After a successful vote by the community, the OGP has been renewed for another twelve months!
A bit of background: the OGP was first launched in mid-April, running for a six month term until mid-October. Since launch, the program has funded 40+ grants for nearly $2M in funding. Awesome projects such as Kado's and Transak's fiat on-ramps, validator monitoring tool Tenderduty, and asset management tools Yieldmos and REstake have been funded by the program, and many more cool projects will get funded in the future.
As part of this post, we’d like to give you an update on how the OGP will operate going forward.
Communication and Transparency
As grantees continue to deliver finished projects, it’ll be important for us to keep the community up to date about the latest & greatest developments.
Initially, we communicated with the community through quarterly updates, funding reports, and appearances on Updates From the Lab. Based on community feedback however, we learned that this communication cadence wasn’t enough: people wanted a more live-action way of following what the OGP and its grantees are up to.
And as part of the renewed OGP program, we’re doing exactly that. Going forward, we will be expanding the OGP’s communication efforts to include the following:
- Recurring Updates from Grantees. We will host monthly calls with grantees to allow them to show off all the cool work they’ve been doing to the community. Though we’re still designing the format of these updates, we can share now that they’ll be done through monthly Twitter Spaces or Discord sessions. For more information on that, follow our Twitter account.
- Monthly Transparency Reports. The OGP will produce monthly transparency reports that will (i) highlight the latest initiatives funded by the OGP, (ii) look into the OGP's operating costs, (iii) present a list of all Grants that have been completed that month, with useful info and relevant links to their projects, and (iv) spotlight any RFPs we’d like to fund applicants to work on.
- Live Grants Dashboard. Over the coming months, we’ll develop a public dashboard that shows insights into OGP’s applications, the status of applications, and funding requests.
- Regular Office Hours. Potential Applicants and community members will have an opportunity to regularly discuss project ideas, ongoing grants, funding rounds, and any other outstanding questions with the OGP team during regular hourly office hours.
- Grantee Discord Channel. We will create a channel with all grantees in the Osmosis Discord. This way, anyone from the community will be able to easily get in touch with grantees and check up on their progress. In addition, this channel will be a place where grantees can ask each other questions and collaborate.
RFPs
RFPs are a simple but powerful tool in the OGP’s toolkit. We use them to find as many applicants for a specific task as possible. An initial list of RFP’s has been created here, but know this is just a start!
Most of the grants we’ve funded did not originate from this list, and we expect things will be similar in this next phase. If there’s anything you’re interested in working on, please reach out to us Discord or Twitter. You can also suggest new RFPs here. Additionally, we will publicize key RFPs that are being prioritized to give community members enough time to submit applications.
SubDAOs
As outlined in the OGP’s proposal, we’ve identified a number of areas where Osmosis could greatly benefit from more dedicated attention. To that end, the OGP will work on the incubation of several subDAOs.
We’ll note that in all of these cases, it will ultimately be up to the community to decide if the subDAOs receive more significant amounts of funding from the community treasury or authority over protocol operations.
The first example is a grants-funded subDAO focused on optimizing LP incentives. As part of the incubation effort, we will collaborate with existing Osmosis contributors Hathor Nodes and Chaos Labs to build a model that optimizes LP incentives. If successful, this subDAO could i) significantly reduce Osmosis costs, and ii) improve the Osmosis experience by reducing slippage.
In addition to the above, we’re considering incubating a few more subDAOs such as New Asset Listings (to improve the process of listing assets), Protocol Security (to provide ongoing security monitoring and ensure upgrades are implemented in a secure way), and DAO Finances (to help highlight and understand the protocol’s ongoing operations).
If you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out to us!
Skunkworks Projects
We have identified a number of high-impact research initiatives that can be accelerated through the grants program. One such example is the ProtocolRev module.
If you haven’t heard of it, the ProtocolRev module gives Osmosis the option to capture benign MEV-related revenue generated by the protocol. If implemented, the community will be able to decide how this revenue should be distributed. The OGP is interested in supporting this effort by funding research into the optimal use of MEV revenue.
ProtocolRev is just one skunkworks project the OGP is interested in funding. Other skunkworks projects we’re interested in include mesh security, fee abstraction for other zones, and MEV modules post-threshold encryption.
Operations
As a reminder, the OGP is well-funded, with funds (OSMO and USDC) sitting in two 4-7 multi-sigs.
Over the coming weeks, we will be rotating several members of these multi-sigs. Having a regular rotation ensures the Reviewer Committee has turnover and gets input from many different perspectives. We will also be using new front-end tools such as Apollo Safe (an OGP grantee), which should make the payment process much smoother.
Compensation
As part of the passed proposal, Reverie was approved to receive 55,000 USDC and 25,000 OSMO per month for helping run the OGP. We heard some of the community feedback, so we decided to add another commitment on top: we will not receive any OSMO until the end of the third month, effectively baking in a three-month cliff into the compensation structure.
That way, the community will have three months to see if they’re happy with how the OGP is running. If the community is happy, Reverie will receive 75,000 OSMO at the end of the third month, with 25,000 OSMO per month thereafter. And if the community is unhappy with our work, it can cancel the OGP at any time, meaning that we’ll receive only the monthly USDC payments. This commitment allows the community to keep the OGP even more accountable.
Treasury Diversification
Previously, the OGP sold 2,734,374 OSMO for 3,500,000 USDC in order to allow US-based grantees to receive stablecoins, and to allow the program to operate in all market conditions. As disclosed in this post, this OSMO was sold to long-term oriented venture funds with respectable reputations in the space.
The multi-sig’s USDC balance remains well capitalized for the fore-seeable future. Pending market conditions, we may explore additional diversifications to long-term OSMO buyers. As always, we will keep the community up-to-date on any and all sales conducted.
Conclusion
We are excited for the next iteration of the OGP, and have many exciting updates planned over the coming months! We appreciate all the feedback we’ve received, and encourage community members to follow along on Twitter and Discord. We look forward to hearing from you!
