SCRT Labs delegation, grants, and more

Hi everyone!

Wanted to give ya’ll a quick heads up as we’re approach 2022. We’ve received a lot of feedback around the following topics, and are looking to do better. We’re formalizing our strategy right now, alongside our roadmap for 2022, and are exciting to share it with the entire community. Here’s a summary of what to expect from SCRT Labs in the coming weeks:

Delegation

Starting in early 22, we expect to revamp our delegation strategy. We will issue a blog post with more concrete guidelines on the things that we care about that would entitle validators to receive delegation from us, at different tiers. The list would be open-ended, but here are the areas of particular interest:

  • Building Dapps on Secret, infra tools
  • Running critical infra (e.g., IBC relayers, query nodes)
  • Providing liquidity (e.g., to Secret Swap)
  • Contributing to network growth in other ways (e.g., providing business leads to SCRT Labs, writing documentation, etc…)

We are also planning on ramping up delegation of the ecosystem pool, which will be the primary source of these new delegations + shuffling existing delegations. For this reason, we will issue an interest form that we encourage all validators to fill out. Reviewing existing delegations will be done a quarterly basis, which means that validators should continue to express their interests and contributions every quarter going forward.

Grants

One of our clear goals is to get to 100-1,000 apps built on Secret in 2022. For that, we are planning to significantly ramp up our grant allocation and attention. Delegation would also be another funding source alongside grants.

One thing we noticed re: grants is that many of them failed to complete, and even many more dragged out their timelines without good reasoning. We take responsibility for this, for not giving clear guidelines and mentorship, and we plan to change that going forward. Stay tuned.

Building and shipping

We plan to showcase SCRT Labs roadmap in the next few weeks to gather feedback from the community. We’re extremely excited to show our thinking to the entire community :slight_smile:.

All the best and happy holidays,
Guy

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I agree with the strat of being more aggressive in deploying funding but I hope that it doesn´t become too burdensome for scrt labs if you try to tighten up supervision of grant milestones.

It will definitely be great if a higher delivery rate can be achieved obviously, but it’s not your fault if someone gives up on something.

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Thank you, this is great news!

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I agree with this and it may make sense to form a committee of some sort that will periodically check in on progress of milestones? I.e.rant a portion of the requested funds until X milestone is met and then release the funding for the next milestone. This may cause some delays due to the bureaucratic nature of needing to track and approval progress for additional grant fund releases but could allow SCRT Labs to step away from a project that isn’t progressing without forgoing 100% of the grant money in the original proposal.

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I wouldn’t support a committee of this kind. Also, the ecosystem fund is not managed by the community, nor does it belong to it.

Ahh okay, well in that case scratch the committee idea. How do current grant structures work? Are the recipients given the full grant right away?

I guess the reason I suggested this is because I agree that there should be more aggressive deployments to allow new applications to be built out on the network but also realize that we need to make sure the grants are being used appropriately and that the recipients are holding up their end of the bargain.

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Very much excited about the acceleration of deployments to keep people building on the network. Is the plan to form a team or launch something that would be focused on the grant deployment and milestone execution?

I discussed this in this thread but I’m unfamiliar with how the current grant structure works? Is Scrt Labs providing the entire funding amount up front? Or is it set up to release it in tranches based on the completion of certain milestones?

A milestone model could make it so that SL can accelerate grant funding while committing less capital upfront in case a project or application doesn’t work out or they are not making any significant progress.

Just a thought and I apologize if this is something that is already being done or has been talked about at length internally.

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Hey @guy! I am excited to see this initiative take shape from SCRT Labs. For those who are just getting caught up with past/present developments, could you provide a list of outstanding grants that failed to deliver?

Also, the grants that are currently in development so that we can track their progress and/or assist if needed.

Here’s a list of grants approved or waiting for approval:

Excited for what’s to come in 2022!

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At a glance, hasn’t Altermail and Griptape completed their work?

What’s priority at this point?

Good question. Altermail definitely have not yet reached their user-base size milestones that they set forward (see near the end of their grant application), and we will probably need to touch base with Griptape to see if their milestones have been achieved). In any case we’re in the process of clearing up various unsettled questions like this one :smiley:

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I see 10k user acquisition as the target. Would be good to know what the percentage to goal is on this. I suspect with Stashh now live some incentives could be established to new users as a trial.
-collectors
-first time minters

(DeFi)
-SEFI users
-Osmo LPs
Etc.

How can we get the AnonDAO a delegation with the purpose of building the first DAO on Secret? We are in the processing of creating a novel way to introduce voting to SNIP721s and proof of ownership voting.

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With the failing of https://secretnodes.com/secret/chains/secret-4/governance/proposals/67 due to not reaching quorum, could a requirement (or at least pressure) to vote be brought into the delegation calculation?

@reuven

It might press some validators to always vote abstain, but that’d still be better than no votes at all.

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Thank you @guy for this write-up. Very grateful to get a transparent delegation strategy to boost stability in Secret Network. I agree with @dylanschultzie that involvement with Governance should be part of the qualification. Having a strong functioning governance system is paramount for the future of the network and effective deployment of capital from the community pool.

As an application builder, I’m also happy to read that grants are getting more attention. Looking back at the last months I realize that the unclarity has kept me from making the grant request I announced late-summer.

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This is great. I would agree with the concern about additional burden on SCRT Labs with monitoring more aggressively. I wonder if any effort has been made with investigating automated tracking tools like Basecamp to make tracking progress a bit more manageable? I think as the number of projects launching grows, it will be that much more difficult to juggle. Placing more of that burden on the project teams might help a great deal.

Thank you for the breakdown @guy - very ambitious goals for 2022, and I think this approach is an excellent start to smashing this years targets.

I also agree with requiring delegatees to participate in governance (at least with some sort of participation rate measuring above 50-60%). With the added voting power delegatees receive, it makes sense to establish healthy governance participation requirements.

Just my two cents! Lookikng forward to participating more in governance discussions and being active on here in 2022 - I’m still green to the Secret ecosystem, but I’m arleady a huge fan (and building my bags!)

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This is probably a little late given the announcement already, but I would also add it worth considering a commission rate requirements for both minimum and maximum rates.

For example, it doesn’t stand to reason for 0% validators to receive team delegations. How are they benefiting from it?