Garrett Jin - Grant Reviewer Application

Governance Proposals Community Treasury - Grant Reviewer applications
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1.) Preferred Display Name and Age (If you do not want to enter your age, enter that you are above 21 years of age, which is the minimum)

Name: Garrett Jin
Age: 30+

Social Media Handles

Twitter: @GarrettBullish - https://twitter.com/GarrettBullish

Discourse: Garrett Jin - Profile - garrettjin - govern.IOTA

Reddit: NA

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrett-jin-bb821394/

Discord: Garrett#9293

Telegram: gjarete

2.) What motivates you to apply for this position?

Since I have been a relatively successful builder and investor in crypto space since 2014, I have the expertise, experience, resources and the will to make IOTA and Shimmer more adopted. As a grant reviewer, I believe I could try my best to make the right decisions with my profession and integrity for the community.

3.) What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background

Economics Major, Boston College

Web3/Crypto Background

Operation Director, Huobi, 2014

CEO, BitForex, 2017

Co-founder, TanglePay, 2021

Professional Background

Researcher, People’s Bank of China (China Central Bank) School of Finance

4.) What experience do you have relevant to this position (grant reviewer, Project manager, etc.)? Please describe

I am an entrepreneur so I know how to spend money cautiously and effectively. Also I could give go-to-market strategy suggestions for projects.

I am an investor so I have a method to evaluate on projects and builders.

I am experienced in managing roles in different teams so I know how to manage project and push things forward.

5.) Are you a software developer? If yes, please provide info on your skills and proof of the projects you already have built/worked on (Github, languages, certificates, etc.)

NA

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.

TanglePay (co-founder)
Soonaverse (committee)
Iotabee (adviser)

7.) Are you willing to sign a legally binding service provider contract and reveal and verify your identity through a KYC process with the legal entity of the Treasury Committee?

Yes - I am willing to KYC and sign a service provider contract with the Shimmer Community Treasury.

8.) Can you commit 10 hours weekly on average to work as a grant reviewer for the Shimmer community over the next 12 months?

Yes - I am willing and able to commit 10 hrs a week to the Shimmer Community Treasury.

9.) If you are voted in the top 2 reviewers, you may have the option to join the Growth Committee and work with the TEA representatives. In this case, you may be required to work hours over the required 10 hrs per week. Are you able to commit to this if required?

Yes - I am willing and able to commit to the Growth Committee and the Shimmer Community Treasury if required.

10.) Are you willing to sign a service provider contract, including an NDA with the Tangle Ecosystem Association, and respect the Non-Disclosure Agreement if selected as a member of the Growth Committee? Breaking the Non-Disclosure Agreement may bring consequences financially and or legally.

Yes - I am willing to sign a service provider contract and Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). I absolutely will respect all binding effects within such agreement contracts.

11.) Provide any web links or supporting documentation you would like the community to see when assessing you for the Shimmer Community Treasury Grant Reviewer position.

TanglePay:
https://tanglepay.com/

TanglePay Road Map:
https://medium.com/@tanglepay/tanglepay-roadmap-e43ac8905c10

12.) What is your long-term vision of the Shimmer Community Treasury? How do you see the Community Treasury affecting the Shimmer & IOTA ecosystem, and what does the Shimmer & IOTA Ecosystem look to you in three years?

As the Shimmer Community Treasury grant reviewer, the goal is to make Shimmer adopted and SMR to the moon. We need to make sure every SMR token going out of the Shimmer Community Treasury will create a much higher value.

Listing on more exchanges, as an example, is a good and direct way to make SMR adopted. But the secret listing fee for CEX sometimes can be crazily high. I know the insight and can advice the community in a better way.

Funding project is the key for Shimmer’s success. I am a builder and investor myself and I have a methodology to evaluate projects and builders.

In 3 years, Shimmer needs to be ready for the next bull market. We need to have infrastructure of DeFi and other dApps ready so that we don’t miss the bull market. The IOTA and Shimmer layer 1 is our edge that no other networks have. If we can support even just 1 or 2 successful web3 projects that uniquely rely on the feeless and scalability natures of IOTA technology, Shimmer and IOTA will stand out and shows the world why IOTA and Shimmer are the game changers. I want to work together with the community to make this happen. Let’s do it!

Do you support my application as Grant Reviewer?
  • Yes

0 voters

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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 TanglePay and Soonaverse and Iotabee is and in which sector it operates or plans to operate in the future?

