OceanDAO Round 21 is Live

85,000 USD in OCEAN is available for Web3 data economy projects!

Introduction

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, rewarding projects that are aligning and contributing the most value to the ecosystem.

Round 21 has 85K USD worth of OCEAN, or 200K OCEAN available, whichever is larger in USD terms. (Calculation is on August 8th, 2022, at midnight UTC.) 75K USD is available via the regular grants program, and 10K USD via our micro-grants run by Algovera AI.

Round 21 Dates

All times are midnight UTC.

• Proposals Submission Deadline is September 6 at midnight UTC
• Add OCEAN to Voting Wallet by Proposal Submission Deadline.
• Two-day proposal Due Diligence Period ends September 8
• Voting Starts on September 8
• Voting Ends on September 12
• Funding Deadline on September 26

Goals in Improving OceanDAO

We are tuning OceanDAO towards these goals:

• A culture of contributing. Biasing to those who are engaged with the community and who are aligned with our value-add mission.
• Quality outcomes. Rewards flow to contributors (with OCEAN) who are effective at delivering results.
• Improve DAO efficiency. More efficient capital spending, yet lighter tracking overhead

Approaches to Improving OceanDAO

Towards these goals, we have received feedback from the community on possible approaches. We have come to see that OceanDAO is better suited to earlier-stage funding of projects. As projects get stronger, they are in better shape to seek funding from Ocean Shipyard grants program, complementary ecosystem grants programs, investors (angels, VCs), and potentially launching their own token. Given this, we have tuned OceanDAO to give more space to earlier-stage projects compared to experienced projects, by capping the total funding amount for a project or team to 100k USD lifetime.

There is a category of an experienced team that has been using its funds to dole out micro-grants to their own sub-community. It doesn’t fit Shipyard because it’s too close to inception; it isn’t appealing to investors because it grants; yet it’s of value to the Ocean ecosystem and we want to encourage this. So, we have earmarked 10K USD to the first recipient of this, Algovera AI.

Given this shift, we feel comfortable reducing the total amount available per month, from 100K USD to 85K USD (including the 10K micro-grants). We tuned the funding ceilings per tier accordingly.

Round 21 Specs

Total funding of 85,000 USD (min.)

• 10,000 USD will be allocated for Algovera AI micro-grants.
• 100,000 USD max. per project in a lifetime
• 100,000 USD max. per team in a lifetime (not including Advisors)

Funding ceiling per tier, in a round (max possible that a project can request in a round):

• New projects — 3K USD (New project: never previously received a grant from OceanDAO))
• Existing projects — 7.5K USD (Existing project: have completed one grant from OceanDAO)
• Experienced projects — 15K USD (Experienced project: have completed two or more grants)

Grant Funding Categories

OceanDAO provides grants for a variety of project types.

• 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

Submitting Proposals

We encourage you to submit proposals early.

To submit proposals, use the Proposal Portal. A tutorial is available here.

Proposals will then be published on Ocean Port. Port is also where voters can read proposal details and ask questions.

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

Proposals that receive support from the DAO voters receive funding, shortly after voting concludes.

Teams can reach out to the Project-Guiding Work Group, here for any guidance or assistance.

Please, do not submit proposals through Ocean Port directly anymore as you will run the risk of not having your proposal accepted.

Project Standing

If you have previously received a grant, you must update your Grant Deliverables inside each proposal to remain in Good Standing, to stay eligible in future Funding Rounds. The Project Standing Dashboard has details.

Funding Tiers

Funding Tiers are achieved by teams delivering on their grant promises, to unlock higher funding ceilings.

The Funding Tiers are:

1. New Project

• Funding Ceiling: as described earlier
• 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: as described earlier
• 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: as described earlier
• Requires: You have completed 2 or more grants.

The amount requested is in USD; the amount paid is in OCEAN token.

Earmarks

“Earmarks” means that there are funds available exclusively to the groups listed below, without having to compete. For example, New Teams (Outreach) have 6,000 USD available without having to compete against other projects. Beyond that amount, they have to compete.

• 6,000 USD for New Teams (non-outreach category)
• 3,000 USD for New Teams (outreach category)
• 17,500 USD for 2nd/3rd Time Teams
• 13,000 USD for Core Tech Initiatives (listed below)
• 35,500 USD for General (all projects)

Core Tech Earmark & Initiatives

There is specific tech that the core team and Ocean technical community would love to see built. Here’s the list for R21. It’s earmarked, therefore building towards it gives you “air cover” wrt competition.

Note that R21 has earmarked for integration with Chainlink, TheGraph, Filecoin, and Arweave. (Ocean Shipyard specs for these are not quite ready yet.)

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

Other OceanDAO Features

Quadratic Funding: Instead of projects receiving a binary grant (either 100% or 0% of what they asked for), all proposals will receive grant amounts relative to how much engagement they received, while still abiding by other rules such as Earmarks and Funding Ceilings.

Minimum USD amount: Projects can set a minimum they are willing to accept and return the funds if they are insufficient. This drastically increases the probability of receiving a grant, on top of Quadratic Funding. (You can reduce your Deliverables commenting in Port if you only receive a minor part of your overall requested budget.

Voting Boosts: Quadratic Voting helps distribute voting power better. The more projects you vote on, the higher your overall voting power becomes. In addition, you can now visit the Web3 Portal, register yourself with BrightID and receive a 400% voting boost.

Voter Delegation: Voter Delegation allows participants to delegate their decision-making to ecosystem members they trust, easily assigning their voting power to other addresses. More info here.

Funds recycling: 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.

Working Groups

Here are the WGs:

• Parameters & Roadmap Working Group
• Core Tech Working Group
• OceanDAO Engineering Working Group
• Outreach Working Group
• Ambassadors Working Group

Ocean Discord has a channel for each WG. The pinned message will have WG meeting times, and other key info. WGs typically meet weekly or bi-weekly. When a WG meets, it’s in its respective discord voice channels. Anyone can listen in. More info.

Town Hall

There are weekly OceanDAO Town Halls, where OceanDAO WGs report progress. Also, any team in the Ocean ecosystem can request to present and share their progress.

Claiming Grants

You can claim your grant from the OceanDAO website. Please find the instructions 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!

Updates

[Oct 24, 2022] On Oct 4, 2022 we published “OceanDAO Is Going Fully Decentralized and Autonomous”: down OceanDAO grants will wind down (last round is R23), and the DAO components of veOCEAN and Data Farming will go autonomous. Earlier, this piece had described a move to retroactive grants. In light of the move-to-autonomous, grants will wind down before retroactive happens.

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