OceanDAO Round 16 is Live

200,000 OCEAN available for Web3 data economy projects!

Hello, Ocean Community!

OceanDAO is a grants DAO to help fund Ocean community projects, curated by the Ocean community. Anyone can apply for a grant. The community votes at the beginning of the month. The Ocean ecosystem becomes self-sustainable as the builders of the Web3 data economy leverage Ocean Protocol to create products, services, and resources that the community finds valuable and fosters value creation for the Ecosystem.

The OceanDAO website has up-to-date information on getting started with OceanDAO.

OceanDAO’s next funding round — Round 16 — has 200,000 OCEAN available. Submissions are due April 5th 2022; we encourage you to submit early via the Proposal Portal, present your project at Town Hall, update your profile on Ocean Pearl, or reach out to the Project-Guiding Work Group for feedback and guidance.

The rest of this post has details about Round 16.

Thank you to all of the OceanDAO participants, voters, and proposers.

OceanDAO Round 16 Outline

Funding Amount

There is 200,000 OCEAN in grant funding available in Round 16.

Grant Funding Categories

• Building / improving applications or integrations to Ocean
• Community or developer outreach (grants don’t need to be technical in nature)
• Unleashing data
• Building or improving core Ocean software
• Improvements to OceanDAO itself

Proposal Portal

To submit proposals teams can now use the new Proposal Portal and all participants are required to create their projects and proposals via this website. Participants can visit the OceanDAO home page to learn more about the grants program.

All projects, proposals and discussions take place inside Port. As a voter, Port is where you can see all proposal details, engage with teams, and ask questions.

All proposals that meet the basic criteria are then submitted to Snapshot.

Proposals that receive support from the DAO receive funding in OCEAN.

Project Standing

If you have previously received a grant, you must update your Grant Deliverables inside each proposal to remain in Good Standing. This enables eligibility in upcoming Funding Rounds. Follow the instructions on the Project Standing Dashboard to learn more.

Funding Tiers

To continue providing incentives for the completion of proposals, we are continuing Funding Tiers which can be achieved by Teams delivering on their grant promises.

In Round 16, the maximum funding projects apply for will be $20,000 USD. The Veteran Funding Tier is therefore being removed. The Funding Tiers are:

1. New Project

• Funding Ceiling: $3,000 USD
• Requires: No one in your project has ever received a grant from OceanDAO. Open to all.
• Benefits: Earmarked. Receive feedback during the application process. Introduced to related projects. Receive support during voting.

2. Existing Project

• Funding Ceiling: $10,000 USD
• Requires: You have completed 1 or more grants.
• Benefits: Same as above. Receive promotion via Newsletter, Twitter, and other channels. Receive support during voting.

3. Experienced Project

• Funding Ceiling: $20,000 USD
• Requires: You have completed 2 or more grants.

Above are the Funding Tiers accessible by projects in OceanDAO. The amount requested is in USD; the amount paid is in OCEAN token. The conversion rate is the market price when the Voting period Ends.

Earmarks

“Earmarks” means that there are funds available exclusively to the first three groups listed below, without having to compete. For example, New Teams (Outreach) have 12,000 OCEAN available without having to compete against other projects. Beyond that amount, they have to compete.

• 24,000 OCEAN for New Teams (non-outreach category)
• 12,000 OCEAN for New Teams (outreach category)
• 30,000 OCEAN for Core Tech Initiatives (listed below)
• 134,000 OCEAN for remaining General Grants

A total of 200k OCEAN is available.

Core Tech Earmark & Initiatives

If you are interested in contributing to Ocean Protocol there are earmarked Core Tech Initiatives that are being continuously expanded upon. You can view them inside our wiki.

You can find us in the Core-Tech Working Group discord channel.

Burning becomes Recycling

Starting Round 13, any funds remaining inside an Earmark will be recycled into General Grants rather than burned. If there are any funds available at the end, they will be moved back into the Treasury.

For intuition on how burning relates to voting in OceanDAO.

You can find all the steps below:

1. [Earmarked Grants] winners are counted first.
2. Projects that do not win an [Earmarked Grant] are then considered for funding under the [General Grant] category.
3. Any remaining funds inside an Earmark, are then moved towards [General Grants]
4. [New & Core Tech] teams are thus eligible to be funded from both [Grant Categories].
5. Returning teams are eligible to be funded from [General Grants].
6. 50% or more “Yes” Votes receive a grant.
7. Any remaining funds inside the [General Grants] Category are moved back to the treasury.

Quadratic Voting

Quadratic Voting has shipped in Round 14!

The Quadratic Voting formula may be tweaked into Quadratic Funding, so more teams receive funding.

Voting Boosts

You can now visit the Web3 Portal, register yourself with BrightID and receive a 400% voting boost.

Voter Delegation

In Round 15, we have introduced Voter Delegation to our grants program.

Participants will be able delegate decision making, and easily assign their voting power to other addresses.

You can learn more about Voter Delegation and other voting improvements in our latest blog post. We look forward to having more votes unlocked inside OceanDAO, and contributors acting as delegates while stewarding positive outcomes in the ecosystem.

Working Groups

Head to the Ocean Discord and dive into each Working Group. There you will find each Working Group’s respective documents, stewards, members list, meeting times, and more:

• Project Guiding Working Group
• Parameters & Roadmap Working Group
• Core Tech Working Group
• OceanDAO Engineering Working Group
• Data Consume Volume Working Group
• Ambassadors Working Group
• Outreach Working Group

Working Group Outline

• Each Working Group has its own public discord sub-channel. Then, each Working Group can leverage real-time discord channels (voice/video).
• Each Working Group has its own membership + working process.
• Each Working Group has a weekly or bi-weekly call.
• Each Working Group has Stewards (who’s accountable to run the group), and Members (people who participate and contribute).

You can learn more about Working Groups by reading the following blog post.

Town Hall

Town Hall has been running weekly since the beginning of OceanDAO. Currently the DAO is expanding and with this growth so will the Town Hall.

Town Hall will be a structured presentation and expand its scope to include the entire Ocean Ecosystem where each Working Group presents slides on their current progress and updates

Deadlines

• Proposals Submission Deadline is April 5th at midnight GMT
• Add OCEAN to Voting Wallet by the Proposal Submission Deadline.
• A 2 day proposal Due Diligence Period ends April 7th, 2022 at 23:59 GMT
• Voting Starts on April 7th, 2022 at 23:59 GMT
• Voting Ends on April 11th, 2022 at 23:59 GMT
• Funding Deadline on April 25th, 2022 at 23:59 GMT

Claiming Grants

Starting with Round 13, grant requests via request.finance have been deprecated. Instead, you can now claim the grant directly from the OceanDAO website. Please find instructions on claiming your grant here.

OceanDAO Ecosystem

Visit Ocean Pearl to learn more about each project, track updates, get an overview of the grant process, and follow the Voting Leaderboard.

You can also find all Funding History & Round Data here!

Thank you!

Follow Ocean Protocol on Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub & Newsletter for project updates and announcements. And chat directly with other developers on Discord.