Author(s): Jack Clancy, Benji Cohen

Contributors: N/A

Status: RFC

Date Posted: 2022-09-21

Motivation:

Hop is an emerging protocol with a large community of developers and users. It is one of the most used crypto apps in the last few months due to its utility and support for many of the most popular blockchain networks.

Establishing a grants program that funds independent developers to build on top of HOP will increase developer interest. Protocol developments could be alternative frontends, in depth analytics sites or dune dashboards, or sdks that make it easier to integrate with HOP, just to name a few. There have been several successful grants programs like Uniswap grants, Liquity, and Maker, which this proposal attempts to emulate.

Renewal/Sunset:

This program is intended to be reviewed after 6 months. After the trial period ends, if the program is not renewed, any unused $HOP token will be returned to the treasury.

Funding

The initial grants program will allocate 750k HOP to the grants program (~$100k), which holds a multisig at 0x1ECC9Ee9980348a2373c1F2EFbfDF520a389f35C. This should give the grants program enough funding to allocate several sizable grants to the HOP development program. The intention of this funding amount is not to definitely allocate all funds, but to have enough funds to give out several sizable grants if there are worthy candidates. As stated previously in this RFC, any unused funds will be returned to the treasury or rolled over into a more formalized grants program after the 6 month trial period.

Reporting and administration:

Developers wishing to seek a grant from the HOP grant program will have to apply via a forum post here, outlining what they plan to build, milestone deliverables, and the amount of funding they require to develop in line with their specifications.

DAO governance will select several eligible candidates (based on their technical expertise, prior contributions to their protocol and their willingness to contribute time to this initiative) to administer this grant program.

Grants under this program will receive a maximum of 100k HOP, which is ~$16k USD given current market pricing for HOP. The grants committee will allocate funds to developers as they see fit. The grants committee members could be as follows:

• Lito Coen - Hop Growth
• Getty Hill - GFX Labs
• 4Poops - HOP Delegate
• Jack Clancy - Developer and DAO contributor
• Chris Winfrey

The grants multisig is at the address 0x1ECC9Ee9980348a2373c1F2EFbfDF520a389f35C.

This is not a hard recommendation, would like to have community input from the DAO on committee members. Most importantly, members of this committee will be engaged, have a stake in HOP and have technical expertise to review grants proposals.

The grants committee will be added as admins to a Gnosis Safe that holds the funds allocated to the grants program. They will vote with a simple majority quorum whether or not to fund grants. Grant submissions will come via forum postings with a lightweight template developed if/when this proposal passes

Disclaimer: Jack Clancy and Benji Cohen are writing this on behalf of Web3 Equities, a liquid token fund run by Benji Cohen. The fund has a sizable $HOP position.