Summary of Proposal
This is a first draft of a proposed grant committee, future iterations will follow.
The SSV.Network DAO will use its own treasury to structure a grant program for the ecosystem to apply for with the intent of promoting development and innovation.
The grants serve as seed funding for developers and not the full cost of development.
There are 3 types of grants:
- Predefined - A set of grants with predefined scope and size
- Open - Completely open grant requests
- Bug bounties - Grants for finding issues in the SSV node code
Proposal Details
Goals
SSV.Network is a critical infrastructure component for the ethereum ecosystem designed to be adopted by and for developers/ projects/ staking services.
To accelerate developers building on the network, even during testnet, the community and DAO should introduce economical incentives.
The below grant program aims to encourage and reward developers building great services and products on the network.
To put it simple, the DAO sohould:
- Incentivize and catalyze developers to build on ssv.network
- Incentivize various predefined grants and non defined (free-for-all) grants which both encourage much needed (and known) use cases to be built and give way to innovative ideas.
- Incentivize bug bounty for security vulnerabilities detection
Predefined Grants (Total: $1.5M)
Grant payments are encouraged to be in SSV, or up to %25 in USDC
The below is an EXAMPLE list of pre-defined grants, the final structure and grant types will be decided (within budget) by the multisig committee and published to the community to see
| Grant | Description | Amount | Recurring # | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staking pool | Develop a staking pool on SSV or integrate SSV with an existing pool. Basic functionality is being able to stake whatever amount of ETH | $100K | 7 | $700K |
| Unique use-case | Think of and write about a special use-case for developing a service/ using SSV following the suggestion template. Including: explanation, documentation, code examples, POC(optional) | $5K | 10 | $50K |
| SSV explorer | Build a complete working SSV explorer with whatever metrics/ stats/ etc you’d want + commit for future maintenance and work | $100K | 1 | $100K |
| Institutional staking service | A centralized institutional staking service using SSV to decentralize their backend. Can set up all nodes or choose other operators. | $10K | 5 | $50K |
| DAO treasury staking | A service that has DAOs as its users, enabling DAOs to easily allocate and manage staked ETH | $100K | 3 | $300K |
| Defi staking | Enable defi protocols holding ETH to stake in a decentralized way. | $100K | 3 | $300K |
Open Grants (Total: $1.5M)
A completely open grant allocation where it is up to the applicants to describe and justify the requested amount.
Open grants MUST not copy any of the pre-defined grants.
Grant payments are encouraged to be in SSV, or up to %25 in USDC
Bug bounty (Up to $3M in total)
Bug bounties should be defined and set on immunefi.com, like many other projects have done.
Grant payments are encouraged to be in SSV, or up to %25 in USDC
Evaluating Grant Applications
Grants will be evaluated for:
- Need/ use case
- Technical feasibility and capability of the team, team track record
- Team involvement in ssv.network thus far (participating in the testnet? Know the protocol and its core value proposition)
- Requested grant size
- Time lines, execution schedule
- In case of pre-defined grants, other grants will be evaluated and the best will be approved.
- Innovation and uniqueness
- Vision, why build it? Is the project in line with the network’s overall goals?
- Grant products license - who and how can make use of products originating from the grant (for example, code produced by a grant is open sources? What license?)
Grant lifecycle
- All grant applications will be sent to grants@ssv.network
- Grants will be evaluated by the Grants Committee
- Predefined grants
- Applications submitted continuously, until the grant allocation is exhausted
- Initial evaluation & feedback - up to 60 days from submission
- re-submission if needed
- Relevant applications will go on public discussion and voting, which will decide the grant allocation (could be less than the pre-defined grant)
- ‘Open’ grants
- Applications will be submitted to grants@ssv.network, initial evaluation up to 60 days
- re-submission if needed
- Relevant applications will go to the Grants Committee which will decide to accept the entire application or none of it (this is done to reduce evaluation complexity and overhead, any feedback should have been given in the initial evaluation).
- Applications will be submitted to grants@ssv.network, initial evaluation up to 60 days
- Voting on grants will be made public via video
- Accepted grant applications will be published on the ssv.network forum
Grants Committee Members
- Yorick
- Fod
- Ben Affleck
- Ariel (Blox)
- Taiga
The addition of committee members (or removal of existing members) can be elevated via a separate proposal.
Voting on Grants
Committee members are trusted by the community to evaluate and allocate grants that will best reflect the community’s interests.
This proposal encourages committee members to be autonomous and agile, enabling them to commit to certain grants on their own, or convince other committee members to increase the maximum grant size.
Voting:
- A single committee member can allocate grants of up to $5K/ month
- 2 committee members can allocate up to $15K/ month
- Any amount above $15K/ month will need a normal committee vote with majority
- Qualified majority must include 50% (rounded up).
Motivation for Proposing
We’ve seen support, need and want to build on top of the network. The DAO already approved a few “solo” grants to developers which created a need to structure the grant application process and give the community a transparent way of tracking grants and applications.
Reasons supporting the proposal
If you want SSV to succeed 
Reasons against the proposal
If you think there is a better use of funds, please comment on this proposal.
Appendix 1 - Minimal grant application
A grant application will include the following required items:
- Overview of the grant request
- What is proposed (In-depth description in case of an open grant)
- Vision, need and usability (why is what you develop needed)
- Why SSV?
- Competition/ other similar grants
- How is the grant advances your project and the SSV community
- Team members, experience, previous projects
- Basic core team KYC
- Location
- Execution timeline & milestones
- Grant payment milestones
- Grant products ownership, open-source, etc.
- Regulatory considerations
Poll
Insert the Poll here (Go to Settings (the gear icon), build poll, voila)
- I support
- I’m against