Aragon Developer Grant Program - 300k USDC Funding Request

🦅 Aragon Network Proposals
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Transaction:

We request a first tranche of 150,000.00 USDC on the Ethereum mainnet to the following address: 0xe3cdf267f7cb8a5c32868a226523b6efdfa6eaca here within referred as “DevGrants DAO”.

The use of funds and the permission controls of DevGrants DAO are outlined in this proposal.

Financial Compliance:

I have completed a Financial Compliance Form for this Withdraw Request

Description:

The team that will deliver upon the program consists of members of the existing guilds to ensure that projects which receive funding will be closely incorporated into Aragon’s value proposition - details on the team can be found in the Team section. We are requesting 300,000 US dollars.

The target recipients are teams building projects using the Aragon OSx stack. These teams are extending the Aragon protocol’s functionality, enabling new use cases for on-chain organizations.

The initiative will push plugin experimentation to external development teams, accelerating the expansion of functionality available to DAOs and making Aragon OSx more attractive and versatile for DAOs to launch.

Objective:

DAOs move faster than infrastructure, sometimes needing functionality not yet easily accessible within the Aragon stack. We have seen smaller, focused teams respond more quickly to market needs throughout the ecosystem.

This initiative aims to incentivize external teams to contribute towards the functionality of the Aragon OSx protocol, thus:

  • Increasing the number of developers familiar with our code base and tooling
  • Empowering the Product guild to focus on architecture work needed to enable modularity (instead of working on specific features)
  • Providing valuable insight to the Product guild to facilitate the prioritization of modules
  • Encouraging developer feedback to improve our developer experience

The initiative will focus on funding and supporting:

  • Plugins: Smart contracts published on the Aragon OSx protocol in mainnet chains extending functionality for Aragon DAOs
  • dApps: Decentralized applications using the Aragon OSx protocol in some capacity.
  • Modules: Dependent upon Aragon’s Modularity Framework, modules are defined as a modular capability for the Aragon App. Still to be further defined.

It will not accept funding requests for educational, community, or other general initiatives.

Details:

Strategic relevance

Aragon’s Governance Hyperstructure Strategy aims to bootstrap a two-sided market with tooling developers on one side and DAO builders on the other. That strategy relies on teams beyond the Product guild contributing towards extending the functionality of the Aragon OSx protocol. The scope of the proposed funding mechanism is to incentivize precisely that.

Funding

Sourcing and target recipients:

  • The proposed team will publish bounties and/or RFPs with a set cadence (TBD, whether quarterly or monthly). Those bounties/RFPs will be scoped based on previously identified needs of DAOs and on what excites developers about our product.
  • Additionally, organic inbound submissions may also be accepted for a grant at the discretion of the proposed team.

The purpose of the program is:

  • The development of plugins, dapps, and modules that enrich Aragon OSx functionality by teams outside Aragon’s product guilds
  • Making such plugins, dapps, and modules accessible and usable for multiple DAOs built on Aragon OSx, see “Integration with Aragon OSx and the AragonApp” for further details

Funding schema:

  • Beneficiaries can get up to $30k per grant/bounty and a maximum of two grants/bounties
  • Payouts will have an average dollar-denominated USDC: ANT ratio of 2:1 (i.e., a $30k funding will consist of $20k in USDC and $10k in ANT)
  • Payout schedule to vary, but final payment upon project completion to represent at least 70% of the overall funding
  • Beneficiaries will receive the payments to a DAO/multisig they set up on Aragon OSx

Teams/individuals who have sourced or stewarded beneficiaries or have in other ways facilitated the funding disbursement process can receive a payout of up to 5% of the granted amount. The decision to award such a “scout” payout remains at the discretion of the DevGrants DAO team.

Success

The measure of success would be DAOs deploying on Aragon OSx and actively using the plugins/dapps/modules funded through the program. Furthermore, we will measure success earlier in the funnel by the number of valid submissions (submissions within the here-defined scope) that were attracted.

