Hop Grants Program Renewal and Redesign

This is a snapshot vote on the Renewal and Redesign of Hop’s Grants Program. The overarching goal of this new grants program is to drive high quality application volume. The Grants Committee is primarily but not solely targeting; cross-chain tooling & infrastructure, research & analytics, marketing & education, and onboarding, therefore the total grant program of 750k Hop tokens seems very low. The max grant allocation of 100k Hop tokens also seems really low which potentially discouraged high quality grantees from applying.

Additionally, the fact that there were few grant applicants demonstrates that there wasn’t enough awareness of the grants program to attract applicants. Finally, another issue with the previous program was the lack of incentivization for grant committee members which lead to apathy and lack of focus from some committee members.

The proposal below is based on the most recent feedback and conversations with community members.

1. This proposal plans to increase the grants program by 3x; therefore, the new grants program amount shall be 2.25 million Hop tokens, and the max grant allocation amount will be eliminated. Approved grants are to be funded based on milestones and payments made periodically.

2. There shall be three grant committee members elected by the DAO that will each receive a base salary of $500/month (in HOP) and their base responsibilities will be: a. Promote the grants program to attract grant applications. For example, hosting discord calls or twitter spaces. b. Share quarterly participation and voting metrics with the DAO. If a grant committee member isn’t voting and communicating in at least 70% of the grants, this committee member can be fired and replaced through a vote.

3. Grant committee members shall have the ability to ask the DAO for up to 15% of the grant amount as retroactive commission if the individual committee member sponsors a grant applicant. The sponsor role entails guiding the grant applicant through the application process and monitoring the disbursement and usage of the grant in accordance to its original stated purpose and time frame. If a person applies to the grants program without going through any grant committee member, then a grant committee member will be assigned at random. In the scenario where one grant applicant ends up receiving the entire grant program amount it would make sense for the three grant committee members to be the sponsors and share the responsibilities and commission equally.

4. The three grant committee members will vote on each grant application and there will be a 7-day period where the DAO can veto approved applications.