The Grants and Contributor program is run by the Balancer Grants Committee, a group of BAL contributors supported committed to the development of Balancer.
<aside> đź’¬ For questions or complaints - please visit the #grants discord channel or mail [email protected]. To understand what makes a successful proposal, check out our application guide here.
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At Balancer, we want our applicants to feel heard and supported, not only financially. That is why we want this process to be as clear as possible.
During the evaluation, the Grant Committee looks at the reasonable viability of the applications and does due diligence on the team. The evaluation process takes about 2 weeks. The applicants are requested to submit a formal proposal with detail proportional to size of grant being requested to aid the committee’s decision making and value judgment. A guide is provided here.
If the application is successful, the team will be contacted, further steps will be discussed, and they will be connected with a mentor for regular calls to keep up to date and provide support. It is expected that this is reciprocated by grantees through operational transparency, high developer velocity, active repositories and frequent communications towards us.
Transparency is important to the Balancer Grants program and as such we have made our application review details public so the community can see how we are assessing proposals. For all applications which pass the fundamental questions (are they building on Balancer / is this project in the spirit of the grants program), they are subjected to our decision matrix. See this document.
For Grant applications to be funded, their ability to provide value for Balancer is assessed through:
The Grant application needs to be assessed to bring in more value to Balancer than the grant value itself against the risk of it not succeeding.
Balancer Grants will work with milestone based payouts. These milestones are clear and reasonable targets based on the communication between the grantees and the Grant Committee. Grantees will need to outline their deliverables and timeline as part of their application with the intent to suit both parties (e.g. sufficient for grantee cashflow, while managing risk of high payout with no useful deliverables to Balancer).
Grants are awarded in BAL tokens, based on predefined payment installments. Such installments are subject to a payment schedule to ensure that predefined milestones are achieved. If a Grant application is larger than $100K USD, the project will have to be sent to the forum and a Snapshot vote. The grants are to be priced and paid in BAL to limit risk for the Grants treasury and encourage grantees to be aligned with increasing BAL value.
The Balancer Grants Committee controls payments and assesses milestone reports from grantees before follow-on payments. The Balancer Grants Committee may decide not distribute all follow-up payments for projects that do not hit their deliverables.
Grants are awarded in BAL tokens, based on predefined installments. Such installments are subject to a payment schedule to ensure that predefined milestones are achieved, and the first milestone can be prepaid. The grants are to be priced in BAL value where practical, to be agreed between the committee and the grantee at the start of the grant. The Balancer Grants Committee controls payments and assesses milestone reports from grantees prior to follow-on payments. The Balancer Grants Committee may not distribute follow-on payments for projects that do not hit their deliverables.