  • 50 valid program submissions
  • 10 DAOs have installed/forked at least one plugin/dapp/module that has been funded

Additional benefits we expect the program to bring are:

  • Increase the number of plugins published on mainnet chains
  • Increase dApps using Aragon OSx to enhance their functionality

Isolating and measuring the impact of the current program will not be done at this point as many other initiatives of the guilds contribute to these outcomes.

Integration with Aragon OSx and the AragonApp

Plugins/dApps/Modules developed by program beneficiaries will be discoverable in a database maintained and curated by the DevEx team. The current version of the database is here.

The team will work with other Aragon guild members, program beneficiaries, and prospective DAOs to assess the best path for surfacing the modules/plugins/dApps being funded. Two options are currently apparent:

  • Build a custom front end so DAOs can interact with the beneficiary project
  • Audit and integrate the beneficiary project in Aragon App’s main user flow (the Product Guild will cover the cost of the audit)

Team:

The address of DevGrants DAO, which will receive the funds from Aragon DAO, is the following 0xe3cdf267f7cb8a5c32868a226523b6efdfa6eaca. DevGrants DAO is a member DAO deployed through Aragon App, where all actions require a support threshold of 2 out of 3 signers. The current set of signers are:

  • Developer Advocate - interfacing with the Product Guild, preparing bounties/RFPs, ensuring submissions are functioning as required and compatible with Aragon OSx, providing technical guidance to beneficiaries, & escalating findings within Product Guild
  • Ecosystem Lead - interfacing with Growth Guild, coordinating program promotion and non-technical support for applicants and beneficiaries, structuring program practices, consolidating and reporting results
  • Finance Coordinator - interfacing with the Eagle Ops Guild, providing power-user feedback, and ensuring proper financial and compliance procedures are followed.

The signers are also ultimately the team driving the execution of the program and pulling other guild members and shared resources as needed for the successful delivery. Signers can be changed at the discretion of the Guild Lead of the respective guild they represent.

Funding breakdown:

Any team effort is already accounted for in the budgets of the respective guilds to which the team members belong. The requested funds will be used as follows:

  • ~95% to be allocated to beneficiaries as per the scope outlined in the Details section
  • ~5% to be allocated as scout payouts per the definition outlined in the Details section. This provision should also cover the costs if the team chooses to utilize a dedicated tool or service (i.e. Questbook, JokeRace, DAOlens, OpenQ)

DevGrants DAO requests a mandate to distribute the funds within nine months from receiving them. Unallocated funds will be returned to the Aragon DAO treasury address 0xaA655C4AC5aB454c8d36f100eAd92EED38bC0a78.

The funds shall be allocated to the DevGrants DAO in two tranches:

  • Tranche 1: 150,000.00 USDC in the first transaction (current vote)
  • Tranche 2: 150,000.00 USDC once the balance of Aragon DAO surpasses 300,000.00 USDC. The second tranche is not an automatically scheduled transaction and will be subject to passing a separate onchain vote

Risks & Dependencies:

  1. Not enough applications - this does not present a substantial threat as the program mainly targets learning and process refining at its current scale. To mitigate this, the proposal already budgets for incentivizing scouting and stewarding applications. If the pipeline does not include enough quality applications, no funds will be given out, and future iterations will work on more extensive incentives toward expanding the funnel.
  2. Beneficiary projects gain no traction - although a popular and helpful tool, funding in isolation are inadequate to support projects and developers contributing towards the Aragon OSx ecosystem. As outlined in the details section, the team will work with beneficiaries to improve the discoverability of the supported projects. Furthermore, synergies with other initiatives undertaken by the Developer Experience team and the Growth Guild should mitigate the risk of low usability of funded projects.
  3. Running the program is too resource-intensive, presenting a medium risk to the initiative. Time spent on this initiative is time team members could have spent elsewhere. Before this proposal has been brought to the DAO for voting, it has received approval by the Product and Growth guilds, and the required time commitments from team members will be accounted for in future quarterly planning.
  4. A beneficiary does not deliver a functioning plugin/dapp/module - the guilds will mitigate this risk by building multifaceted relationships with the beneficiaries. Another deterrent that will be used is making the bulk of the funding conditional on final delivery. A standardized contract can be part of the process, but realistically the upfront payment amount is too small to justify pursuing legal action.
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Happy to see this @fartunov and happy to share it with the Dev community in Rome :rocket:

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FYI: I am the Growth Guild Lead and helped review this proposal.

