[Grant Request] Utopia Labs

Project name: Utopia Labs

Utopia Labs is the financial stack for onchain teams, supporting customers like Sushiswap, Gitcoin, Lido, and many more. We do this by streamlining financial workflows that you do on your Gnosis SAFE multi-signature wallet (aka SAFE) - including your payments (such as payroll, CSV airdrops, expense reimbursements through request forms), and accounting (bookkeeping, treasury insights) - weā€™re now enabling native DeFi workflows for multisigs - starting with swaps.

This proposal is written by Kaito Cunningham, CEO of Utopia Labs.

Point of contact: Kaito Cunningham

Team background: You can find a complete list of our team members here.

Other sources of funding and approximate amounts (grants, VC, etc.): We raised our 23M Series A last year - we believe this grant request is justified due to the differentiated swapping experience we aim to offer, alongside our investment in distribution capabilities, as we work towards making the 0x protocol the default and superior choice for swapping through a SAFE.

Project Details

Describe the problem being solved: Using a SAFE to swap a token is a pain because slippage and price movement frequently invalidate a proposed transaction as it waits to be signed.

Utopia proposes to integrate the 0x protocol within our platform (app.utopialabs.com) to provide a native swapping experience for SAFE users that solves this problem. With this proposal, weā€™re enabling the following:

  1. V1: A first party end user experience for any SAFE to swap using the 0x protocol through Utopia (ie app.utopialabs.com/swap) on all of the available 0x chains. No need to use WalletConnect anymore to interact with the 0x protocol for simple swaps!

  2. V2: Weā€™re planning on using Gnosis Zodiac role modifiers to solve the core problem of timely execution. Zodiac role modifiers allow for an EOA wallet address to swap with a SAFE, without needing all of the other signersā€™ signatures while still ensuring security. This feature doesnā€™t particularly involve 0x, but relates more to Utopiaā€™s efforts to make swapping a great experience for SAFE users, with value deriving to 0xā€™s orderbook/protocol.
    Additionally, one of the most common ways that people try to solve this problem of timely execution today is by using limit orders, as limit orders allow for signatures to be signed, with execution happening at a later time. We believe that our V2 solution will encourage this segment of users to use 0x protocolā€™s swapping experience, as weā€™re enabling SAFEā€™s to operate at the speed + capabilities that are competitive to offchain, centralised custody services.

  3. In the future, weā€™re also considering 0xā€™s limit orders for treasury management use cases, alongside potentially 0xā€™s relay api in the future with V2. However, this is not finalised, nor confirmed on our side yet.

Explain how the funding will be used, and list any critical milestones and dependencies (if applicable): The funding will be used primarily for distribution purposes. Given our plan to integrate the 0x protocol, we view the following milestones, timelines, and funding allocation as appropriate:

  • By May 26th: Our team will write an asynchronous update in the forum comments:
    • V1 completed:
      • Integrations with the rest of the EVM chains (ie OP, ARB, BNB, AVAX, etc).
      • General UI/UX polish.
    • A Figma link with a view-only prototyped V2 solution.
  • By June 15th:
    • Update on the engineering status of our V2 swapping experience.
    • Implementation of 0x tag explorer with V1 being deployed across all chains to all of our customers.
    • V1 metrics/KPIā€™s will be outlined in the forum.
    • Update on the engineering status of our V2 swapping experience.
    • Receiving the requested $50K (50K USD worth of ZRX) grant - we understand that this is subject to the 0x protocol governance timelines.
    • V2 metrics/KPIā€™s will be outlined in the forum.
    • We plan to use the $50k USD worth of ZRX to incentivize Utopia users to complete their swap transactions within Utopia/0x. On a volume/trade basis, Utopia will distribute tokens to the most important customer profiles and users who generate the largest swap usage. We plan on doing a retroactive accountability report back to the community each month until funds are exhausted, and tentatively expect this campaign to last for at least 3-6 months.
      We understand that incentive campaigns are not optimal when you have an undifferentiated product with a single purpose - however, given our user base as mostly organisations that use Utopia for many of their business operations, alongside what we consider a differentiated V2 solution in the market, weā€™re confident in using incentives as a means of scaling + leverage distribution. You can refer to Utopiaā€™s current metrics below to get an understanding of our distribution efforts + capabilities.

