SIP-17: Top up Data Fund by minting 10M tokens

Background

The Data Fund is the Streamr grant fund which originally got an allocation of 10M tokens (1% of the total supply) in the token launch in 2017. The Fund currently has around 2.1M DATA remaining, worth $53,000 at current market prices.

The Fund has two tracks: one for small grants of up to $5,000, and one for more substantial ones of up to $50,000. 7.9 million DATA has been spent over the years to fund various use cases, including Swash, DIMO, LogStore, BrubeckScan, many hackathon winners, and maintainers of some tech used by Streamr, such as the node-datachannel library. Most of the tokens have been spent during higher market valuations, allowing notable impact.

Proposal

• Mint 10 million DATA and allocate it to the Data Fund

Reasoning

Currently the Data Fund doesn’t have much of an effect in boosting adoption as it only has 21% of its original allocation left and the market valuation of the remaining tokens is relatively low.

In 2017, around the time of the Streamr project launch, it wasn’t yet known what percentage of a token reserve should be allocated to builder grants and community growth – Streamr allocated a mere 1% for the grant fund. Compared to some newer takes on token allocation, the number sounds small. For example Optimism allocates 25% of its maximum supply to an ecosystem fund.

However, the current DATA supply is only roughly half of its maximum supply, with most of the reserve unallocated, which gives the project a great ability to react to new information and changing conditions on the fly. Token holders can decide to allocate more tokens to the Data Fund as needed.

While the first 10 million tokens lasted many years, clearly a 10 million DATA top-up isn’t very substantial at current market prices, and can not be expected to last an equally long period unless the valuation changes. That being said, thanks to the large reserve of tokens available to be created for whatever the token holders deem to be the most effective purposes to advance the ecosystem, it is possible to make further decisions later.