MGP (Nov 2021): MetaMoloch - A Grant Matching and Ecosystem Development Initiative

Moloch Rises
#1

Project Title

MetaMoloch

Description

MetaCartel and MolochDAO are two of the leading grant providers within the Ethereum ecosystem. Our core values (outlined under the stakeholders section) are highly aligned, while the types of projects we fund have minimal overlap. This makes us ideal candidates for exploring co-community coordination (through formation of a coordinated working group) and to create a grant matching program, to expand the impact of both communities to the greater Ethereum ecosystem.

Manifesto/Vision

Looking ahead during a time of unprecedented technological change can be frivolous. There are a ton of moving parts and no way to predict what lies beyond the horizon. The ideology of unnecessary competition is changing. Ethereum has created the tools which allow us to better share values, mitigate risk and avoid this unnecessary competition. As outlined in MetaCartel’s manifesto, Ethereum and the world of Web 3 have enabled us to coordinate in a new internet of open value. While we don’t know what the future holds, we have the power to choose who we share our journey with. Our vision represents two communities coming full circle to slay Moloch by driving value through coordination which outweighs the cost of coordination.

Stakeholder(s)

MolochDAO: The purpose of MolochDAO is to fund public infrastructure as technology where the total benefit generated by the technology is greater than the individualized benefit to any particular entity.

  • MolochDAO funds and furthers the development of public infrastructure related to ETH 2.0 and incentivizes coordination between various ETH 2.0 projects and the major ecosystem stakeholders.
  • A secondary objective for MolochDAO will be to research collective incentivization and iteration towards a generalized version of Moloch that is applicable to an even wider range of sub-optimization problems regardless of scale or scope.
  • The MolochDAO: Collapsing The Firm: TL;DR = Assuming there’s no external revenue coming into the treasury, if Moloch DAO is to succeed in capturing value, it will have to do one core thing: attract members who will use the capital towards its shared goals. It essentially posits the question: can an organization grow effectively only by being quite diligent on who is allowed to be a member of it?

MetaCartel: MetaCartel’s mission is to accelerate and drive the mass adoption of Web 3 and the open internet of value to make the world a richer, fairer place.

  • MetaCartel aims to become the epicenter of the Web 3 movement by providing grants to the earliest of the earliest ventures in the Ethereum ecosystem.
  • The MetaCartel offers grants of up to $10,000 to highly motivated teams that are creating a positive social, technological and financial impact on the application layer
  • Forking MolochDAO: TL;DR = MetaCartel’s hypothesis is that the Ethereum community will be able to accelerate its process of value discovery on the application layer by coordinating an ecosystem-wide collaboration behind: Product insights, user data analytics, and shared user growth. The re-purposed DAO fork will aim to provide grant funding to dapps based on the metric of their end-user success metrics. The DAO will only funnel funding towards projects that are reaching agreed upon metric-based milestone goals to enforce ongoing growth in value creation and the search for it.

Solution

We propose forming a joint coordination working group to improve community collaboration. The joint working group will focus on identifying mutually investable funding gaps and educate/active funded (new and old) projects. In aggregate, this proposal represents a collaboration opportunity, using a bottoms-up/top-down approach, to increase ecosystem awareness.

While deliverables will be iterative, here is an outline of what we hope to solve.

Research --> identification of ecosystem constraints/bottlenecks --> funding gaps

  • A key to building a sustainable competitive advantage, while enabling coordination between communities, is understanding what is going on within the ecosystem and by having a thesis of what is occurring in out years. MolochDAO and the MetaCartel are complements in this area with the MetaCartel having greater visibility about what is being developed at the application level, and MolochDAO having greater ecosystem (Ethereum) visibility.
  • This creates an interesting opportunity to gather information from the application layer (MetaCartel) and feed this information back into future research (MolochDAO). Essentially creating a feedback loop.

  • In the research phase our goal is to ultimately map the ecosystem of projects funded, to which we can easily identify:
    • Funding gaps
    • Educational gaps
    • Activation gaps

Funding gaps
MolochDAO and the MetaCartel have different funding mandates and provide grant sizes in different amounts. MolochDAO typically provides larger grants, while MetaCartel provides sub-$10k grants. Through ecosystem analysis, we expect to uncover a funding gap that exists in the middle ground of MolochDAO and MetaCartel (both in size and in scope) We believe there will be an opportunity to jointly provide grants in this identified area.