Indicate whether your solution/product will integrate directly with the 0x Protocol contracts (such as the 0x Exchange Proxy) or via APIs. If APIs, please list them (if known):

  • Current APIā€™s utilised:
    • Swap API
  • Potential APIā€™s utilised in the future:
    • TX Relay API
    • Orderbook API
    • Token Registry API

Describe how the solution/product benefits the 0x Protocol Ecosystem: The proposal is beneficial to the 0x ecosystem for several reasons:

  1. Access to an emerging onchain customer segment (ie established DAOā€™s): Today, Utopia facilitates 15M+ worth of bulk transfer payment volume a month for DAOā€™s and onchain organisations with Utopia facilitating 230M+ to date. Thereā€™s over $100M+ in addressable volume opportunity for swapping within our current user base once we enable this feature. Utopia also reimburses for gas fees, which would encourage SAFE users outside of our current customer base to consider swapping on Utopia (and 0x) vs the typical alternatives.

  2. Ability to provide a first party end user experience to one of the largest markets: Gnosis SAFEā€™s secure billions of dollars onchain, and as of today is 5+% of the entire crypto market capitalization. Utopia represents a fraction of the total SAFE TVL with over 6K+ SAFEā€™s connected on our platform, which allows 0x to work with a new user group it hasnā€™t powered yet to date. This speaks to the market opportunity, evidenced by the multiple aggregator alternatives already available through the app store like Cowswap + 1inch. On SAFE alone, DEX trading volume sits north of ~50M+ weekly. Our grant request aims to develop a swap functionality that starts with being offered for Utopia customers, but becomes standard for other SAFEs.
    image

  3. A 10x solution to the first party user experience vs just putting 0x on the SAFE app store: As noted, weā€™re working with Zodiac modules to remove the need to have all signers sign a transaction for swapping, as this is the core problem with swapping transactions failing. We believe that our work on the UX front will favourably position 0x as the default swapping standard on SAFEā€™s, vs the iFrame experiences currently available in the SAFE app store.

Do you agree to tag your solution/product for visibility in 0x Explorer: Yes! Once V1 is in a stable state across all chains, we expect to integrate the 0x explorer. This is outlined in the timelines above.

What are the actual and/or target usage metrics (such as users and volume) for your solution/product:

Current Utopia Metrics:

  • Retention: Our users show a high retention propensity once they have transacted on our platform. For months 1-4 we are seeing over 80% of our users return to the platform month-over-month, which indicates incredibly strong user stickiness.
    image

  • SAFEā€™s on Utopia across all chains: 15.5k unique SAFEs have connected since launch.
    image

V1 (Basic Market Swaps):

  • Q1 SAFE DEX volume, only on Ethereum, was $991M, averaging $330M volume a month.
  • Weā€™re aiming for ~0.5% of all DEX swap volume occurring through Utopia SAFE by the end of July, which is 1.6M a month. Source: https://dune.com/queries/2457713

V2 (Role Modules): Incremental increase in swap count and volume due to improvements in the transaction funnel.

  • Q1 SAFE DEX volume, only on Ethereum, was $991M, averaging $330M volume a month.
  • Weā€™re aiming for ~5% of all DEX swap volume occurring through Utopia SAFE by the end of November, which is 16M a month. Source: https://dune.com/queries/2457713

Provide links to any of the following for the project (if available):

Funding Request

Grant amount requested (in fiat): $50k USD

Grant amount by token (ratio of tokens): $50k USD of ZRX on Ethereum

Receiving address and chain: 0xD4bAD6E7887110081aA8EE9e16c9341890caE7e5

Conclusion: We believe that the 0x protocol + governance team is the perfect partner to build seamless experiences for the next generation of onchain organisations - including companies, DAOā€™s, and businesses. We welcome any feedback, discussions, and questions.

