TERRA GRANTS FOUNDATION

Promote Chain Utility via the Establishment of the Terra Grants Program



With the passing of proposal 5234, there will be a portion of the seigniorage redirected to the community pool at the end of every epoch. With the influx of new resources, it is critical that the community spend the funding with wisdom, transparency, and efficiency. Historic methods of distribution (“trust me, bro”) are insufficient with no accountability, nor is there any established peer review process in the distribution nor oversight in the use of grant funding.

Current methods of community pool distribution have not been adequately formulated. Historic methods of community pool spending have suffered from a myriad of problems including, nepotism, centralization, poor transparency, lack of accountability, and lack of direction. A grants program with independent reviews of the proposed contributions of a project, group, or developer team will attract new talent, evaluate proposals on merit (not who you know), while providing funding for the delivery of specific milestones. Furthermore, a pay by milestone model will provide enough seed capital for the project to get started, and incentivize the completion of that project or proposal.

*This grants program does not prevent the submission of any community pool distribution on its own. This program aims to be the recommended method to request a grant due to the oversight, peer review, and rationale described above.
**The grants program does not actually fund anything, just collects proposals, organizes independent reviews, makes recommendations via these reviews, and keeps projects accountable. All community spend proposals still need to go through governance and voting by the community.

Funding Priorities

The past 6 months have been very difficult for the Classic community. Immediate funding priorties include rewarding developers, projects, validators, and community members who have made the revival possible. Complete independence from TFL infrastructure is also important with community run LCD endpoints, wallets, documentation, software libraries, etc. Funds will also be used to bring new utility to the chain and incentivize dApps and utility. Finally, refunding failed txs due to tax miscalculation is also a priority..

The general process for funding is the following:

  • Identify needs or deficiencies within the Classic ecosystem. These needs will be through community solicitation, or roundtable discussions with community members, validators, developers, and users.
  • Create Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for identified needs. For example, this could be a general call to attract NFT developers back to Classic, build educational material for Terra Classic, promote Terra Classic via social media, rewards (for devs, validators, promoters who stuck with LUNC from the beginning) or very specific requests such as “Add 2-factor authentication to Terra Station wallet”, or “Maintain a TestNet for developers”.
  • Market RFPs to the greater crypto/cosmos community to collect grant applications. Unsolicited grants will also be accepted.
  • Find independent grant reviewers with no conflicts of interest to the grant proposer. A small stipend will be offered for the review of the grant. Grant reviewers could be members both internal and external to the Luna Classic community (from Osmosis for example).
  • Perform a synchronous review of the grant proposals with independent (anonymous) reviewers. Come up with a recommendation (poor, fair, good, excellent). Grants over the threshold will be recommended for funding and presented for community pool distribution. There is no fixed set of reviewers; reviewers will be chosen based upon their expertise in relation to the proposal.
  • Grant proposers will be interviewed and KYC’d and presented to the community.
  • Community governance will be presented with all of the information, a discussion will be posted on Agora, and recommendations of the independent reviewers will be presented. The community will then be asked to vote for distribution to a multi-sig wallet controlled by the team and the Grants Program Manager.
  • Distribution of the funds in the multi-sig will be “pay by milestone”. Funds will only be distributed upon satisfactory completion of the given milestones as signed off by the program manager via the multi-sig wallet.
  • grantee’s will provide project updates in the form of documents, videos, or demonstrations as proof of work until the grant expires.
PROGRAM STAFF

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Edward Kim

Program Director

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Edward is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Drexel University, USA, and Co-founder of the Terra Rebels organization. He has been volunteering for the betterment of the Classic chain for the past 6 months. In his day job, Ed has received $2.19M in total research funding in the past 5 years. He has received grant awards from the NSF, DARPA, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NIH, DOE, DOD. He also regularly reviews grant proposals for the National Science Foundation and other grant agencies.

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Marco Ferreira

Program Manager

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Marco Ferreira, a graduate from Temple University, has spent the majority of his career, with both public and private sector organizations, as a seasoned and high-performing program development, non-profit and fundraising officer with over 10 years’ experience in the affordable housing, resident services markets, public sector, & grant and program management Under his leadership, he has developed various programs including a high degree of Federal, State, and Local government partnerships and the management of successful mult-million dollar grants. Also, Marco is a professor at Temple University where his teachings focus on community outreach and development in the New Urbanism landscape.

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David Coyne

Program Advisor

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An expert in brand management, David Coyne has spent several years at Reckitt managing a $500M brand. During his tenure he has driven double digit revenue growth in key business segments, launching national campaigns that brought new consumers into the brand portfolio and kept them in it. Looking for a new challenge, David is currently transitioning to brand management at consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Outside of work, David likes to spend time outdoors with his wife Sarah and two young sons. David is fond of travelling to new places and is a die-hard FC Barcelona fan.