Principles for a Implementing Pluralist Grants Framework | Disruption Joe - Arbitrum

hello everybody how are we feeling out there yeah I just wanted to do the hype thing with like all six of you so we gave out $3 million in Grants in the last like four months and we're about to give out 6 million more so if you're interested in arbitrum Grants programs and how you can get some funds this is probably a talk you want to see so just any of you guys around if you want to join in this is about arbitrum grants pluralist framework and how we're about to give away another $6 million to builders in the ecosystem now we put forward a proposition to arbitrum as the Dow started which was a little wild a little different than anybody else had done we looked at a couple things they gave the sequencer fees all of them to the Dow and their 9 of2 security uh Council mult mulig which has the potential to jump in and upgrade the network if there's a problem is actually manned by a 9 to2 multi where the elections happen on chain using tally so they were really going in the ethos of decentralization in the way they set up arbitrum Dow and in other ecosystems we've seen many times either a foundation or one organization that has granted the right to give out the funds but in a token driven economy like if we're going to admit we're doing pure plutocracy here so far well the who you give the tokens to is going to be really important right and we think that it should be a plurality of people who are able to give out those grants and we had to get over some problems in our first implementation of the pluralist grant framework so let's first think about the problem that's actually happening that causes this first decentralization is obviously disorganized if you've been in a doubt at all you know this right and we call it decentralized autonomous organizations but we have no freaking clue how to organize right if we're being honest now this this results in systems that compound the problem so a circle of influence one of the problems showing here is when those token holders who have the most delegation have to pass a proposal they talk to each other and they develop stronger social bonds and that becomes harder and harder to penetrate so that's an unseen power that develops and so you look at things like optimism tried to do a web of trust for their bamal power distribution they said the way the token propagates is one power distribution we're going to use a different system they try to web a trust which means I give a somebody else I trust a badge then the next series we both give somebody else a badge and you can imagine that if what you're trying to do is uh stop Circles of influence from forming in your governance that's going to embed a circle of influence right so we need to learn and find new ways to do this if we're going to be successful at providing the dream now the Strategic misalignment is really hard because there's nobody to be that final decider to say yes and there's never a time no mechanism we've seen that can get everybody's voice included we did a cross-section we did surveying of 17,000 members of arbitrum Dow to find out what was most important to them before our grants program and we validated it across multiple statistical models topical analyst throwing everything into an llm and asking for its top and then actually running votes across different platforms and taking segments of our uh token holders whales vers minnows delegates not delegates and seeing if the top results what they thought was most important changed and it still wasn't enough to be a legitimate strategy thing that everybody bought into because normally it's like six people say we're going to run a workshop then they put it on stamp shot they're like uh you can vote Yes or pretty much go [ __ ] yourself you got no other choice right with 600,000 people as token holders that's not the best representative way to do things another thing is that they centralize because a lot of times we saw on the bare Market they're running out of some money they say we need to be organized so what do we do we know there's methods that work let's go ahead and centralize and give somebody the power so we can be efficient and the last thing is it's really hard to access value this is my gift of trying to get paid in a DA it can be hard now does anybody think this GIF is ridiculous based on your experience in a dow probably not right people are yelling out from the sidelines here we all know it so what do we need we need to be able to give power to many different individuals to run grants programs but we need to not run into the problems of them so when we talk about your Dow strategy there's different functions of what they can fund they can incentivize user incentives this is like if your Dow is a city this is like paying people their first month rent to come into your city and check it out there's product Market fit bets these are Builders of daps and protocols it's like subsidizing the entrepreneurial risk for gas station owners and grocery stores who are going to come into your city before there's a nice packed population that they know for sure that their business will be successful service providers maybe you have to hire a Sanitation Company to serve your city operations who's actually or organizing all of these things that you're doing marketing if you have a sanitation service how do they know that they got to put their garbage out on Tuesdays at 12 if you extend your user incentives to two months of free rent who's out there telling them and lastly the open source infrastructure who's working on the roads the piping the electric in your town and each of these things requires a different way for contributors to participate in your ecosystem so when we think about these functions there's a few different levels to them at the start we want to think about the ux of the contributor so at level one you should be able to come into arbitrum find out where there's something you could do or give value on those functions and get do it and get paid within like 48 hours that would be a great goal right