Community Development Grants Cohort 2

Welcome back to another round of our Community Development Grants! Last year, we ran the first ever program in December and celebrated a huge success with key takeaways:

We’re grateful to our active community for the amazing outcomes of this newly launched program within the short timeline. As mentioned before, we want to do a lot more of these exciting initiatives and do a better job at every iteration. Which is why we’re now launching the second iteration and cohort for the grant!

We’ve taken feedback from our participants in the last program and introduced a few changes in this next round.

Yup, you read that right. It’s 10x the last round. The reason for the substantial increase is simple — the success of Immutable X is greatly contributed by the maturity of the ecosystem. To that end, we are constantly focusing on rewarding people for building their world-class NFT projects on our cutting-edge protocol with the IMX tokens.

We believe in the voices of our community members and take their feedback to the core of our growth strategy. Below are some of the known issues that were highlighted to us that you might be interested in providing a solution for. In return, you may receive raving support from the community for the added value your project gives to them.

1. Airdrop tool: Projects building on Immutable X have asked about an airdrop tool, which will allow projects to quickly spin up an airdrop for their NFT; thus reducing developer effort for the clients having to do it themselves. Example airdrop tool: https://www.coinvise.co/dashboard
2. Auction mechanism. Developers are often wanting to integrate auction functionality into marketplaces. Two types of auctions are typical, English auctions (where users bid up in a certain timeframe) and Dutch auctions (where price drops until someone buys). Immutable X doesn’t natively support either but both of these can be built on the back of our existing APIs. A solution for these using the Immutable X orderbook that other developers could leverage in their applications would be useful.
3. Full suite for deposit and withdrawal NFTs and ERC20s. Currently, there are no frontends supporting deposits of NFTs from Ethereum into Immutable X; although this is possible through APIs. Taking a step back, there also isn’t a portal that showcases the full suite of deposits and withdrawals from both NFTs and ERC20s. It will save developers time and energy if this was already available.
4. Tools for the Community Development Grant program. We want to make these grants a regular program for the community. Tooling such as smart contracts to facilitate the disbursements of IMX tokens to community grant proposal winners would be helpful in the operations of the program.

We’re compiling feedback from our grants program and we’ll do our best to apply the learnings. For example, here are a few things we’ll aim to do for this next iteration:

• Use quadratic voting for snapshot — Through this type of voting, each vote costs more tokens than the last. The aim is to reduce bias towards large token holders
• Leftover tokens will be allocated to projects by rank — For example if only 500 tokens are left after the vote, and the next ranked proposal request is for 1000 tokens, then we’d check with the project team first if they are fine with a prorated amount. If not, then we move on to the next team after that. This reduces the need for another vote, but also respects the token holders’ ranked preferences
• We will be stricter with the ‘developer tooling’ theme — We chose to be more flexible last round, but this time we’ll make it a point to be stricter with pre-screening so that funded projects will be more aligned to the theme.
• $50,000 threshold for more requirements — We don’t want to ask for complicated legal processes from community grant proposals, but at the same time we need to be good stewards of the community’s tokens. As such, we’ll try to strike a balance by creating a threshold for added process. If a project proposal is $50,000 USD equivalent or more, then we will require more information and process from the project team assuming they win the vote.
• Longer unlock period for big projects — The grants program should consider its impact on the token supply. Therefore for large project requests (e.g. $50,000 and above), the token disbursement may require an unlock period.

As always, there will surely be more areas of improvement from this round. We’ll keep iterating on this to get better each time.

More developer tooling!

The theme will continue to be developer tooling. Again, we believe a key part of the success of the ecosystem is more builders and better builders. Builders need the right tools. We want to incentivize developers for tooling that would otherwise be blocked by financial constraints.

The voting process is the same

We’ll use mostly the same process as the first round of Community Development Grants. Namely, the 5-step process below:

Please complete this form and when your proposal has been selected, it will be announced in Discord.

The deadline to submit your proposal: 31 January 2022 at 04.00 pm AEDT

Also, join our Discord to check out the community grant proposals and vote on your favorite one!