I am really excited to push forward a well thought out and pragmatic grants program with a narrow, product focused scope, that is highly aligned with the Aragon strategy. Now that Aragon OSx is becoming much easier to use and has received excellent feedback from the developer community, I believe it’s time to begin the process of kicking growth into gear.

Starting with 300k is more than reasonable for a first edition and to iterate on afterwards. Other similar sized, well discovered protocol DAOs have grants program that are in the millions or tens of millions.

Hoping we can get some more pragmatic feedback from the community.

Great work and thank you!

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Hey Ivan!

Overall, really like the proposal. Thanks for putting it forward.

aragonOSx / Aragon App as still in its early days. It’s a new product that needs to accrue Lindy and pass the test of time.

While that is accrued, I think that inorganic incentives make sense. They can help bootstrap those positive self-reinforcing loops between developers who extend functionalities via plugins on one hand (which enriches the value prop for DAOs), and DAOs who deploy on aragonOSx / App (who increase the reach developers can access to).

BTW! I think it would be wise to consider amending slightly the amount of funds requrest to Aragon DAO, as Guardians may have to veto it in such state. Currently Aragon DAO has 300K of funds, and this was voted as such, it would mean that it goes “bust” as there’d be no remaining funds in the DAO at present moment to cover for any other costs.

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As a Dev in the ecosystem and strong supporter of Aragon, I’m really excited to see this proposal come through! I’ve seen similar types of grants programs successful in other communities (like Lens, Aave, Gitcoin, etc) and I’m excited to see Aragon experiment with this too!

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Hi Joan,

What would the minimum amount in the DAO required be for the proposal to pass? 299?

Thank you!
-Anthony

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FYI - I’m Aragon’s Developer Advocate and helped review the proposal

Great to see so much positive excitement for this. I’m particularly excited to see this in practice and empower more developers building with our product.

This will be a great first iteration to test, see what works, and improve as we move forward. It will also give us closer collaboration with those projects building on Aragon OSx, helping to feed the future roadmap for the engineering teams with feedback and insights.

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Hi everyone,

While the program may “sound” interesting, I’m not sure of its soundness. The target is to fund plugins and dApps using Aragon.

  • Aragon spends currently 12M$ per year (10M$ on payroll & ops) to develop tools for DAOs. This amount is already sky-high, and a 3x increase compared to the previous years (3.5/4.5M$). If we need additional execution capacity, a reorg of the teams would be preferable to (yet) another spending splurge.

  • Aragon-powered DAOs create currently no value for the Aragon Network. Spending 30k$ to acquire a nascent dApp is too expensive, and is more akin to internet-bubble type of financial planning than the responsible and wise austerity that DAOs should commit to.

Last, 300k$ is all the DAO has currently, and I’m not convinced burning all the assets in one go is the way. Therefore, I’ll vote against.

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I think this would be a no, it sounds nice but the focus should be to cut down on spending and inefficiencies, and streamline the core product.

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Wow! Interesting proposal… The DAO as it stands currently has 300k! Why would it simply burn it all for a grant? It took Aragon 4 months to add arbitrum support… seems a bit long no? This feels like more value extraction from the treasury which the DAO will not stand for here imo. This is a big no from me!

There is currently no incentive to simply burn all the money away for 0 return… like @Orion stated theres a 12m burn with 30k rev? And the devs want the full DAO grant? LOL

Also find it quite interesting to see the team all flood into this proposal when theres a slew of ongoing proposals that have been waiting over a week for simple answers… cough @Joan_Arus cough.

Instead of trying our best to siphon as much value for the treasury as we can why not try and benefit it? :slight_smile:

ty

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Correction: Arbitrum is not supported and Aragon has no plan to support the thriving communities on L2s. I guess the current budget doesn’t allow such extravagant deployments?

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lol

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Appreciate the discourse!