2 Likes

Hey folks ( Kaito :wink: ) -

Thanks for your interest in working with the 0x infrastructure stack and community.

I appreciate your transparency around funding here:

My concern is not about the teamā€™s ability to execute, nor the value of this integration, (big fan of SAFE tooling & apps) but instead how this contradicts ā€œBest Practicesā€ as outlined in this post.

This amount seems to surpass the initial limit proposed in @nikitaā€™s Grant Lifecycle document.

It may be worth waiting for the community to further evaluate the parameters set in this fresh proposal before properly judging Utopiaā€™s ask.

While we donā€™t believe VC funding should necessarily exclude a teamā€™s ability to receive a grant, it is our goal to uphold the values and vision as agreed upon by the community.

Independent of this, it feels like a thorough, well-written application. Some aspects which I enjoy:

  1. Clearly defined goals and dates ā†’ greater ability to judge the efficacy of the Grants
  2. Transparency and honesty ā†’ leading to more trust within the team
  3. Numbers and dashboards ā†’ can be used to audit the growth and usage, greater comps

Thanks for the patience here as we work to define the Treasury Grants Lifecycle in parallel!

2 Likes

:wave: Kaito here! Appreciate the notes Fig, and addressing a few of the comments here:

My concern is not about the teamā€™s ability to execute, nor the value of this integration, (big fan of SAFE tooling & apps) but instead how this contradicts ā€œBest Practicesā€ as outlined in this post.

This makes sense, and we definitely recognize + acknowledge this best practice. We believe that our value proposition of distribution given our user base + the new opportunity for 0x protocol to reach a new customer segment justifies for this grant request, regardless of our funding status. Weā€™re happy to discuss this transparently, and have also outlined our current metrics so the community gets a good understanding of our product + company.

It may be worth waiting for the community to further evaluate the parameters set in this fresh proposal before properly judging Utopiaā€™s ask.

For sure - weā€™d be happy to contribute to the status of the parameters and discuss this. My general take is that there could be a clear distinction between indie developers + more formal company/labs requests, as I think thereā€™s a clear value proposition for both types of builders! We also want to acknowledge that centralized startups/companies like ourselves should not be ā€œextractingā€ a majority of the grants distributions + disbursements. Given the amount, we believe that 50k USD worth of the native ZRX token is also a fair value.

Independent of this, it feels like a thorough, well-written application. Some aspects which I enjoy:

  1. Clearly defined goals and dates ā†’ greater ability to judge the efficacy of the Grants
  2. Transparency and honesty ā†’ leading to more trust within the team
  3. Numbers and dashboards ā†’ can be used to audit the growth and usage, greater comps

Appreciate this - weā€™ll also be doing accountability reports in regard to our metrics + KPIā€™s as we go here in the context of our integration :slight_smile: If thereā€™s any other metrics that the community wants to see, happy to discuss this!

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I need to do some research on some of the technical aspects of your proposal and may have some questions on that and some other things later, but please describe in more detail how you arrived at the $50k ask/cost and provide more information on the mechanics of the proposed incentive distribution and what it is intended to achieve other than mercenary usage. This type of incentive is easily gamed and has been the subject of serious allegations and strife in other protocols.

1 Like

Hey Nikita!

For sure - here are a compiled list of links if helpful. Feel free to drop technical questions here as well:

We came to the 50k ask/cost with the following logic:

  • As a venture backed startup, we do not need funds for ā€œprotocol developmentā€ or ā€œengineering costsā€ to integrate the 0x protocol (we believe that most of the value should go to the users that find value in our product + 0x). Rather, we think the 50k makes much more sense for our marketing/distribution efforts over a longer time horizon - as distribution + branding are competitive moats in crypto.

