Ben Royce - Grant Reviewer Application

[Ben_Royce]

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[Phylo]

@Ben_Royce

6.) Do you have affiliations that may cause a conflict of interest when reviewing applications? The community would like to know particularly if reviewers are involved with projects as a creator, on the board, or employed. Please list any projects or applications you have affiliations to.

*Note: This will in no way prevent you from being elected to the position. It is the opposite. We seek experienced reviewers that are specialists in different industries. The reviewers with affiliations will not be able to review grants within their category; however, they will be great resources and act as subject matter experts.

Yes I have affiliations and involvement with the following projects: Society2, Soonlabs, The Evvrything, Decensored 2.0, Shimmer INU, Soonlabs, Soonalink.

I have one question:
To make it easier for the community to understand what potential conflicts of interest a reviewer may have, and as not everyone may be familiar with the platform you have stated here, could you shortly describe what Soonlabs, The Evvrything, Decensored 2.0, Shimmer Inu, and SoonaLink is and in which sector it operates or plans to operate in the future?

[Phylo]

I asked our Grant reviewer candidates if they would agree to take part in this challenge on 19 November with this message sent out to everyone:

Hey, I want to challenge all potential Committee members with a little task.

I want to present you with a grant application and give you one week to come up with an opinion about this application based on the information provided to you. Please put anything that comes to your mind in your response to this message, and if possible, come up with an initial opinion if you would support funding this Proposal.

You may want to use the evaluation matrix developed for the Treasury committee: Shimmer Community Treasury Grant Committee - Version 2

The Proposal is a copy of an original proposal submitted to another Ecosystem Grant program.

I have chosen two types of applications, one that is a bit more developer oriented for the reviewers with experience in software projects and one that is more community/event focussed for the others.

Every Proposal is presented in 3 different versions. I have changed some parameters in every version, so your competitors may be presented with the same Proposal with some small but important changes to the original version.

I hope you agree to this little challenge. It may be interesting for the community to see how different candidates approach this task and to which conclusions they come regarding the grant proposal.

I will DM every candidate with the same text you got here and send them their challenge privately. I hope we can keep this private until the challenge is finished in one week.

Next Sunday, at 11 am CET, I will post the information about the challenge in reply to your application post and will include the response you sent me via DM in this post.

This will, in my opinion, be the fairest process to give everyone the same conditions without revealing a challenge that a competitor has to solve or making answers public that others could consider in their own approach to the problem. So everything will stay with me, and I am the only one who knows who gets which challenge and who replies what until the reveal.

I try to make sure that applicants who are part of the same project do not get the same grant challenge, so they cannot support each other.

Please reply within 24 hours if you agree to this challenge, and I will send you the Proposal.

Thanks again for offering your skills to the community. I hope you find this a fair approach to give the community some better insights.

This is the publication of @Ben_Royce ‘s participation in the Grant reviewers’ Test challenge. More details about the challenge can be found in this post

Ben Royce response

[Phylo]

Ben Royce Grant Review

Proposal : Crypto APIs Shimmer Spending Proposal 3 (Unchanged Version 60.000 USD)

• Proposal: Crypto APIs, Shimmer APIs.

• Opinion: Decline. Not enough bang for our buck.

• Reason: Not Shimmer-specific enough, too general, worryingly excludes evaluation of how Shimmer figures into their more advanced goals.

• Caveat: willing to approve at a lower amount requested.

Evaluation of grants has a central bifurcation: projects originating within the IOTA/ Shimmer ecosystem where intention and commitment is not in doubt, but capability to execute is in question. And projects originating outside with established track record of capability, but questionable intention and commitment.

For Crypto APIs’ grant request, the metrics for evaluating capability to execute is straightforward. It is an established crypto utility, and thus it is not complicated to see if they meet their stated goals. However, the sticking point is “bang for the buck”: is it worth Shimmer Community Treasury funds, what does the Shimmer ecosystem get for their funding? Would their current success give Shimmer a boost? Does Shimmer funding go towards overall development of their product without any specific benefit to Shimmer?