@juliettech @Anthony.Leuts - indeed the idea of the current proposal is to remain small in size and tightly focused in scope. Hopefully it can serve as the basis for a larger initiative further down the line once Aragon’s infrastructure is more modular. Popularizing our code-base across the developer community is essential for attracting larger, more advanced DAOs.

@0xZakk @Incandenza - appreciate the support

@Joan_Arus - thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Anthony is raising a valid question - what would you recommend to be the adjusted request?

@Yakitori - appreciate the feedback.

  • The precise point of the initiative is to attract contributions from developers and teams that are external to the current guild. The success of the Aragon OSx protocol relies on having developers outside of Aragon’s guilds contribute towards its functionality - you can check the Strategy endorsed by tokenholders. If you think we should pursue a different one happy to see it
  • An entirely new product stack was launched some 4 months ago. There are some 500+ organizations on it and they do create value - they provide feedback and generate insight helping us improve the product, which has evolved a lot since its deployment.

@Orion I will be stoked to capture your feedback on how the core product can be streamlined?

@AntHolder thank you for your feedback.

  • We have looked at quite a few grant programs throughout the industry and have purposefully kept the scope tight and size small to make sure the funds are not “burned”. I have no unique insight into the thinking of the committee but if the DAO fails to allocate resources towards the stated purpose of the Aragon Project, I find it hard to believe there will be any incentive to move the funds in there.
  • I have seen a lot of discussions but haven’t seen these proposals you speak of. A proposal has some structure and articulated course of action. Putting “proposal” in the title of the tread does not make it one
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I love this proposal and think this is coming at the perfect timing!

This grant program aims to support projects that help Aragon consolidate its competitive advantage in the market, bringing novel capabilities and sustainable business models.

I think it is important to land Aragon OSx, ensuring that they consolidate their position and see some outputs before moving to the next milestone .

Other way there is a risk that Aragon does not exploit or land any of their latest releases and fails into a “development paralysis”

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Hi Yakitori,

Glad you raise your concerns. I won’t enter into evaluating the quantitative part of the proposal, but whether it makes sense or not.

Would you say that having a Grants Program to foster Ecosystem growth is something redundant and without any strategic value? If so, how come most well known industry players out there have such programs, and mostly fund them outside their teams budgets? As a most recent case, Safe’s Grant Program of $1M that got approved last month. Would you say that Safe is burning resources on that initiative?

Would you say that every new Safe created on Gnosis, every new integration with their Smart Account, destroys value for Gnosis?

Before the obvious “BUT HEY HOW DOES THIS ADD VALUE TO TOKEN HOLDERS”, I’d like to point that absence of evidence != evidence of absence. The fact that Aragon (nor Gnosis) has not explored/implemented yet a clear “value accrual model” after a significant product pivot doesn’t mean that it can’t exist. But a pre-requisite for value accrual is PMF and defensible network effects. This proposal helps bootstrap them. Network effects increases the costs of forking substantially, wouldn’t you agree that Aragon having strong network effects increases the likelihood of being able to create (and distribute) value?

Moreover, the proposal supports the strategic goal of Bootstrapping the Two-sided Market. Every proposal that is put forward to Aragon DAO is meant to explicitly state which Aragon Objective it supports (as per the Strategic Planning Guidelines), which is indirectly enforced by Delegates and wANT holders. I think it would be great if we could refer to “How does this proposal support Aragon’s Strategic or Annual Objectives” when we discuss whether we should vote YES or NO to a proposal.

Lastly, Aragon is not a monolithic entity funding “a team”. Aragon Association has supported multiple Guilds, with different scopes and contributing in different layers of the stack (aragonOSx, no-code App, Offchain voting capabilities + Growth & Ops). Each of them have expressed how they intend to support the current strategy with clear roadmaps and OKRs in the forum. If you believe there could be a better use of funds, I really invite you to create an alternative strategy for Aragon with clear objectives that can help guide fund allocation.