  • Over a 6 month timeline, we believe that an average of 8K USD a month is a fair amount to provide to real users, given the comparison of other aggregators and DeFi projects spending hundreds of thousands on conferences + other events. We would not be spending this $ on ads, but rather incentivizing users based on real activity for a real user base. Given our V2 solution, we believe that a more aggressive marketing/distribution push also makes sense to make 0x the default standard for swapping on SAFEā€™s, and feel that 50k USD is a fair amount to ask here.

  • Weā€™re also reimbursing gas fees upfront for swaps on our platform, as gasless trades for safe multisigs currently donā€™t work.

  • At the end of each month, weā€™ll provide an accountability report on the addresses that would recieve ZRX. Any member of the community will be able to see which addresses got paid in ZRX. As a collaborative financial workspace for onchain teams, weā€™ll also have real time insights + transactions dashboards available for the entire community to see how ZRX is allocated in real time. Hereā€™s an example of Arbitrumā€™s transactions, and our insights. Weā€™ll have one created specifically, and only for the ZRX capital allocations as well.

  • At Utopia, we also have internal metrics/tracking to filter out airdrop farmers, and have criteria such as 1) wallet creation date 2) generalized transaction count 3) transaction volume metrics 4) SAFE balance (for ex, the SAFE. has to have 1K+ USD in their value to ensure they can receive ZRX) and many other metrics. Our general suggestion here is to be outlining the methodology retroactively, but happy to provide more clarity if requested!

  • Regarding the comment around mercenary capital, our customers are primarily sustainable onchain teams, DAOā€™s, and companies that use crypto for real, tangible use cases (ie payroll, spend management, etc). Feel free to reference the section ā€œCurrent Utopia Metricsā€ alongside our current cohort retention - which outlines incredibly strong user stickiness of our product.

Great, constructive questions - appreciate it!

Hi @Utopia ā€“ Thanks for your answers, above. I havenā€™t had time yet to look into the Gnosis role modifiers aspect and to evaluate the analytics you shared, but do have an additional question:

When describing the problem being solved, the focus is on what Iā€™ll loosely categorize as the transaction mechanics/output. It would be helpful to have more insight into the upstream use case in terms of the typical user persona. Specifically, if the target/existing ā€œmarketā€ is mostly DAOs, organizations making recurring payments, etc., can you share what research or other signal indicates that these types of users have a need to or would want to concurrently swap tokens at the time of the transaction/distribution? Also, can you elaborate on why you think integrating into the Utopia app is a better user experience than integrating directly into the SAFE ā€œapp storeā€?

1 Like

Hey Nikita - Kaito here:

For sure - our research/data consisted of us querying all of the SAFEā€™s that were already connected to Utopia, and we queried the SAFEā€™s onchain activity to see if 1) these SAFEā€™s swapped and 2) the volume of the swap. Within our customer base alone (ie the SAFEā€™s connected to Utopia), thereā€™s been over 100M$ worth of swapping activity:

Moreover, we also queried SAFEā€™s that are not connected to Utopia, and calculated that thereā€™s been over $900M worth of volume with the top 25 SAFEā€™s by DEX volume alone. The market that weā€™re working towards serving is the general SAFE market (DAOā€™s are/were our beachhead):

In regard to why SAFEā€™s even swap in the first place, itā€™s usually for a few reasons:

  1. Treasury Management (ie native token diversification, risk management via stables, swapping tokens to stake ETH, etc)
  2. Payroll Management (ie swapping from ETH ā†’ USDC to pay employees/contractors)
  3. Operational Workflows (ie swapping USDC ā†’ ETH to deploy contracts)
  4. DeFi Activities (ie swapping so you can withdraw/deposit LP tokens)

For sure:

  1. iFrames do not abstract chains. For ex, 1inch is currently on the SAFE app store, but only supports ETH atm, Cowswap only supports Gnosis Chain + ETH. Utopia abstracts the need to switch chains, which isnā€™t available in the iframe experience.
  2. Users donā€™t have to context switch, and click multiple buttons to be able to access the swapping module on SAFE, once they arrive on https://safe.global/. On Utopia, you click one button (new) and you get to swap instantly.
    newswaps_gif
  3. Within the iframe experience, youā€™re not able to additional metadata/context to the reason behind swapping - which is crucial for organisations to ensure theyā€™re making accurate, informed financial decisions
    3.1: Once the signing transaction is put onchain, thereā€™s a lack of metadata that makes it easier for the other signers to have context.
  4. The iframe experience requires the user to sign 2 separate transactions - 1 for approving the token, 2 for executing the swap. Utopia batches both of these transactions into one.

