Second cohort of grant.fish
The past 6 months of grant.fish
It has already been 6 months since we first launched our grant.fish program and validator. We have been delivering the staking rewards from the grant.fish validator to our first grantees: Everett Protocol and Unslashed. In total, grant.fish has delivered 2,441 ATOMs to the two grantees. Additionally, the grant.fish validator has received over 100,000 ATOMs in delegations. We want to thank all community members who have contributed to this program.
The program was well received for its ability to deliver grants with minimal impact on committed capital. Since the grants are coming entirely from staking rewards, contributors could withdraw their contribution at any point.
The biggest issue for the program was the lack of incentives for new sponsors. While the opportunity costs of contributing to grant.fish are low there are no strong reasons other than goodwill for ATOM holders to delegate a portion of their funds to grant.fish. We had brainstorming sessions with our first grantees (Everett and Unslashed) to try to tackle this, but we were not able to come up with a strong solution. We still do not have an answer for increasing delegations on grant.fish and welcome community feedback for ideas.
As we wrap up the first cohort, I think it is important to disclose that Everett recently ceased operations. Some of their team members have moved on to newer opportunities, while others have decided to continue contributing to Cosmos and supporting Keplr (more on this below). Unslashed has been progressing nicely, with their founder, Marouane, getting more and more recognition around key DeFi events. We wish the best for all Everett team members and for Unslashed.
On to the next cohort
grant.fish is now moving to support new, and somewhat new, projects.
First is Chainapsis. Tony Yun and Josh Lee (better known as dogemos), former Everett team members, have decided to keep building up Keplr and contributing to ICS under their new team, Chainapsis. Specifically, they have shared with us that they will get Interchain accounts (ICS 27) implementation ready and reviewed. They will also integrate Keplr and ENS which will let users control Cosmos accounts and Ethereum accounts under human readable names. Since they have decided to continue their contributions independently, we recognize their need for funding and have decided to support them.
From the Chainapsis team
Chainapsis was spun-off from Everett as an entity to bring improvements in public-good tooling, infrastructure, and user applications within the Cosmos ecosystem. We are currently working on implementing ICS27(Interchain Accounts) for the Cosmos-SDK, adding new features to Keplr wallet, and increasing flexibility of the CosmosJS signing library.
Chainapsis have developed Keplr, a wallet for the Cosmos ecosystem that provides a simple and intuitive experience for interacting with Cosmos applications, similar to Metamask. We envision that the Cosmos ecosystem will look completely different a year from where it is now. One key aspect we see is that there will be more transactions for DeFi, games, and other applications happen than the usual sending and staking. We wanted to build a tool that helps developers create applications and for users to use applications. The key feature we want to integrate is supporting IBC transactions, and we’ve recently released an early test of this feature on the Game of Zones testnet.
ICS27(Interchain Accounts) simplifies connecting application features of many IBC connected blockchains. The aim is to provide composability at the level of VM-based systems within the architecture of sovereign, interconnected blockchains. We believe that interchain accounts will be the foundation for many early DAOs, DeFi applications, interoperable games, and more.
CosmosJS provides developers a modular and flexible signing library written in modern typescript. We believe that this will provide the foundation for developers to focus on building the application rather than having to spend time building the tooling for end-user support. We’ve been brainstorming with the CosmWasm team on how to improve the library to be even more safe and robust, and we also want to ease process of transitioning from Amino to Proto.
Second is CosmWasm. CosmWasm enables smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub. Especially with proposal 25 being passed, the path to CosmWasm being implemented has been laid out. Until we see widespread use of IBC, this team’s incredible work will help bring in new interest and developer influx to the Cosmos ecosystem. They have detailed plans to deploy our grant directly to hire a Dev Evangelist. Specifically, they see the need to engage the technical community in order to get widespread adoption of CosmWasm. We couldn’t agree more that this is the number-one priority in a world after CosmWasm is fully live on the Cosmos Hub. We look forward to working with CosmWasm on initiatives outside of the grant.fish program.
From the CosmWasm team
CosmWasm was prototyped from the Berlin HackAtom 2019 and received a grant from the Interchain Foundation to further develop the prototype into a robust version. Now, CosmWasm stands as a secure, interoperable, multi-chain operable smart contract platform, providing a WebAssembly (Wasm) virtual machine (VM) for the Cosmos SDK. With CosmWasm, smart contracts can be run on multiple chains with IBC integration in a secure and safe manner, and it will leverage the speed of Wasm and the power of Rust.
As of writing, we now have 6 projects committed to or reviewing the integration of CosmWasm on their projects. We have also delivered customized features for Terra. More recently, the proposal to integrate CosmWasm on the Cosmos Hub has passed thanks to a very supportive community. We will continue the development of CosmWasm including IBC integration and a stable 1.0 release. Stay tuned for our next announcement!
Concluding words
Please join us in supporting the new 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 receive 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.
If you are a PoS network interested in having grant.fish launched for your ecosystem, please reach out to us at hi@stake.fish. We are happy to keep expanding this grant program and funding small, early-stage teams.
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