Proposal

Continue the Alchemix grants program for max $200k ALCX/year unless amended by a future governance proposal.

AIP 108 Results

Per AIP108, $100k of ALCX was approved for at least 3 months of grants in February 2024. It is now 6 months later - let’s see how it went.

Basic Stats: 24 grant applications 7 accepted grants 3 completed grants to date $30,500 paid out thus far $52,500 in pending payouts assuming completion of outstanding grants

Info on specific grants here: https://questbook.app/dashboard/?proposalId=65e16fc9c11e2951a04318af&grantId=0xeb75a84db372485817c5fd4bf59ea639dfca685c&chainId=10&role=admin&isRenderingProposalBody=true

Grant Program Learnings

Marketing/education grants were the most common types of application. It takes a LOT of time for someone to get up to speed on Alchemix, so grants will either be low funding and likely result in incorrect explanation/information or properly account for the time it takes to learn Alchemix and thus be quite expensive to be done correctly. To better filter these grants out, the program was modified to have the following restraints: Translation to another language and location-based grants are not supported at this time (difficult to verify if no one on the team is fluent, and requires constant upkeep if anything else changes, and puts education in the hands of specific locations without core contributors present to verify accuracy / help ensure benefit) These grants need to be narrow in focus, or else the scope is simply too much and has no specific goal Data and front-end related grants (limited or no solidity required) tended to be smoother as they were less technical, and required less review (since they do not custody user funds and do not interact with the alchemists) Straight solidity grants are more difficult to work with, for a similar reason as marketing/education as they require a lot of time to get properly familiar with the smart contracts A lot of manual review/oversight is required. This was a known issue - grant programs that expect to throw money at a project without providing project management support will not do well. But it is important to highlight that this aspect is the primary reason the program is difficult to scale. One potential change in the future could be grant cycles - rather than reviewing applications continuously, review once a quarter then focus on supporting those projects. Grants that are defined by Alchemix contributors/community are more likely to be applied for, accepted, and completed than if you simply ask grantees to come up with their own ideas. Leaving room for creativity is good—so long as the grant application clearly defines the value brought. Seed Tidbits and Layer 3 grant are examples. Many wishlist items have been addressed, so there currently aren’t as many pre-defined projects available. Since February, the core team has grown with new solidity, front-end, and marketing hires. This means there is less need to outsource projects. As v3 development continues, Alchemix v2 becomes less of a priority. This creates a void where building on top of Alchemix v2 isn’t worth funding, but building on top of v3 isn’t ready to happen yet. This applies to every category of grants. Projects related to alAssets, the treasury, and operations are likely to be minimally affected by Alchemix v3 and, therefore, are good candidates for funding. Projects that aim to create use cases that benefit from Alchemix loans are likely to be easy-ish to port to Alchemix v3, and therefore are reasonable candidates to consider funding. However, with alAsset prices as they are, they are less of a priority.

Moving Forward

Overall, the completed projects were a success - needs were achieved where the time/resources did not exist internally. It was and continues to be an absolute pleasure to work with the grantees (they will receive a Twitter shoutout!).

Alchemix does not have enough projects to sustain a large grant program at this time. But that does not mean there is any reason to close down the program—it just means that applications need to be selectively approved based on the criteria above and the spending needs to be restricted.

Therefore, the proposal is to spend at most $200k/year on the Alchemix grants program.

Note that there will be a hiatus for reviewing new grant applications until mid-September due to some other high-priority projects (UI refactor, Entity being the primary ones).