Education + engagement --> activation
We will also take learnings from our research, to create a similar top-down/bottoms-up framework to educate and activate individuals and communities within the projects we have funded. We aim to create sustainable best practices to enhance the success of projects we fund (individually/jointly) down the road. Creating a frameworks around education, engagement and activation should create sustainable network effects making it more attractive for individuals/communities to seek grants from MolochDAO and MetaCartel.

Delegate(s)/community representative(s)

  • To coordinate and maintain positive sum relationships between the two parties, we propose the DAO’s elect (3) community delegates to maintain community relations and drive proposal initiatives. Delegates will be responsible for providing updates to respective communities on a quarterly basis, with scope to be determined by respective communities.
    • Responsibilities include: managing proposal deliverables, regular attendance of governance meetings, communicating essential information (i.e. voting) back to respective communities. (As determined by respective communities). As well as attending in person events to scout potential grantees and make first contact.
    • Delegates will be paid $100/hr.
    • Delegates are voted in by each community independently of each-other. Term-length shall be determined by the communities individually, however we encourage a minimum term of three months.

Progress

To date, we have held multiple joint meetings between MolochDAO and MetaCartel to scope the deliverables within this proposal. We have also signaled the proposal to the MetaCartel community and presented on the weekly town hall. Work to date has been to establish the parameters around this post.

Differentiation

At the highest level, our vision is a collaboration opportunity between MolochDAO and the MetaCartel. Our aim is to let initial research and coordination determine setting up a funding pool for reciprocal grants. At a minimum we view the proposal as a way to share knowledge.

Grant Request $

100 ETH (matched by both communities) granted over four milestones:

  • Milestone 1: 10 ETH (matched) to deliver on December-March objectives. Findings presented to the communities for vote for additional funds.
  • Milestone 2: 30 ETH (matched)for establishing funding/educational/activation gap (detailed strategy). Release of funds signified by passing community votes.
  • Milestone 3: 30 ETH (matched)for deploying 10% capital toward joint grants.
  • Milestone 4: 30 ETH (matched)for deploying 10% capital toward joint grants.

What the Funds Are For

Goals (December-March) - Milestone 1
Strategic

  • Establish regenerative treasury management practices
  • Jointly map ecosystem of MetaCartel and MolochDAO funded projects
  • Survey projects at the application layer to identify funding/educational gaps
  • Establish a framework to automate information flow gathered at the application layer to be fed into macro level research
  • Identify funding gaps & educational/activation gaps between ecosystems
  • Seed public goods cross-dao infrastructure, incentivizing permission-less bounties infrastructure

Operational

  • Set up gnosis safe and superfluid funding mechanism for joint grant funding
  • Establish regular meeting cadence
  • Regular attendance of governance meetings
  • Communicate findings to the communities on (monthly) basis via forum post

Help Requested

In addition to the grant, the members of the working group would be greatly benefited from a close working relationship sourcing, selecting, and distributing grants. Together we represent a diverse and omnipresent view of the Ethereum ecosystem and only together will we achieve the highest possible impact with the funds being allocating to this initiative.

Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio

Many thanks to the authors and advisors of this post @helmass, @scottrepreneur, @YalorMewn, @traviswyche and more :pray:t3:

6 Likes
#2

Having helped start both Moloch and MetaCartel, I am here for this!

Count me in!

4 Likes
#3

Just to be clear, that means 50 ETH from each, not 100 ETH from each, right?

Really?!

1 Like
MGP (Nov 2021): Meta Gamma Delta
#4

Can you please clarify this? Is the 30 ETH for operational expenses related to grants, or for the grants themselves? What is 10% capital?

#5

@0x965fdb32e3fcdc6dc3

  1. This is 100 ETH from each DAO.

  2. $100/hr is correct. To determine this number we looked at what was funded historically (proposals with hourly breakdowns) and proposed a rate that was below average.

  3. Milestone 1 is operationally focused with 20 ETH earmarked for completion (10 from MC, 10 from Moloch). Within this stage, we will outline our funding strategy to be presented to the communities. If “greenlit”, the next tranche of funds (30 ETH each) will be released to the team (representing ~10% of the total budget request). All funding (post milestone 1) will be used for providing grants.

Let me know if you have other questions and ill be happy to answer.