Lmk if these answered your questions! Appreciate it

Thank you - this is helpful. I do understand the examples you provided regarding why/when people use SAFEs to swap, but am still struggling to understand where the overlap is between those activity drivers and your current user base. For example, with your example of payroll management, my impression is that typically swaps are done as a one-time thing (and often done OTC) after a DAO decides to sell a large amount of their native token or ETH for a stablecoin, rather than incrementally at the time of individual payments. In other words, it isnā€™t clear to me whether the SAFEs doing swaps for whatever reasons outside Utopia would shift those swaps into Utopia and I was wondering if there was some specific signal indicating they would. Will get back to you with a couple other questions in the next couple days.

1 Like

For payroll specifically - this could be the case for larger organisations but many of the smaller onchain orgs they swap directly through a DEX. These customers also swap much more frequently for payroll than once a year, but rather once a quarter (or even once a month) to DCA so the trade doesnā€™t significantly impact liquidity onchain (vs one large trade onchain which harms token price). Many of the SAFEs we support also donā€™t have the ability to trade OTC.

Outside of the specific payroll use case, swapping serves to be a ā€œpre-requisiteā€ to many of the workflows required to operate onchain. For example, you might swap USDC to ETH to deploy contracts, fill up relayers, or you might swap USDC to ETH to stake into Lido, etc. Alot of these swapping use cases add up.

This is a fair argument - however, the scope of our product around streamlining financial workflows is not just limited to payroll (for ex, we facilitate grant payments, transfers between internal SAFEā€™s, helped OHM execute an $8M+ transaction around paying back the FEI debt, etc) - our purpose is to enable all transaction types and use offchain or onchain experiences to make the most prominent financial workflows on SAFE a phenomenal experience. In many cases, weā€™re the financial back office for onchain orgs, and already facilitate a large % of an onchain orgs transactions.

From a product perspective, we believe that thereā€™s a few differentiating reasons to why SAFEā€™s would start doing swaps via Utopia:

  • Gasless Swaps: Weā€™re offering the ability for users to conduct swaps gaslessly, which helps users save money. This is also part of the reason why weā€™re asking for a grant.
  • Bundled token approvals: Instead of signing/executing 2 separate transactions (ie 1 for approving a token and 2) for actually executing the swap), we bundle into one, seamless experience.
  • Metadata + Context: Weā€™re giving users human readable context when creating/executing swap transactions, so the organisation is able to decode and truly understand what theyā€™re signing.
  • Regarding the specific signals - we analyzed current Utopia users onchain DEX volumes and thereā€™s already a 100M$ volume opportunity. Given our retention/engagement metrics, we believe this serves to be good justification (but not neccesarily 100% validation) that serving this product to our current user base is promising. Lmk if Iā€™ve been repeating myself here, happy to provide more context.
  • Role Modifiers: Weā€™re allowing SAFEā€™s to skip the signing process of swapping tokens, without skipping security. This use case/solution is currently not in the market, and serves the core problem that many SAFEā€™s run into - which is the following:

Hi,

This is an interesting feature solving a real problem with SAFE usage today

Reading the description Iā€™m not sure though what is the purpose of V1, from my understanding (which can be wrong) it will have the timely execution limitation issue, which currently makes swaps unpractical using safes.

Iā€™m I missing something? If not could you please elaborate on the need to for this step rather than directly implementing the V2 features

Many thanks

Appreciate your questions here:

V1 is a dependency for us to get V2. V1 is to reach feature parity with existing solutions that are currently available in the market (but making it better through offchain experiences, such as notifications, metadata and simpler onchain experiences such as gasless transactions, bundling approvals).

