabs (DYDX Token Design & Protocol Parameters Research) raise significant concerns. At $125,000, this particular research paper seems overpriced by several times compared to others.
I would attribute the opacity of funding for certain grants to an area where I would like to see changes.
Community initiatives
The final and weakest part of this program is the community initiatives. In my opinion, both the community cauldron and community buckets have been completely unsuccessful initiatives in terms of the outcomes achieved. Perhaps these grants do not interest Reverie; they may lack the capacity to manage such grants. The introduction of two new grantors has not changed the situation at all. Part of their work was occupied by grants where Reverie has a conflict of interest (COI).
I concede that the quality of applications may have been insufficient, but I have not seen any discussions in the public domain about what specifically these applications are lacking, whether community members can come together in groups to submit a quality proposal for a potential initiative.
I believe that the current inactivity on the forum is also connected to the general apathy within the community due to the inability to interact effectively with the community initiatives grant program. The period of four months of community cauldron and six months of community bucket are sufficient to draw conclusions and understand that radical changes are required in this domain.
Conclusion
It seems to me that Reverie should continue to handle strategic initiatives, while Robo and Mackay could assist them in this endeavor.
I specifically see the necessity for a parallel program of grants focused solely on community grants, on developing regional presence for dydx, and on creating products that interact with the end users of the protocol - traders.
This program should be managed by different individuals and will concentrate on building a community of builders, educators, and brand promoters all over the world.
These two programs can operate in tandem and yield excellent results.
In the next topic, there is a TEMP CHECK from the Questbook team. With some minor refinement and considering the community’s preferences, this program has the potential to become an excellent candidate in the realm of Community Initiatives.