OceanDAO Round 11 is Live
500,000 OCEAN available for sustainable data-oriented 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.
The OceanDAO website has up-to-date information on getting started with OceanDAO.
OceanDAO’s next funding round — Round 11 — has 500,000 OCEAN available ($400,000 USD at today’s prices). Submissions are due November 2nd; we encourage you to submit early for better feedback and engagement with the community. The rest of this post has details about Round 11.
Thank you to all of the OceanDAO participants, voters, and proposers.
OceanDAO Round 11 Updates, Announcements and Guidelines
Round 11 Parameters
Amount
There is 500,000 OCEAN in grant funding available in Round 11.
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
Project Standing
If you have previously received a grant, you must update your current Project Deliverables to remain in a good standing to be eligible to participate in future Rounds. Follow the instructions on the Project Standing Dashboard.
Funding Tiers
The amount requested is in USD; the amount paid is in OCEAN token. The conversion rate is the market price on the Proposal Submission Deadline.
To continue incentivizing completion and outcomes, we are continuing Funding Tiers, which can be acquired by Teams delivering on their grant promises. Below are the Funding Tiers accessible by projects for OceanDAO Grants Round 11. “Unleashing Data” has two tiers ($3,000 USD, $10,000 USD max); other categories have four tiers ($3,000 USD up to $35,000 USD max).
“Unleashing Data” Category (max per team):
- Open to All
- Funding Ceiling: $3,000 USD
2. Experienced Project
- Funding Ceiling: $10,000 USD
- Requires: $1,000 USD of legitimate consumptions in the previous month AND the team has received less than $30,000 USD funding total.
All other Categories (max per team):
- 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 application process. Introduced to related projects.
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.
3. Experienced Project
- Funding Ceiling: $20,000 USD
- Requires: You have completed 2 or more grants.
4. Veteran Project
- Funding Ceiling: $35,000 USD
- Requires: You have completed 5 or more grants.
Earmarks
“Earmarks” means that there are funds available exclusively to the first three groups listed below, without having to compete. For example, New Teams (non-outreach) have 60,000 OCEAN available as “air cover” without having to compete against other groups. Beyond that, they have to compete.
- 60,000 OCEAN for New Teams (non-outreach category)
- 30,000 OCEAN for New Teams (outreach category)
- 30,000 OCEAN for Core Tech Initiatives (listed below)
- 380,000 OCEAN for remaining General Grants
Core Tech Initiatives
Proposals that work on any of the following fall under the “Core Tech Initiatives” earmark, for air cover when voting.
- Enhance Ocean’s Fine-Grained Permissions to support Verifiable Credentials (vs just Ethereum addresses) in allowlist and denylist. (The schema already allows it.)
- First-class integration with WebSockets as a data service. It would include a fork of Ocean Provider, plus affordances elsewhere in the stack.
- First-class integration with Arweave as a data service. It may already have some support; this needs to be validated. Then the aim is to remove friction and leverage Arweave more fully. It may be as a fork of Ocean Provider, and/or elsewhere in the stack
- First-class integration with Filecoin as a data service. It already supports via IPFS; the aim here is to remove friction and leverage Filecoin more fully. It may be as a fork of Ocean Provider, and/or elsewhere in the stack
Burn
As with DAO Rounds 8, 9, and 10, any remaining funds not granted in Round 11 will be burned. Here’s how burning relates to voting in OceanDAO.
Rules:
- [Earmarked Grants] winners are counted first.
- Projects that do not win an [Earmarked Grant] are then considered for funding under the [General Grant] category.
- [New] teams are thus eligible to be funded from both [Grant Category].
- Returning teams are eligible to be funded from [General Grants].
- 50% or more “Yes” Votes receive a grant.
- Any remaining funds not granted, are burned.
Voting Parameters
OceanDAO is a nascent monthly grants program and has a lot of mechanisms still being designed and developed. The OceanDAO roadmap aims to deliver stable systems for existing and future participants across: voting and funding. It has also been designed to improve voter & token holder representation.
Whilst Quadratic Voting is a key deliverable for OceanDAO, Sybil vector attacks cannot be taken lightly. Which is why intermediary steps have to be taken before moving to QV, so as to avoid the following:
- Willingly create an opportunity for a Sybil attack
- Overlook a well-orchestrated attack
- Become a central authority in grant-voting outcomes
- Fracture voter & grantee participation.
There are 2 major improvements being rolled out for OceanDAO Round 11. The key concept is that these changes are designed to reduce the impact of whale voters, increase the impact of voter representation, and make the process easier to navigate for all participants.
Single Ballot:
- All Grant Proposals will now be listed in a single voting ballot together (as opposed to each proposal having their own Y/N ballot)
- OCEAN can only be used to vote once (as opposed to each proposal’s Y/N ballot being voted on with your full OCEAN amount).
Weighted-Ballot System:
- Voters will be able to use OCEAN once
- Voters will be able to distribute their votes across several projects
- 1 OCEAN = 1 Vote
Note that we are still moving towards QV, which is currently implemented on Snapshot. Also, going forward, we will be deploying digital identification (DID), snapshot strategies that support this, and the required UX to reduce friction, and reduce sybil attack vectors.
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 widen its scope and begin to include the entire Ocean Ecosystem. The call will continue to take place at the same time as already planned. Keep an eye out for new format changes as they are introduced.
Round 11 Information
As a builder, submit your project proposal on the Round 11 Ocean Port Forum. As a voter, this is where you can see all the expanded proposal details to make an informed vote decision.
Additionally, you can check out the OceanDAO Round 11 Proposal Submission Dashboard to see all the proposals in one place as they are submitted.
The grant proposals from the snapshot ballot that meet these criteria are selected to receive their Funding Amount Requested (in OCEAN) to foster positive value creation for the overall Ocean Protocol ecosystem.
Round Deadlines
- Proposals Submission Deadline is November 2nd at midnight GMT
- Add OCEAN to Voting Wallet by the Proposal Submission Deadline.
- A 2 day proposal Due Diligence Period, ends November 4th, 2021 at 23:59 GMT
- Voting Starts on November 4th, 2021 at 23:59 GMT
- Voting Ends on November 8th, 2021 at 23:59 GMT
If your Proposal is voted to receive a grant, please submit a Request Invoice to the Ocean Protocol Foundation (OPF) for the Ocean Granted amount, if you haven’t already.
OceanDAO Ecosystem
Continue to support and track progress on all of the Grant Recipients here!
Much more to come — Thank you!