To put it simply - for us to get to V2, we still need to build the functionality for V1 and we think of building product with milestones while iterating with short feedback loops!

Hi @Utopia thank you for making this proposal! are you planning on extracting any fees on the 0x swaps that will be done via your application?
Also, since you will be doing gasless trades it seems, how are you planning on funding those gasless trades? if gas prices spike again, would you be able to guarantee uptime?

Also, a small follow up.

From what I understand, not all SAFE swaps will be time-sensitive, right? certain rebalances and treasury management can be done over days/weeks, is that correct?

If that is correct, you should implement limit order functionality alongside the swaps, since this would directly benefit the 0x liquidity - and will also allow your customers to swap at a better, more predictable, rate. Itā€™s a win-win and very clearly benefits the 0x ecosystem.

You could also really be creative with the user experience here - providing users with the option to set their own deadline for rebalancing. Initially, Utopia places a limit order, and if thereā€™s remaining liquidity that needs rebalancing when the deadline arrives, the system could automatically execute it as a swap.

Hey! Kaito here :slight_smile:

At the moment, weā€™re not planning to extract any fees. Weā€™ll explore fees once our product generates significant volume.

Weā€™re a venture backed startup that provides gasless transactions to our top customers. If thereā€™s a case in which thereā€™s an abuse of the feature, we have the ability to turn it off, and still give the users the ability to swap (albeit without gas reimbursements). We canā€™t 100% guarantee uptime, but weā€™ve been reliable in terms of our transaction execution capabilities for our users. This is also part of the reason of why weā€™re requesting the grant!

Correct - however, even if itā€™s not time sensitive for the end users (letā€™s say I donā€™t mind if it takes 1 week to get a swap fully approved + executed), there could be the chance that slippage and price movement invalidate the proposed transaction as it waits to be signed, meaning that they would have to re-create/queue the transaction again.

Our opinionated take here is that limit orders are actually the alternative solution today to the timely execution problem that weā€™re solving - we believe that our V2 solution of enabling onchain permissions to allow an individual to swap actually replaces, or removes the need for many limit order experiences. For example, alot of SAFE users today establish a limit order for ETH ā†’ USDC over a weekā€™s timespan, requiring all signers to sign, and waiting on the transaction to eventually clear. We think that it makes much more sense to delegate a user to be able to swap ETH ā†’ USDC instantly.

Moreover, limit orders are relatively low in liquidity, and sometimes donā€™t execute if theyā€™re for uncommon pairs - after you create a TX for a limit order at price X and the market price diverges significantly before the TX is signed and put on chain, the order will never be fulfilled (unless the price returns to X within the allotted time).

Regardless - appreciate the suggestions here! Definitely not shutting down the potential implementation of limit orders, but also want to be 100% transparent in terms of our short term roadmap.

Hi Kaito :wave:,

Thank you for providing the detailed responses to the questions!

Itā€™s good to hear that Utopia is not planning to charge fees at this stage. I also think your strategy for handling ā€œgaslessā€ in times of volatility makes a lot of sense (having the capacity to turn off this feature in case of abuse or extreme market conditions - while still allowing the user to proceed manually if they want).

However, when it comes to your conclusion on Limit Orders, I disagree. While what you say is correct (the limit order market might sometimes suffer from low liquidity), I still think that the ability to set a specific price and add liquidity for other takers directly benefits 0x ecosystem and would make this grant more than ā€œyet another Swap API integrationā€. While I understand your point of view here, I would encourage you to consider including limit order functionality.

Thanks again for the open dialogue!
Acilia

1 Like

Hey Kaito,

I believe you have a product that solves a pain point for on-chain organizations, and you successfully scaled even in a challenging economic environment. Consequently, I do not understand the request for a grant equaling 0.2% of your recent round.

