Hey Eugene, thanks for putting together and sharing this proposal as well as incorporating feedback from the calls!
Getting straight to the point, we think that the two-tier funding structure looks really good to encourage diverse DeFi projects on Scroll. The review committee setup seems great to put into practice and should do its job evaluating the grantees. Also, the referral program is quite a new idea for us in Programs, and while a 1% commission might feel a bit low, it should help to avoid any referral farming issues. Excited to see how that part unfolds.
While we support the proposal as it is, we take the chance to drop a few suggestions:
Metrics : Being a DeFi-specific grant program, some of the metrics that could be leveraged are TVL impact vs. grant size, how deeply these projects integrate with the Scroll ecosystem as a whole, how sustainable their yield mechanisms are, and what the user acquisition costs are.
Funding: While the milestone-based approach can initially work, we may consider adding results-based tranches, where extra funding unlocks after hitting specific milestones. Also, an abbreviated cycle for smaller grants may be considered in the future.
Impact Reporting: It would be a good idea to set up some standardised impact tracking from the beginning. Therefore, we suggest implementing something along the lines of a real-time dashboard of active grant outcomes and even a comparative analysis with other token distribution methods, coupled with regular public updates to measure the impact of this programme. This will definitely help us to know how to iterate this programme.
Overall, we support this programme as we think it is quite well designed, and the focus on DeFi protocols makes perfect sense due to the actual Scroll state. Down the line we could experiment with other mechanism (Retro i.e) and iterate on governance management of the program but at this point time this should kick us off. We will vote in favour of launching this programme and will be happy to contribute to its execution!