- Author: catena2w
- Status: Proposed
- Created: 13-Aug-2019
- License: CC0
- Forking: not needed
Ergo has a treasury box, that collects coins locked for further development of the platform. This is the proposal of the process of treasury box distribution.
This section contains the description of mechanisms, how the ecosystem and core development is supported in various cryptocurrencies.
Grant system
Zcash grants are powered by https://grant.io/ - "community driven funding for blockchain ecosystem development".
It is similar to regular crowdfunding platform - anyone can create his own proposal, providing an idea that he is going to implement as well as the number of coins required to start the project. This proposal is added to a list with other proposals, and anyone may donate to this proposal. When the required amount of money is collected, the proposal is going to in progress state and the work began.
Zcash foundation has its own funds and is one of the donators. It has own requests (but this list is empty for now) and a list of ideas.
Zcash grant system was inspired by Monero funding system, that does not provide any grants since 2017.
Application accelerator
Blockstack has a program to encourage the development of applications on top of it. Every 30 days they payout $200k to the apps by choice of the reviewers selected by Blockstack PBC. The best application receives 10% of the reward, second place receives 8%, third place 6.4% and so on.
Tron, VeChain, 0x have similar accelerator programs that are a bit less structured and more informal.
Blog based
Ethereum, Cosmos, Tezos and Waves have similar grant programs. They require to fill an application form that describes the project and the team. After that application review is started, which may include additional interviews and conversation. List of grantees is published later in the form of a simple blog post (see for example wave 5 of Ethereum grants). Starting from waves 5 Ethereum does not disclose a grant award amounts.
List of topics of interest is usually published, while it is not necessary and it is possible to apply for a grant with the project that is out of the scope of these topics.
Venture fund
EOS and Binance provide a venture fund that invests in startups focused on some topics (in the case of EOS it is limited to EOS infrastructure). They make seed investments for projects, requiring an equity and tokens (10% Equity and 10% of Token Sale Pool in case of Binance) and provide support for project with mentorship, fundraising, marketing and so on in return.
General research support
DTR provide general funding for researchers. DTR organization is added to acknowledgments of the papers supported papers.
Build-in treasury
Dash has a build-in treasury system that distributes part of the new coins based on master nodes voting.
As the first step of the Ergo grant program, I propose to use the simplest blog-based form with manual grantees choice and simple text-based application form. It looks like it makes sense to collect batches of grants every three months in order to choose the best projects. Long-term grants that require a lot of funds may be split into several parts that will be distributed every three months (if the reviewers will find the results of the previous 3-month period good enough).
First batch grants may include the development of more complicated and decentralized grant system. For applications development acceleration, Blockstacks approach looks quite promising and transparent - some amount (e.g., 20k ERG) from the treasury box may be distributed to developers of the most interesting applications on top of Ergo, while best application receives at most 10% of the fund. For more generic tasks like research, infrastructure development, marketing, documentation and more, ZCash-like approach looks the most interesting - grant applicants may propose any improvements they want and request some amount of funds, while the community may choose projects to support. This may be done from own funds of community members, as well as from treasury box. However, it remains an open question, who will decide where to spend treasury coins.