fairly get paid for the value you put in and then we need to minimize risk for the Dow right because we have to balance both needs next there's the idea that we want to give them a pathway and we want to increase their odds of success on this pathway so once you've shown that you can do some work what are the types of requirements that would feel less as like gatekeeping to you and would feel more like a coach that's helping you do the right things I'll give you an example of this in the $400 million gaming Catalyst proposal that's out right now for arbitrum they worked with a company called helica that showed a framework for what Publishers do in gaming and what they do is at level three to be eligible for this big increase in funds that you could possibly get from the publisher you have to have AB testing software installed because they know games that don't have this won't be successful so for you think from the contributor ux this is great you have a coach there that's making sure you do the right things to be successful and that you can keep elevating on your pathway from the dowo perspective it minimizes risk at each step because we're putting in requirements that make sure not that the bad guys don't get in but that the good guys can Excel so much that we don't even have to think about the bad guys anymore I spent two years at gitcoin trying to fight the Civil problem and I'm really really bearish on it anybody who's talking about like proof of human or individual human I just I just don't think they see where the pucks going at all like they're missing the point what we actually want to do is optimize our Capital allocation so that people can Thrive now another thing we don't do is give them a pathway with a pot of gold at the end right as a contributor if you do one thing what is your eventual exit or you know final spot that you can earn a great healthy living and you feel proud um if the way it works today is you get a grant and they basically give you the money and they say here's some money don't [ __ ] it up right and and it's a very scary adversarial relationship it's not like a coaching relationship where you feel like they have your back and they're trying to help you build so the framework in arbitr is looking like this where we're trying to identify if you come around like you're building a let's say a game using hatx protocol for meta allocation and grants if there's 30 different Grant programs each with its own requirements and evaluation needs how do we decide how to allocate our funds between the different programs right so you come in and say I'm going to build some open source infrastructure for this and we need to figure out all right how do we get you started quickly give you a pathway and then eventually people use the thing you built right there's an exit builtin if you're doing it as a product Market fit bet and you want investment that we already have investors lined up anything but the feeling of it being adversarial is a win in the Dow space now now if you open this up what we realize is there were 30 points on the last screen but we all know that like D5 versus gaming are going to have different needs the infrastructure needed for gaming is the whole reason why we launched the Nova chains from arbitrum the orbit chains have a ceiling of use cases because of the fee structure so the Nova chains and orbit chains built on top allow the Builder to customize different options for that and because the different verticals require different uh different risk minimization different things things that we can give to them as requirements that help them grow this becomes a really complex problem so when you hear about somebody who's saying oh my God there's two grants programs think about this there's 150 different variable points of different eligibilities and how you review to be able to build a robust ecosystem so most likely they're not complaining usually what's happening is they're saying uh we do research and development for x and somebody else is like well wait a second we do research and development too and somebody else is like well we've been doing research and development too and then you ask them and they're like oh yeah I do it for y and I do it for Z because you need research and development before most things that you do at least some level of it uh but in Dows because we don't have a a pattern language to talk about exactly what point we're referring to in the ecosystem it tends to create adversarial relationships even between two contributors who are working on similar things and could help each other to build so I'm going to show you a few programs that have run in arbitrum here stip was $50 million user incentive program where the Dow just went straight to like Max user incentives for everybody but you couldn't use those to develop your product so there was a pro a program through questbook which was called the new protocol program and it gave like a level one level two Grant something to get started and those could turn around in like seven days they did a Community Education one in plur Labs we did one for product Market fit bets instead of quick money it was a support network it was a fellowship we did the fire starter program because questbook was relegated to the domains they had selected but we needed support for Dow operations and people to write rfps for service providers which wasn't included in their domains so these are something where you could just give out a grant and started streaming then we have the open data Community who started addressing our open infrastructure needs they provided fraud detection services for stip and they allow anybody to go in and suggest a data analysis for that community and they'll Source quality data scientists to actually do the work and because most people in the Dow can't analyze the quality of data work especially deep data work their Jedi Council then reviews it and says this is how quality we think this is and this all runs on chain with Hats protocol our gov boost program let us go and skate to where the puck was going in the way that if there's a $50 