This thread is intended to provide a record of GFX Labs’ voting and communication around the reasoning of each vote. Subsequent voting communications will be added to this thread over time.
1 Poll Ending May 10, 2023
Z-4.2: Purple Pay Grant
Summary: This proposal would grant PurplePay ~$25,000 in MATIC from the 0x DAO treasury.
Recommendation: Vote Yes. GFX is new to 0x, and is only now getting up to speed. This proposal appears to have wide support, and so we will defer to the broader community.
That being said, this proposal illustrates a number of areas where 0x DAO could materially improve the grants process. This grant plan’s forum and Discord discussions appear largely driven by interested counterparties to the applicant (Polygon and its affiliates). 0x DAO itself needs to have a more vocal and formal role to represent tokenholder interests.
For instance, one delegate directly asked what the existing user base of PurplePay was, and that was not answered clearly and directly. In fact, it was unclear from the public discussions that this applicant is a startup with no broad, existing user base. It should be absolutely clear whether an applicant requesting grant funds to integrate 0x has launched, and what volume they predict being able to drive to 0x in exchange for funding an integration.
Due diligence was also made difficult by the fact that another payments app, launched in 2021, shares the name PurplePay, complete with similar logo (a stylized, purple-themed letter P) and website (https://www.purplepayapp.com vs the applicant’s https://purplepay.app). This should be noted somewhere during the application process, and in the case of the applicant’s very close resemblance in marketing assets of an existing payment app, a brief summary of whether this represents a future IP challenge risk from the incumbents that could be a distraction or disruption.
Broadly speaking, grant plans should also be managed with a lifecycle viewpoint. It is unusual for grants to be given 100% up front – though in this case the grant is fairly small, so perhaps it is appropriate. Typically, a mature grants program will offer some portion (40-60% is a widely used range) with later funding tranches released only upon meeting certain specific deliverables on specific dates. This provides the grant applicant a strong incentive to make sure expectations are matched on both sides, limits the loss of grant funds if a grant plan proves impossible, and puts the burden of progress reporting on the grant applicant in order to receive final funding. There is ideally also some form of close-out process – that is, a trigger by which success or failure is declared, and the grant plan considered completed. This is important because it provides a clear point where grantor funds and grantee efforts are no longer expected.
Codifying these expectations and a clear process for applying for grant funds will breed stronger grant plans by applicants (since they know what they need to do and how the application process will work) and more oversight and transparency by ZRX tokenholders (since they will have more control over funds flows, standardize applications to compare against each other, and receive definitive success/failure/progress reports on grants made rather than forgetting about them).