#6

This just seems like an incredible amount of money to me, and a rather sketchy plan, and I’m not convinced that it will generate significant value. It’s kind of like “give us $1M and we’ll figure out what to do with it”.

#7

The commitment is 10 ETH from MetaCartel and 10 ETH from Moloch before releasing additional funds.

1 Like
#8

10 ETH from each DAO to prove value will be generated seems fair to me.

2 Likes
#9

Thanks for your comments @0x965fdb32e3fcdc6dc3 I will do my best to answer them in clear language.

IMHO $100 an hour for high value contribution is not an unreasonable sum considering most of our contributors are in the US and could make that or more working on profit generating endeavors. The key is they want to work on this , they want to support the valuable efforts that go into giving grant and we want to reward them for that work.

Anyway it’s important to look at this as a 50-50 proposal, you’re paying $50/hr for labor and we’re matching that with $50/hr an hour from our treasury. The same thinking applies to all the funding proposals presented. Keep in mind that we will be using significantly less of the total funding for our operating costs, than we will be giving away via grants. Roughly 9% will go to our exploration phase vs the 91% allocated for grants.

The key of this initiative is to grant funds that create the highest potential impact in the space, the funds now sitting in both of our treasuries do little good for the ecosystem. Given that pushing forward the Ethereum Ecosystem is the base principle upon which both of our DAO’s were founded we are optimistic that this proposal will be welcomed.

The breakdown you asked about looks like this:

10% capital = 10% of aggregate ask or 20 ETH (200 total) all release of funding only releases a portion of the total funds to a shared Gnosis Safe, signified by passing community votes in our respective DAO’s / 4 proposal to Moloch & 4 proposals to MetaCartel.

- M1: 20 ETH (MC + Moloch) - for operations. Once we identify opportunities for grants. We then present our findings and trigger proposal #2.

- M2: 60 ETH (MC + Moloch) —> once we establish the above opportunity :point_up_2:t2: in a detailed strategy including the funding/educational/activation gap we will begin reviewing proposals.

- M3: 60 ETH (MC + Moloch) —> for deploying 10% of 200 ETH (if total was rewarded) or 20 ETH

- M4: 60 ETH (MC + Moloch) —> for deploying 10% of 200 ETH (if total was rewarded) or 20 ETH

The 30ETH mentioned in each milestone from Moloch DAO will go in it’s entirety to grant opportunities identified in phase #2, #3, and #4

If total is rewarded each grant round then we simply roll the funds into the next round of grant giving, for example: If during round #1 starting in March we give away 40 ETH in grants, then we roll 20 ETH into round #2, which would create a budget of 80 ETH going to all subsequent rounds. I think it is important that we do not set a precedent for needing to spend all the funding during any particular round, we could have more than 4 rounds based on the interest level and the amount of proposals we receive.

To clarify we are not an inexperienced DAO when it comes to scouting high value projects and helping them move from ideation to product-market fit, connecting them with resources, and advising them on the highest impact strategies.

Furthermore, we are not asking for 1mm to YOLO out to the community, we are asking for the time of our members to be compensated for creating a detailed and informed plan around distributing the funding, that proposal cannot be detailed here because the research and efforts involved are part of the proposal.

That being said, we are huge believers in the power of applying micro grants, we have had huge success funding teams that started scrappy with a $5000 grant and turned into Zapper, Gelato, and 88mph not because of the money but because of the community of highly engaged leader’s in our ecosystem.

The unseen foundation of this partnership is the fact that our members have been helping from behind the scenes get Moloch kick-started for months, Dekan, Ven, and Myself have been helping to migrate the DAO from V1 > V2, scouting members of RBG and providing constant feedback on proposal, not to mention countless hours of consulting time with the operational group advising, guiding, and sharing our knowledge to help Moloch accomplish it’s mission. All unpaid work up to this point, all done because we at MetaCartel care about the outcome and impact of Moloch.

Now we’re offering to help you accomplish your goals through the creation of this partnership. We believe that the power of our communities and our treasuries combined are greater than the sum of their parts :fire:

Please consider supporting this proposal and continue to ask clarifying questions as they arise, many thanks in advance :pray:t4:

4 Likes
#10

Dear MetaCartel Team:

I really like this proposal because it seems very well thought out with the governance process, and projected budget for the next year.