Not saying this ironically. I recognise there may be margin for improvement, especially in value creation / distribution. In fact the current strategy being pursued is due for an update very soon based on the learnings of the last months, but I acknowledge that it’s at least challenging (and I think we’re not alone in the challenge, it’s an industry wide challenge) to capture value in an scalable way in an opensource industry without making certain compromises.

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Would you like more clarity on ideas for plugins or products this could go towards funding from the proposer?

I think it’s important to note that rather than pre-prescribing generalist plugins we assume would be wanted to be built… this leans towards DAOs pitching plugins, etc. they want and will use, by building it themselves and than operating on the OSx stack with them. This is more likely to bear fruit and be more effective. Especially if they are reusable for other DAOs; which is one of the top value propositions of OSx and its modularity.

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Am not arguing the value of grant programs in general - but there clearly is an overspend - @Joan_Arus Safe may have approved a $1mm grants program, but they also don’t spend $12mm on development costs already.

We can barely get a deployment on popular chains like Arbitrum. The best way to get PMF and network effects would be to get it in the hands of projects, they will create their own plugins, dapps and contribute for free. We are thinking about this the wrong way - we are just throwing money at the problem.

@fartunov as for streamlining the product, it is probably out of scope for this forum post - but i think it would first require a honest discussion about the current spending and breakdown of that. I suspect we have “too many chefs in the kitchen”. I am not sure how many developers we have in total - but great products don’t need massive teams (Uniswap V4 is 7 core contributors).

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If you look at successful modular products, the expendability, and ecosystem is useful when strong modules built by the team, and maintained are already in place. I think it’s too early to distribute cash like this while the core product is still in its infancy. The team should build those modules first before thinking about spending yet again more capital.

So, we don’t need to pay to acquire users, right? And ahem “feedback”, while valuable at the margin, isn’t hard value. If you need a solid, methodological user feedback report, ask @juliettech to conduct 1-to-1 interviews with the most active devs to point down their needs, difficulties, and ideas.

I see that opportunistic devs are very enthusiastic at the idea of getting 30k$ to build stuff, however do we need to distribute this money? Hardhat has dozens of modules, built for free by the community, for instance. Same with VSCode, etc.

Throwing cash at things with great hopes never works in crypto, sorry. Dedication, grit, anti-establishment and austerity is what builds great products.

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Fully agree we should be deploying in other L2s asap.

AFAIK the only reason this hasn’t happened yet is that we’re waiting to get the last 2 main core features in production (Smart Contract Composer-live+ ERC-20 compatibility of existing tokens + WalletConnect) so we when we deploy there the App has a significantly improved value prop.

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There are multiple ecosystems that are thriving without paying developers to build on them. Layer Zero never gave grants and is now crushing the competition, sees them driven before its dApp and hears the lamentations of their VCs.

Gnosis is a good example of not needing to distribute cash to reach a successful product. They now have a near 100% market share over multisigs, hundreds of dApps natively integrated, a Hardhat plugin, etc etc. Maybe a grant program is useful for them, as they reach maturity and may need to help devs willing to develop complex products needing capital. It’s not the case with Aragon, which just started. Please don’t fall into the cargo cult trap.

Thanks, I know very well about two-sided markets. This answer will mix with the “lack of ways to add value” comment, as it is adequate.

User’s utility on one side, in two-sided market, increases when the number of users on the other side increases, in theory. A platform can fund the side that derives the least utility and charge the one who earns the more to recoup the costs.

The problem is that now, there is no business model for Aragon, or ways to earn from the increase in users using Aragon OSx. Funding devs from various DAOs to build modules that fit their use doesn’t necessary create network effects. Those modules could be built by the team, much more efficiently, as the devs know the codebase, and can assess their safety.

Safety is a great issue, to. I’d be more keen to vote on a grant program geared specifically at funding audits for modules. Otherwise no one will use them, as the risk is far too high.

“Guilds” is a fancy name for “department” or “teams”. In practice, 10M$/year (+50% from previous year) should be enough to pump as many modules as we need. Uniswap Labs has about 7 devs working on v4? So yes, again throwing more cash hasn’t solved any issue.

Anywyay, let’s put it out for a vote and see what the DAO thinks.