Announcing the Fei Grants Program

We are excited to share details of the Fei Grants Program!

The Fei DAO has been evolving from the launch of the protocol, and has reached the stage where community initiatives are driving protocol improvements almost weekly. The next stage of growth for the DAO will require formalizing the approach to rewarding and incentivizing community members for their contributions across several categories.

The goal of the Fei Grants Program is to widen the base of contributors that make up our community and put more TRIBE in the hands of the people building Fei. We believe a well-executed grants program is integral to making FEI a decentralized and resilient stablecoin.

Following other successful programs, grants will be awarded in batches. The batched approach will allow us to launch this program quickly and then iterate to improve it. Each batch will target several categories that represent the high-level objectives of the grants program. Here are the categories for the first batch:

• Education and Transparency: Make it easier to onboard new community members, stay up to date on governance, and provide greater transparency on the inner workings of the protocol. Examples: tutorials, newsletters, podcasts, on-boarding guides and up-to-date information sources about governance, PCV allocation, etc.
• Usability: Enhance Fei’s accessibility and ease of use. Examples: decentralized clients for the protocol, websites that allow new functionality, and analytics dashboards.
• Tooling: Improve the developer experience. Examples: CLIs, scripts and visualizations.
• Research and Development: Help Fei Protocol stay ahead of the curve by doing research.
• Other: While the above categories represent the main objectives of the program and will receive the most attention in the application process, we want to leave space for projects that may not fit into those categories.

The first batch of grants will be open for applications starting today. It will have a duration of 3 months and a cap of 250k TRIBE. Applications for grants will be considered and funded on a rolling basis through a simple application form. Grants will be publicly listed as approved, and paid out once the scope of work is completed.

Projects that do core protocol development can be funded via the grants program, but must meet a much higher bar than other grants. The project must be fully resourced, including an audit from a top auditing firm.

You can read more about the program and apply for a grant here.

Grants Funding and Roadmap

There are two funding sources for Fei Grants: the DAO Treasury and the Fei Labs grants allocation.

The DAO Treasury holds a large portion of the TRIBE supply and can be tapped into via a DAO vote. Eventually, the entire grants program should be funded from the DAO Treasury to ensure community consensus on the allocation of each batch and maximum decentralization in how this essential part of Fei operates.

However, to get the Grants Program started as quickly as possible, the first few batches will be funded via the Fei Labs grants allocation. At Genesis, Fei Labs was allocated 2% of the TRIBE supply for, among other things, issuing grants to efficiently reward work while the community forms and stabilizes.

The core team will have discretion over the allocation of grants, as long as Fei Labs fund them, but will work to decentralize Fei Grants to be fully funded and run by the DAO. For the first batch, we are working closely with @DioDionysos, @Arcology and @Meertitan to structure and run the program. The batched approach itself is also in line with this strategy of progressive decentralization: it allows us to continue using the same format for the program once funding comes from the DAO Treasury and needs to be voted in on a batch-by-batch basis.

With each batch of grants, we expect to make progress in increasing the impact of Fei Grants. We expect and are open to feedback as we deploy the first batch of grants, and will iterate on the structure of the program to continue driving value creation and community ownership. We look forward to hearing feedback from the wider community about the grants program, and working together to make Fei Grants a decentralizing force that brings high-quality work to Fei Protocol.

Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord to get involved! 🌲