I think you have a valid use case, but if you heavily rely on 0x Protocol as a partner and a win-win scenario is in sight, you would benefit more from a dedicated support team than a (in your case) reasonably low grant. And in case there is indeed a path to revenue, a kick-back could be introduced.

Appreciate your time.

Cheers,
Koppany

1 Like

Sorry for my delay in re-engaging on this ā€“ my schedule has been off kilter this week. First, just a comment that unfortunately I didnā€™t find the Dune queries and the Utopia insight charts very helpful in evaluating current/historical usage. I would have preferred to see a Dune dashboard with charts instead of just queries, and the insights were not really insightful due to the data labeling being pretty generic and lacking correlation. That said, data analytics are always a work in progress, so I assume they will improve.

More to the point though, while I do think this use case has value, as you are aware, the deviation from several of our best practices and considerations is still a complicating factor in terms of supporting this grant. I was wondering if there might be a way to dogfood the solution being funded as part of the rewards distribution? For example, ā€œrequiringā€ recipients to use the Utopia app + SAFE to swap the ZRX rewards they are eligible to receive for USDC or ETH as part of a claims process or some other distribution mechanism.

I donā€™t know how technically difficult it would be to implement something like this and acknowledge it would probably be difficult to enforce, but is it something you would consider? Additionally, if implementing something like this, maybe it would make more sense to do it after V2 is released?

BTW, I acknowledge that this line of inquiry may seem counter-intuitive (why would they force selling of their own token?), but I assume most recipients would sell the ZRX anyway and there might be an opportunity to create some additional experimentation value with a little more thought put into it. Perhaps there could also be some experimentation with SAFE-based limit orders as part of the rewards distribution mechanism, such as getting some kind of bonus in the next month if a limit order is filled/executed using specific parameters or SAFE features.

You know your product and its capabilities better than we do, so maybe you could come up with some other ideas regarding how to incorporate the solution being funded by the grant into the distribution to make the use case more interesting or even create a new use case, and also make the reward more than just a basic, retroactive incentive, which I think is now generally considered to be a non-productive use of capital.

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What metrics/charts are you expecting to see? Happy to provide some more context or fire up a Dune dashboard to share on our end :slight_smile:

This sounds like a great idea actually - weā€™d be happy to consider it, and I can get back to you early/mid next week around what this could look like! Weā€™re very flexible on timelines here around grant disbursements.

Will also spend some more time exploring ideas outside of retroactive incentives.

1 Like

What metrics/charts are you expecting to see? Happy to provide some more context or fire up a Dune dashboard to share on our end :slight_smile:

I donā€™t need anything more on this right now, but if the grant is approved, we can work together to develop a dashboard later

This sounds like a great idea actually - weā€™d be happy to consider it, and I can get back to you early/mid next week around what this could look like! Weā€™re very flexible on timelines here around grant disbursements.

Will also spend some more time exploring ideas outside of retroactive incentives.

:+1: :pray:

1 Like

hey @Utopia thanks for making this grant request. I this itā€™s great for a project to use 0x protocolā€™s meta transactions to solve the issue of failed transactions. However, how can we ensure that the volume will be still there once the program comes to an end? Obviously, the DAO should not sponsor these activities, unless just small-scale experiments.

Since you are a well-funded company, and these rewards are aimed at being transferred to the users entirely, would you be open to:

  1. 1-to-1 matching, i.e. 25k worth of ZRX from the 0x Treasury, and 25k$ worth of stablecoin or ETH from Utopia Labs? This way, both parties would bear the risk, provided thereā€™s a transparent way to verify how the rewards have been allocated.

  2. split the program into 2 phases: Phase 1, with 20k$ worth of tokens (10k$ ZRX from Treasury, 10k$ worth of i.e. ETH from Utopia), and Phase 2 with the remaining 30k$ worth of tokens, conditional to some program success milestone, like for example 20MM$ worth of 0x protocol swaps. In this context, setting the referred address to yourself when using the 0x API (still with a null referrer fee) will help the 0x tracker portals to display the volume that has been processed through Utopia.