Hey RV! I appreciate your candid feedback on the community initiatives funding bucket from the last cycle of the DGP.
I think this comment may come from an assumption on the goals of the community initiatives category that is possibly too narrow. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds as though you feel that the goal of the community initiatives bucket is to source all of our grant applications from dYdX’s existing community. In this last cycle, we took a more hollistic approach that was focused on community growth and onboarding more traders, infra providers, validators, and DAO participants to dYdX (all of whom, imo make up dYdX’s community)
This aligns more closely with the original text of the DGP Renewal Proposal, which was:
I’d like to double-click on a few of these funding targets and objectives and point to a few successes the community initiatives funding category had not just in funding individual grants, but in actively helping to foster growth of the community.
Tooling and Technical Resources
Validator Tools: This was a grant to the Silk Nodes team to bring their Validator tools discord bot and alerting suite to dYdX. This is a valuable resource that exists in many Cosmos chain communities due to its ability to provide a single point of reference for alerting validators of governance proposals, chain upgrades, and node downtime. Within a few days of integration of the tool into the dYdX discord, nearly half of the validators had integrated their node information into the alerting suite.
Not only that, but the Silk Nodes team has since become a valuable contributor in dYdX’s community of node operators, making themselves available for support on a frequent basis and offering advice to two dYdX validators who were tombstoned on how to improve the quality of their infrastructure and prevent similar issues from occurring again.
Promotional and Educational Content
Here again, we aimed to fund initiatives that were targeted at raising awareness of the dYdX Protocol’s transition to v4 and encouraging traders to migrate to the new platform. We did this by helping to supplement the efforts of the dYdX foundation and other stakeholders to market the new chain and fund educational content. A few examples:
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We funded stakingrewards.com to integrate dYdX into their dashboard, which highlights the unique yield opportunity generated by staking DYDX and expands dYdX’s reach to millions of users that may have previously been unaware of the migration to v4. As part of this grant, educational content has been produced that shows users how to stake their DYDX tokens (this has been a pain point for people new to Cosmos that are unfamiliar with the staking flows).
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We funded PANews and Four Pillars to create educational content and research reports in Chinese and Korean, respectively. These are two of dYdX’s largest potential community growth areas.
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We’ve issued RFPs for content in German and Dutch to help grow dYdX’s reach in additional markets that have been identified as being strong opportunities for growth. As a heads up, we’re currently in the final stages of approving a grant for a significant content and education push in the German market thanks to these RFPs! You should expect to see this grant as part of our next approval batch.
Events and Workshops
Admittedly, we struggled in this category, though I assure you it was not for lack of trying 
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We launched RFPs for our community champions initiative back in November, in which we hoped to send one or more community members to live events to represent dYdX and meet contributors. We did not receive any quality applications for this RFP.
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Despite having an open RFP for general event sponsorship since August, DGP has not received many quality applications for events. The ones that we did receive, we evaluated as having a high likelihood of being wasteful or non-impactful spends, and chose to be conservative with the community’s resources. Others were either too expensive or required input from other teams that didn’t have the resources to participate (as an example of this, we received a few high-quality hackathon applications, but were not able to allocate engineering resources to judging submissions + the impact of these initiatives will likely be higher in 3-6 months when the dYdX chain has matured a bit).
Existing Community Member Initiatives
That’s not to say that we didn’t fund existing community members and their work. Retention of valuable contributors is, imo, also an extremely valuable goal.
We funded both the dYdX Merch Program and 0xCLR to continue the work that they had been doing previously. Ensuring that valuable initiatives that the community has enjoyed in the past continue to be worked on.
All of this being said, no program is perfect, and we had our fair share of difficulties, but I do feel that the community initiatives funding category has made an impact on the growth of the community.
Moving forward, we’re hoping to level this up by increasing the quality of contributors we’re able to work with, as increased durational and funding requirements will let us pursue longer term partnerships with content providers. We hope to also continue to work closely with dYdX’s rapidly growing community of validator and infrastructure providers to push forward additional initiatives that make the infra experience better on dYdX.