Title: Scroll Sequencer Fees fund Competitive Grants Program
Name: Matt UI369 - not a delegate
Primary Categories: Grant Programs, Talent Attraction
Secondary Categories: Venture Studios, Treasury Management
Your idea (in no less than 4 sentences).
Have Scroll dedicate a percentage of sequencer fees to a competitive grants program with the goal of discovering and funding “New Meta” - breakout project ideas that draw bridging activity and sell blockspace. Have competing teams of allocators operate like miniature “venture studio + Scroll devrel shops” - each competing to attract and cultivate the best builder talent with the best up and coming projects (aka New Meta) to build “Scroll-First Apps” - apps that are exclusive to Scroll, at least for some period of time.
Then, set up a vote at the end of each funding cycle to review metrics and assess results - best allocators are given a bigger chunk of the pool. Particularly poor performers can be removed and replaced by new/hungrier teams.
How will this idea help ecosystem growth (in no less than 4 sentences; at least one example of how this has gone in other ecosystems should be included).
All of these competing allocator teams are incentivized to find and fund projects that will have people bridge and buy blockspace. That increases sequencer fees which, in this model, grows the pot for everybody involved. So even though they’re competing with each other to find the best New Meta, everyone benefits from community successes because they drive sequencer revenue, which grows the pie for everyone. This uses competition to drive innovation & excellence and collaboration to drive overall program results.
The vote/review at the end of each cycle lends to visibility, accountability and community involvement which is great for ecosystem engagement and growth. If you use TCR voting that creates Scroll utility, and this is a fun and accessible path to interact with Scroll governance.
Examples
This is similar to how “Onchain Summer” worked when it drew so much attention to Base. Base produced talented devrel personalities combined with funding that magnetized developer attention.
This competitive model is currently used by Gitcoin in GG23. They contracted Grant Ships to set it up for them - elected judges use an onchain voting rubric tool to choose the top 6 Community Rounds from a pool of applicants. These rounds receive matching funds and compete with each other to collect donations and allocate their matching funds. An AI-assisted community vote determines top performers, which will be rewarded with top slots in GG24, potentially securing additional matching funds.
It was used to fund the “Web3 Gaming on Arbitrum” grants program, again through Grant Ships, and had good results as a milestone-based grants program, especially compared to other Arbitrum grant programs active at that time that experienced long delays and high levels of user frustration. A lean program with smooth user experience, high visibility (all onchain), includes community engagement (TCR votes w/public review comment), visibility and community which led to a high milestone completion rate and high marks from recipients (source)
Required budget for the idea in SCR.
130,000 SCR estimated for custom dashboard or Grant Ships implementation
Or, negotiate a deal for a cheaper build, but use Vitalik’s “Fair Fees” model described here by Owocki to distribute a portion of sequencer fees to the platform provider and capital allocators:
Fair Fees Model: (TLDR: “if projects get $N builders get $max(sqrt(1000 * N), N * 0.01)”)
Sequencer fees:
Scroll collected ~$22,000 in sequencer fees in March. If that stayed steady and 100% of this were piped into a grants program, that would be ~$120,000 in grants every 6 months.
As sequencer fees increase, more funding would become available (which, think about it, is a damn exciting flywheel for builders to get behind. Just promising to share sequencer fees as grants would grab attention).
If sequencer fees are too low, this program could be supplemented by treasury funds at first. A good goal would be $270,000 in grants every 6 months (900,000 SCR w/SCR @ $0.30) . This would fund 3 competing programs with 300K SCR each, enough for each team to pay themselves and fund several promising projects per cycle.
Who would need to be involved.
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A representative or committee from Scroll that can make initial program decisions like what % of sequencer fees to allocate, how to coordinate a community vote or other type of feedback loop and how to choose initial allocator teams.
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3 or more teams of allocators willing to compete - can be assigned or elected.
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Voters/Judges/Reviewers to assess performance of teams at the end of each cycle.
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1-2 Facilitators to administer the program & handle operations.
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Ideally the Grant Ships team since there is already a platform for this, but you could roll your own.
Additional reading on Scroll, “New Meta” & Grant Ships:
Grant Ships FAQ:
Note:
Full disclosure, I am part of the DAO Masons, the team that built Grant Ships. I tried to frame this as an idea that you can pick up and run with on your own if you want - and of course we are offering a service that can set all of this up for you. We believe this competitive/pluralistic model is the way to go when it comes to grants and we think Scroll could use it to gain a competitive advantage on the L2 scene.