Open Grant Standard ERC – James Fickel

Open Grant Standard ERC – James Fickel

If minimized on-chain governance is the path forward for Ethereum, the community needs better primitives for coordination. Today, we’re submitting an open grant standard that aims to facilitate funding for contributor efforts on Ethereum. It allows anyone to propose a set of items that need funding along with optional parameters such as funding deadlines, all-or-none conditions, and grant managers. It also enables composable grants which means elaborate combinations of grants can be reduced to a single address. When this standard is coupled with a voting or signaling mechanism, a weak form of on-chain governance is possible.

The current grants process in the Ethereum ecosystem is for member organizations like the Ethereum Foundation or MolochDAO to internally weigh and fund grants. In the EF’s case, grants lack transparency by not leaving an audit trail of funds sent and the results of votes. In MolochDAO’s case, there is transparency and an audit trail, but only members can propose and vote on grants, which limits the scalability of grants efforts. This standard enables the broader Ethereum community to transparently participate in grants and voluntary governance through signaling and awarding funds.

Here’s an example: a credible ETH 2.0 contributor creates a grant that lists the donation addresses of different client teams along with a well-reasoned split of every marginal dollar sent to the smart contract. One could imagine this grant being selected (through on-chain voting or signaling) among others and wrapped up in a greater ecosystem grant that divides funds between ETH 2.0 teams, Layer 2 efforts etc. The benefit lies in there being a single destination Ethereum address for grantors to intelligently distribute funds across grantees. Needless to say, these grant proposals are just suggestions, and grantors are free to choose which targets they’d like to send funds to because all of the grantee addresses are public.

Published at Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:23:36 +0000

{flickr|100|campaign}