OIP-108: Olympus Grants Program further 3.3 month approval

Author: Wollemipine

This OIP seeks authority from the community to renew the program for a further 3.3 months (an RFC was posted here and proposal here), whilst making adjustments to operations to bring them inline with current standard DAO operating procedures, namely:

• Reduce monthly operating budget by 66.66%
• Reduce overall grants budget by 66.66%
• Adopt OIP-102 to bring Grants Program compensation inline with The DAO

Accelerating OHM’s Use as a Unit of Account

In OIP-55 (forum, snapshot) the Olympus community approved the creation of a Grants program. OIP-55 stipulated that the grant program be run for a trial period of 3.3 months. The program was renewed by community governance as part of OIP-90 (forum, snapshot) in early Q2 2022.

Since launch, the Grants Working Group has successfully launched a reputable grants program. This can be seen via the active participation of thousands of individual community members in the OlympusDAO ecosystem round as part of Gitcoin’s GR13 alongside reputed protocols such as Uniswap and Polygon. Additionally we have seen 1,000+ OHMies participate in Grants Twitter spaces and various launch events.

The Grants program can benefit Olympus and OHM by helping to support aligned protocols that can drive OHM’s core mission of becoming Web3’s reserve currency and supporting key Olympus12 goals.

Optimizing operations in response to adverse market conditions

The dominating factor during Q1/Q2 2022 has been adverse market conditions. In response, the Grants Working Group has focused on reducing the cost of running the program whilst being able to maintain professionalism with existing partners and managing the admin of active interest in partnering with Olympus. In collaboration with Partnerships, the Grants Working Group has been researching setting up a legal entity to help with administrative aspects of coordinating agreements with external partners such as grantees. In addition the program is in the later stages of adopting more web3 tooling to make the administering of grants and the work of grantees more transparent and accessible for the community to engage with.

Ensuring a tight link between Grants activities and Olympus12 priorities

An additional focus of Grants has been to refine the grants pipeline to ensure all grantees under consideration fit within current priorities of the protocol. The Grants program has had requests for $10.75mm in funding across 69 unique applications. Over the last quarter 2 additional applicants have been identified as being within remit of current priorities of the protocol. These are:

• Artemis Academy ($50k): This initiative is designed to activate builders with the appropriate training to develop OHM-centric products, services and applications. In addition, Artemis will use OHM as a unit of account by paying salaries, investments, revenue, and tuition in OHM. In addition to Grants Committee approval Artemis’ application was further successfully stewarded through community governance as part of OIP-101 (forum, snapshot).
• OHM-EPNS ($9k): Will enable information and updates to be sent to OHM token holders directly to EPNS (Ethereum Push Notification Service)-enabled wallets. According to the EPNS documentation: “EPNS is a notifications protocol which enables users (wallet addresses) to receive notifications. Using the protocol, any dApp, smart contract or service can send notifications to users (wallet addresses) in a platform agnostic fashion (mobile, web, or user wallets).”

EPNS will be immediately beneficial to the Olympus ecosystem, especially as we move towards on-chain governance.

Budget to date

Since launching in early December 2021 the Grants program has been operating during an ongoing down trend in the markets. As such the USD value of OHM granted to the program via OIPs 50 and 90 has seen a significant decrease in value requiring various difficult negotiations and compromises to manage these facts.

Grants supported

• On December 6th the community granted $1.5mm via OIP-50 (OGPv1) of which 164,083.48 USD was distributed. The remaining $1,335,916.52 worth of OHM remained in the DAO multisig.
• OGPv1 committed to a total of $824,999.00 USD across 13 grantees.
• On April 10th the community granted $1mm via OIP-90 which would cover the remaining $660,915.52 USD of obligations, new grants and operating costs for the program.
• Over this period there was a further 50% drop in the market price of $OHM.
• Due to these adverse market conditions the figure of $660,915.52 has been negotiated down to a total of $271,363.61 which will be paid out at a rate of $32USD per $OHM (the operating rate set by OIP-90) for grantees carrying over from OGPv1. This has the effect of a reduction in the USD value of the grants.
• With Artemis ($50k) and OHM-EPNS ($9k) grants this puts remaining funds available to the program at ~80 gOHM.

DAO Contributors

• For April the cost of paying contributors was $29,500
• For May the cost of paying contributors was $23,500
• For June the cost of paying contributors was $13,750

This puts the total cost for contributors to Grants at $66,750 which is a 47% reduction compared to previous OIP-50 operating costs. This OIP seeks to adopt OIP-102 and to cap the operating budget of the Grants program to less than $20k per month making the program one of the cheapest Working Groups in the DAO.

Committee

In OIP-55 (forum, snapshot) the voting process for the grants committee was enshrined as requiring 4 out of 7 seats voting for an applicant with no seats blocking the applicant. To better reflect the close working relationship between the partnerships and grants teams the grants committee proposes to change this governance framework to 5 of 8 with no seats blocking. The committee proposes to invite an additional 2 contributors from partnerships, expanding the committee from 7 to 8 with Apollo stepping down from the committee to focus on Council duties. The committee would now consist of Appleseed, Catwalk, Json, Kleb, Solarpunk and WollemiPine with Glue (has been a contributor in the Partnerships team for the last year with extensive experience in the start up sector) and Stefano (has a background as a founder and working in VC, he is currently running our DAOs Operations and is part of the Partnerships team) as incoming committee members. Additionally the grants committee seeks authority from the community to nominate a delegate from within the Grants Committee to act as a delegate with authority to sign within any legal entities set up to serve the Olympus protocol. Nomination and withdrawal of a delegate to be governed with the same governance framework of 5 of 8 with no blocks.

Key Grants Q3 2022 Priorities

During Q3 Grants will be focusing on projects that:

• Help the community understand the impact of grantees on OHM’s core mission and priorities
• Strengthen understanding and participation in governance (which will aid Olympus’ quest to become more decentralized and responsive)
• Focus the Requests for Proposals infrastructure towards:
  • Decentralized frontends: Improves the robustness of core OHM operations
  • Business development and OHM integrations
  • Hackathons to produce the next generation of OHM-centric applications

Summary

• Reduce overall Grants budget from $1mm USD of DAO owned OHM to $333k USD of DAO owned OHM.
• Limit maximum grant size to $50k USD worth of OHM per project per quarter.
• Change Grants Governance Framework outlined in OIP-55 from 4/7 with no blocks to 5/8 with no blocks.
• Empower the Grants Committee to nominate a delegate from within the Grants Committee with authority to sign within any legal entities setup to serve the Olympus protocol. Nomination and withdrawal of a delegate to be governed with same governance framework of 5 of 8 with no blocks.
• Fund Grants main multisig with $333k USD in DAO owned OHM from DAO multisig (OHM rate set at time of OIP-108 snapshot passing (Time Weighted Average Price or similar)) within 7 days of OIP-108 Snapshot passing.
• Reduce monthly budget cap by 66.66% (from $60k USD -> ~$20k USD per month) by funding Grants comp multisig from Grants main multisig with $80k of OHM over 3 instalments of $26,666 USD worth of OHM over 3 months to cover administration of the program with contributors compensated commensurate with the rates approved within the DAO.
• Adopt OIP-102 to bring Grants Working Group compensation inline with The DAO to be covered either by Grants contributor budget or DAO main contributor budget.
• Existing and new grants may be stewarded beyond the tenure of this OIP.
• Unused funds in the Grants main multisig will be returned to the DAO multisig should the program not continue.