The team outlines their approach to building solutions with Shimmer, and their solutions might be useful for other projects in the Shimmer ecosystem, and projects outside the Shimmer ecosystem can take notice. Especially exciting is the section:

“Among our customers are PayPal, Rakuten, Ledger, Nexo, CoinSwitch, and Chainlink. On an institutional level, we have been trusted by the University of Cambridge, UCLA, NYU, and Stanford University. We have already received grants from several blockchain communities to provide our tools to their ecosystems, incl. Stellar, NEAR, Zilliqa, and others.”

But the simplicity also means it’s just a “copypaste” of their current efforts focused on other chains. With more complicated projects with vague complex goals, cynical moneygrab concerns are harder to mollify, but with a basic utility like Crypto APIs, the straightforward integration makes the evaluation much simpler. We want Shimmer to play with other chains, but there is no discussion here about how that is achieved. It would have been in their capability and would have been nice to see, Shimmer is simply a plus one to their existing product.

Their Blockexplorer.one product details a (centralized) integration of Shimmer data, which provides a benefit, but has no path towards future growth benefit if it’s just “scrape network activity and display it in a silo.” That is not a problem per se, but suggests an intention behind the grant application which does not inspire confidence that the grant money is well spent. The following sentence is suspect:

“Furthermore, we will build other products for Shimmer as well. However, these will be financed solely by Crypto APIs and are out of the scope of the grant agreement.”

Hand waving towards generalized goals which only suggest Shimmer, with no details, is deflating. Ideally there would have been specific detailed discussions about future goals with Shimmer in mind.

They do detail those non-Shimmer-specific goals in Annex B- worryingly, centralized. Centralized is not an automatic red flag, and for their product I understand why their implementation is as it is, but we would want our funding to go towards projects truly in line with the guiding ethos of cryptocurrency, nevermind only Shimmer, or projects that while centralized, outline a path towards decentralization.

Not everything is so high-minded, and basic utilities matter. Therefore, I concede $60k is not a lot of money and may be worth the gamble, primarily for the exposure. Although looking at how the money is spent in Annex C: it seems too much, for the integration of Shimmer, as they are only tweaking an existing product.

I would then argue the crux of the matter is how much is Blockexplorer.one used? How much exposure is Shimmer getting? Getting in on a major project used by many other projects is worthwhile, but if it is not used that much, maybe not. In that regard, an analysis of its status versus competitors within its sector in regards to monthly visits reveals a middling project, not too obscure, not too popular, so this analysis in inconclusive (but there is an increase in traffic, so that suggest perhaps it is worthwhile to approve the grant): https://www.similarweb.com/website/blockexplorer.one/#overview

I would provide feedback that they may resubmit after a period with more concrete plans as to how Shimmer would be integrated and is beneficial for their more advanced goals. Or, alternatively: we may approve if they come in with a lower requested amount. This feels like a Tier 2 level funding project to me, but they are requesting Tier 3 level funding.

Looking over their project leads and their past efforts, they are very capable. But what is in doubt is their commitment to Shimmer and how beneficial is their application is to the Shimmer ecosystem. And it is doubtful this is an open source project (with our current guidelines, they would only get half of what they requested, with a promise to open source for the remaining half, but this may never come).

A final criticism would be their proposal is too vague and not “exciting” in terms of funding truly eye popping web3 projects. But again there is something to be said for nuts and bolts projects that every ecosystem needs. Although the level of need here can be doubted as there is plenty overlap with existing solutions. A focus on higher-minded problemsets and solutions would be beneficial to their application (to any grant), but this sort of feedback is probably outside of the scope of our review.

Scoring Qualities:

1. Relevance to the Shimmer/IOTA Ecosystem: 1 point (The project treats Shimmer as one of many chains and doesn’t seem loyal to the Shimmer/IOTA network.)

2. Plan and Funding Model: 3 points (The team has somewhat clear, realistic expectations on their milestones and how the funding will move the team closer to these goals. They somewhat follow the expectations of the grant system.)

3. Execution: 4 points (Several critical steps have already been taken toward their project goals. This could be seen in the form of a significant MVP, high traction, etc.)

4. Verifiability and Quality of the Team: 4 points (Team is doxxed, and we can easily verify backgrounds. The team is also high quality and seems capable, trustworthy, and ready to take action on the project.)

5. Overall Quality & Originality of the Idea: 0 points (The project/idea is a copycat or extremely weak.)