Note: I am interested in being one of the Moloch DAO delegates here, so take that for what it’s worth as far as bias in my review of this proposal, although I am doing my best to review this proposal objectively, and not just because I would also financially benefit from potentially being involved.

Comments:

  • I think that $100/hr does seem to be in line with standards I am seeing in the ecosystem, such as Uniswap.
  • I think it should be made a bit more clear that the DAO is funding this in 4 tranches, though, one milestone at a time. As far as how much we put in each top up, I feel like those numbers can probably be better fine tuned as progress is made on the initiative and the DAO betters understands the benefits of funding projects via this collaborative multisig as opposed to sending proposals directly to Moloch DAO for funding.

For example, since Moloch DAO has a pretty inactive membership base in reviewing proposals, this partnership can help since Metacartel is a much more active DAO.

It’s possible that over time, Moloch DAO itself may develop a more active membership base which may make this partnership redundant and confusing for potential grantees unless we carve out the differences of what each body focuses on funding.

Like is Moloch DAO moving towards a DAO that funds other DAOs? That may be an interesting evolution as far as Moloch DAO being a “fund of funds”… but it would be cool to test the waters of this more over time and leave room for Moloch DAO to find itself too!

I support moving forward with Milestone 1 of this initiative which is 10 ETH from Moloch DAO, with the following suggested modifications:

  • The Gnosis Safe should have the Zodiac ragequit module added
  • The working group should plan on sharing progress reports to Moloch DAO once a month in a newsletter. If the DAO isn’t happy with the progress, a Moloch DAO proposal can be made at any time to vote to withdraw the funds, and the Moloch DAO delegates will be required to ragequit from the safe and place the funds back into the DAO.

Best,
Stellar Magnet

1 Like
#11

to maintain consistency between other proposals, I don’t think moloch should be funding other DAOs. it has functioned best as a funder of discrete, clearly scoped projects which can be evaluated on their attempts to meet said goal.

this isn’t a criticism of the merit of this idea, just stating i don’t think it is a good fit

1 Like
#12

I support this proposal 100%
:white_heart:MetaCartel+MolochDAO stronger together :white_heart:

#13

After some discussion with the team we have decided to reduce the hourly rate for ops work from $100 > $75 I hope this helps sway your opinion of this grant proposal @0x965fdb32e3fcdc6dc3 :pray:t4:

We are here because we want to make our maximum impact, not to maximize our gainz.

So that would be a reduction on milestone one from 10 ETH > 8 ETH with the remaining milestones staying the same as the whole budget from all proceeding milestones going directly to grantees.

1 Like
#15

For me, the magic is that both DAOs match funds on projects where we are aligned, according to a working group including members from both DAOs.)

I also agree with Stellar Magnet that they are are, for now, a more active DAO that can source projects, and with Yalor that they have extensive experience doing so. I don’t think anyone who receive a matching grant from both DAOs will be confused (or upset).

MC really has been incredibly supportive on all levels this year, through the upgrade and in the weeds. This is a valuable partnership.

Lastly, I don’t think we should take a position that we don’t fund other DAOs. It depends what they are requesting funds for. This proposal helps move grant money into the ecosystem effectively, and we want that money working. (Well, some of it can just sit around and appreciate, too. But you know, it was meant to build.)

This breaks new ground. These are the reasons I like this proposal.

1 Like
#16

Sorry for being late, but I think it’s worth YOLO funding 10 ETH and seeing what happens. Yalor and crew are OG MetaCartel and impressive community builders, so I doubt the 10 ETH would go to waste, and it gives us the opportunity to review the progress before allocating more funds.

to maintain consistency between other proposals, I don’t think moloch should be funding other DAOs. it has functioned best as a funder of discrete, clearly scoped projects which can be evaluated on their attempts to meet said goal.

I think Trent is correct that this kind of proposal is a bit weird, Moloch DAO funding another DAO means we can’t ragequit the other DAO if the other DAO decides to spend money in a way the Moloch members don’t approve. So I think it’s fair that proposals to fund other DAOs be subject to some additional scrutiny.

That said, since Yalor and crew are willing to start with just 10 ETH, then I think that’s a reasonable ask and would be in support.

1 Like
#17

@YalorMewn is it possible to share the results of this initiative? How were the funds spent? What was accomplished?

1 Like
Coordination and Capital Resources Collaboration