[Draft Proposal] - Push Grants Program

🗳️ Governance Proposals
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Background

This proposal will detail the structure of a grants program to facilitate EPNS and other web3 communities to collaborate in the interest of decentralized notifications. The focus will be on empowering a wider network of developers and other contributors to lend their time and talents toward the advancement and adoption of the EPNS protocol. We would like this program to be driven by EPNS community members and share this proposal for your consideration.

EPNS has a community treasury that amounts to ~40 million $PUSH, or almost $87,000,000 USD (as of 1/7/22), which is available to fund growth and community initiatives, part of which we’re proposing be used to fund this grants program. However, it is currently not easy for the community to allocate from the reserve to fund proposals. Talented individuals wanting to dedicate their time to the advancement of EPNS should be able to do so and feel confident their labor, capital, and energies will be appreciated and compensated. Push Grants hope to lay out a transparent process to connect developers/creators/innovators with the resources needed to go from idea to under development.

Proposal Description

Our proposal is inspired by successful existing grants groups, specifically AAVE and PoolTogether. Each has operated for 6 months+ with similar funding to that outlined here.

We propose to run the Push Grants Program over two quarters. We request a total Grants budget of $1,000,000 USD from the community treasury. The grants program will kick off as soon as this proposal is approved on Snapshot.

Push Grants program will run in a decentralized and transparent way through the community forum proposal process where the discussion will be available to all as well. The grant applicant is required to submit a proposal on the forum in the proposed template. An application is accepted only when it gets approved on Snapshot.

The requirements for proposals to advance to a Snapshot vote, and the process thereof will be:

  • Proposal lives for at least 7 days on the forum.
  • Proposal post receives 10 likes and 3 comments (in favor) within those 7 days or more.
  • A poll will be added within 3 days by the EPNS governance team (EPNSgov) for/against moving to Snapshot vote.
  • A poll must get at least 10 votes in total and will be moved along with For/Against majority.
    • FOR: Proposal gets advanced to Snapshot within 3 days with voting open for another 7 days.
    • AGAINST: Proposers are notified and encouraged to reapply after digesting feedback received.
  • Once the proposal lands on Snapshot, 4% of circulating $PUSH supply participating with a positive result is the passing bar. (At time of writing, 1/7/22, that’s less than 600k $PUSH)

:warning: The total timeline can be as little as 15 days. All the forum requirements can be achieved congruently, with the Snapshot voting window running consecutively afterward. (EPNSgov team should complete the 3-day window in just 1 in most cases.)

Applications will be reviewed and funded on a rolling basis. The applications approved and funded within each quarter will form a funding round which will be tracked, supported, and documented. Results will be made available to the community at the end of each round, as well as at regular intervals throughout.

The EPNS governance team (EPNSgov) will be responsible for any further management and support necessary to ensure the proper operation of this initiative. This will be done in a transparent way with feedback received during the program. Including the above-mentioned tracking schedule, these duties can include: grantee payments, communications, milestones tracking, and any other duties the EPNSgov team may identify as necessary. This support will be provided by EPNS in support of this community initiative.

Grant funding will be disbursed based on the milestones laid out in the grant proposal. In general, the goal will be to align long-term incentives with the interests of the EPNS community and PUSH holders.

Budget

$1,000,000 USD from the community treasury. The budget is to be used strictly for the funding of proposals passed through this grants governance process.

Upon a successful passing vote on Snapshot, the $PUSH funds will be allocated to a dedicated multi-sig address for program funding. This will be a 5 person multi-sig managed by lead members of the EPNS team. They will create and manage the send tx’s to successful proposers’ addresses.

Conclusion

If feedback is positive, this Push Grants proposal will move to Discussion Phase, then to Snapshot and if ratified, will begin accepting proposals for grants on a rolling basis shortly after its approval.

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:wave:Hi all!
The following was intended to be included as the second paragraph under the Budget heading:

Should there be any potential legal fees associated with the PGP those costs will be covered by the overall program budget. These services would be identified and managed by the EPNSgov team. Another fee incurred by the program will be gas costs. We will swap PUSH to ETH for that purpose at the beginning of every 3-month wave and as needed otherwise. Those will also be covered by the total program budget.

The first line under the same Budget heading should be edited to include:

$1,000,000 USD from the community treasury. The budget is to be used strictly for the funding of proposals passed through this grants governance process, and the ongoing maintenance in support of it.

We’ll get both of these added to the proposal when we move on to the Governance Discussion phase.
(Which btw… as of this update we’ve hit the number of likes :heart: required!! So we’ll be taking that step on Wednesday! :smile::+1::partying_face:)

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