Dec 12, 2019
Launching grant.fish validator
Introduction
The Cosmos ecosystem can only grow if there are more projects building around it. These projects could be a Zone, a Hub, or something entirely different. We fear that there is not enough focus on supporting these projects.
Funding for these projects in a timely matter is essential. There are largely two funding options. They can seek out equity investments or receive grants from foundations. The former is a strenuous process which requires extreme due diligence and incentive alignment. The latter has challenges in reaching decisions quickly.
Today, we are suggesting an alternative way to provide grants to starting projects. We hope our initiative complements the great work that crypto VCs, angel investors, and foundations have been doing in providing financial support.
What is grant.fish?
It is no secret that we are fond of fish at stake.fish. Fish are one of the longest surviving species on mother Earth. However, fish can only survive if the sea is replenished and bountiful with resources. We hope grant.fish will play that role in the Cosmos ecosystem, helping newer projects flourish and evolve into key players.
grant.fish is a new validator operated by stake.fish that has launched with the Cosmos Hub 3 upgrade. grant.fish will live on a separate validator node and will have the same quality of security that stake.fish uses. grant.fish will use staking rewards as grants to newer projects. stake.fish will bond 1,000 ATOMs to start grant.fish.
How does grant.fish work?
stake.fish will be the operator of grant.fish. grant.fish will be charging 100% fees to all its delegators. Given the current market conditions, 1% of the fees will be set aside to subsidize stake.fish’s server and operation costs for grant.fish, while 99% of the fees will be provided as grants to selected projects. The grantees will equally share the 99% of fees. This ratio may be revised in the future as market conditions change.
Grants will be transferred at the end of every month. All transactions happen on chain, so community members will be able to monitor proper transfer of funds. We will in due time come up with a better way of showing this flow for better transparency.
Every quarter (or 3 months), we will review the selected grantees. We may add new grantees or decide to extend grantees. We may discontinue grants to some projects if they have been able to receive investments or big ticket grants and we deem them to be able to sustain without grant.fish’s grants.
How are the projects selected?
The purpose of grant.fish is to be quick and effective. The stake.fish team will discuss and select the projects for the grant program. We are consciously making the decision to centralize the decision process in order to optimize on reaching grant decisions quickly. We will review revamping the grant program’s selection process once there is a proven alternative that does not sacrifice the speed of the process.
To help guide our decisions, we will constantly listen to the opinions of other project teams and community members on what the key projects to the Cosmos ecosystem are. Our initiative is not perfect, but we hope it complements the efforts of foundations (like the ICF) and DAO experiments by being focused on delivering grants quickly.
Who are the first grantees?
Everett Protocol is an open protocol for creating fungible staking positions. Everett aims to solve potential economic problems that could arise from proof of stake while providing various utilities to users.
Users can create a staking position collateralized ‘shadow tokens’ called bAtoms for use in DeFi applications. This allows users to receive staking rewards and DeFi rewards without sacrificing network security or DeFi liquidity. By this, we hope to kickstart the formation of a global interchain network of interconnected DeFi applications.
We believe providing liquidity for staked coins is an important stack of the staking economy. Everett Protocol is working on a solution for this. We hope to see a future where bonded coins become more traded than non-bonded coins.
Unslashed
Unslashed has requested to remain in stealth mode for now. They plan to come forth with their product in the coming weeks and we will properly provide an introduction then. They are also working on a key stack of the staking economy.
What’s next?
Please join us in supporting the grantees. Social media shout outs, encouragement and feedback are all important ways to support essential projects in the Cosmos ecosystem. We hope this grant program serves as a stepping stone for these teams to receiving investment or foundation grants.
If you are an ATOM holder, we ask that you consider supporting this cause by delegating a portion of your holdings to grant.fish (cosmosvaloper1xym2qygmr9vanpa0m7ndk3n0qxgey3ffzcyd5c). This initiative will evolve with feedback from the community so please share your thoughts in our Telegram group: https://t.me/stakefish.
If you are an early stage project related to the Cosmos ecosystem, please reach out to us at hi@stake.fish. We would like to learn more about your product and your team.
Edit on December 16, 2019
I wanted to give a proper shoutout to a post I read on Ethereum Research that partly inspired grant.fish. Public Interest Projects (PIP) by Justin Lee and Krasimir Raykov suggested an alternative funding mechanism for projects that used interest earned from DeFi activities. Check out their post on ethresear.ch and whitepaper for more details.
Edit on February 4, 2020
Our grant.fish validator address is cosmosvaloper1xym2qygmr9vanpa0m7ndk3n0qxgey3ffzcyd5c.
Website: https://stake.fish
Telegram: https://t.me/stakefish
Twitter: https://twitter.com/stakefish
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stakedotfish
LinkedIn: https://b.fish/linkedin