million incentive program you want to monitor the data for that right so we spent 200,000 on open block Labs coming in and giving expert data monitor in through it we had open source Observer start to look at and understand engagement we had hackathons Alo on arbitrum with gitcoin they made a bunch of new different funding mechanisms running on Alo protocol there was the gitcoin matching rounds so this is still available if you run a quadratic funding round on gitcoin if you run it on arbitrum you're probably likely for a match of whatever matching pool you have available now so if you want to run around reach out to me this is still available but it funds a different set of needs and when we start to see the shape or the visual of this it really helps people understand that there's a lot of green space and we can have a plurality of programs but then we have to figure out what the problems are and the problem is we need to build the pathways and agree on the strategies so when you start to hear conversations where where people are like we should do something like betting on Builders and they want to run a grant program to do that they're going to run into this problem with okay well the way you minimize risk at the beginning is way different than the way you build up an incubator with like Venture partners for them to have an exit at the end right a early stage fellowship or just cohorts and to do all of that they need funds to actually operate it and they might even need some tools that hopefully would be built open source and not private they need to get the message out to all the builders that that uh service is available for them so when you think about a strategy it's comprehensive and it has a lot of different needs and this is one of the things where Dows will turn down perfectly good proposals um they see this and they think way that that is too much but they don't have a language by which they can communicate why they need all these other extra services in there people say well you're getting $10 million to dish out in Grants why do you need funds to run the other parts of it we don't have that language the problem with d is this if did anybody here fly more than like 10 hours to get here anybody travel more than 10 hours all right that's a huge commitment that's really cool right now we could put up a vote in the Dow that every everybody would think yeah let's go fund that but as soon as everybody put their hands up to say yeah that would be great to support those people who put that commitment all the people with like N9 and a half hour travel times would be like wait a second what about us right and the whole thing gets derailed so the principles of a framework that work think about all these problems that are caused by the lack of a a pattern language or visual communication tool that helps us to understand that we're not overlapping each other's work we're building upon it so to get it going we need to minimize the friction to start pay people from day one showcase their work and make sure that other people know to use it and provide a pathway of success there has to be a pot of gold at the end of the pathway and for the Dow we need to drisk at every level right so when you think about requirements think about requirements to actually help the Builder rather than gatekeep the bad guys we're going to win by pushing forward as fast as we can and the the way that we can collaborate better because we're not trying to Silo off is what will make it so we can run faster the ability that the ethereum network gives us is to change it from a game where you're trying to knock down the person next to you in the race to a game where you can just run as fast as as you can and that's the best way to win now how do we actually do this well we we need to start thinking about instead of a foundation just driving all of the grants granting authority to people all over the Dow who have expertise to do the best granting work that they can within a framework that minimizes risk to the Dow at every level but also decentralizes the evaluation and this is a hard part that people haven't figured out de ized accountability as a requirement because the easy problems are people double dipping you know they do the same work and apply to two different Grant programs analyzing the data under it all with Alo protocol we can we can analyze that data pretty easily across all once we see a successful experiment next level requirement build on Alo but with the accountability we haven't figured out how to decentralize it we delegate authority to somebody we delegate authority to a council and that single point of failure is what is corruptible or cutable so if we can remove that we can remove the circles of influence in the way that we work and pluralism or plurality is a buzzword isn't really that crazy when you think about it decentralized should a decentralized org have one person with all the power to Grant funds or one entity with all the power to Grant funds or should they be a framework they can work within so community-led review can be implemented at every level how do you advance from level two to level three level four to level five well the community should be able to review it without decentralization or without decentralized evaluations we have decentralized and autonomous unorganized things or centralized and un autonomous organized things with decentralized evaluation we have decentralized autonomous communities this is how we Thrive we we pay the community to review we identify expertise over time and we review everything the grant success the Milestone payouts the grant pre-processing contributor information Grant output Grant outcomes Grant impact and we do it in a way that can't be gained that can't be bought off and removes the intermediaries that corrupt and collude all of our political systems so if you like this experiment think about implementing it in your doubt that's is all questions time or no uh apparently we do have questions Time Boom we don't have questions I'm hearing one question oh no well no he said no I'll come find you thank you guys