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Hi Phylo! Thanks for the question.

TanglePay is an audited self-custody IOTA and Shimmer wallet available for iOS, Android and browser. Currently IOTA, Shimmer layer 1 and BSC are supported on TanglePay. Shimmer EVM will be supported on day 1. Over 20 thousands downloads have been achieved since our launch. Users will be able to use TanglePay to deposit, transfer and stake their IOTA. TanglePay is also a web3 wallet solution for dApps. Social network feature will be the next big thing for TanglePay. You can find more information for TanglePay and our plan on the road map here,

Soonaverse is a platform for communities to create and manage decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), NFTs, projects, companies, and markets, on the feeless infrastructure of the IOTA network. Any organization can launch and trade liquid assets through our Marketplace, Launchpad, and Token Exchange products. You can find more information here,
https://soonaverse.com/

Iotabee is the first swap in the IOTA & Shimmer ecosystem. The community can use Iotabee to swap SMR, SOON and other Shimmer layer 1 tokens with IOTA. The liquidity of Iotabee is really competitive and the trading experience is very simple and pleasant. Iotabee will deploy their DEX on Shimmer EVM as soon as Shimmer EVM launches. Please check it out here,

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As a reviewer you not only try to understand the business model but the implementation architecture behind the given project. I would love to learn about your personal take at the importance of safety when it comes to building. In particular:

  • As a reviewer one of the tasks is to review the project progress and understand the implementation tech-wise. Imagine you are checking the last milestone. What importance does it for you personally have, the project followed the proposed specifications by the IOTA protocol to ensure safety of users?

  • Now, mistakes can always happen. Imagine a project someone built, did not follow the protocol specifications, for whatever reasons / other grossly negligent behavior and as a result users lost funds. What is your personal opinion what the ethical correct solution would be?

    • Take the blame, reimburse the victims and maybe even think about a bug bounty (ofc including financial situation of the project) as more users have been rescued to show committment or
    • Take the blame, but label it as “crypto has its own rules, there is no obligation to refund anyone and pay nothing or a fraction, lets say 30%” and keep building
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Hi. I am nununana. Someone said what I wanted to say above. What do you think leadership responsibility is? What do you think is your ability to solve? As Soonaverse and Iotabee officials, do you have influence on them?

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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 @garrettjin ‘s participation in the Grant reviewers’ Test challenge. More details about the challenge can be found in this post

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Garret Grant Review

The EasyA proposal requested an allocation of 55k USD.

The Shimmer Network community treasure has a total amount of 181.362.051 SMR and 15% will be allocated by a committee of 5 members. A 55k USD counts for about 3.3% of the committee allocation. An amount like this fall into the Tier 3 level of SMR grant and we should carefully evaluate if it is worth it.

What is EasyA?

EasyA is a Hackathon event organizing company. Polkadot, Polygon and Tezos have all used their service once to hold a Hackathon in London.

What does the 55k USD grant do?

25k USD will be used as prize for Hackathon winners. The rest will be used to cover the rest of cost. By the way, I don’t think I would call it grant. It is more like a sponsor. EasyA doesn’t build on Shimmer. Shimmer is more of its client.

Is EasyA a good service provider for Hackathon anyway?

Let’s start with some basic research. Polkadot just used the EasyA service and held a Hackathon this July. Maybe we should check how good it is. However it is hard to find any information when we input Polkadot, Hackathon or Polkadot Hackathon. There are other Polkadot Hackathons pumped up including their official ones and the ones with “Encode”. What is Encode? It seems to be a competitor of EasyA. Let’s just compare some of the Oct traffic stats from similarweb,

Easya.io:

Visit: 5.6k

Average visit time: 31s

Bounce rate: 72.2%

Encode.club:

Visit: 32.2k

Average visit time: 3m59s

Bounce rate: 47%

Encode date is not ideal while easyA is really suspicious. The easyA traffic data shows me that either they bought some traffic or just drive some traffic that is not really relevant to land on their website. Also we can further compare some other similar Hackathon holders like Dorahacks, then we will have to doubt if EasyA is a good Hackathon service provider.

Shall we give grant to hold Hackathons?

Firstly, EasyA is not a a project that will focus on building Shimmer. It is a Hackathons holder.
It might sounds like a good idea to give money to a team and they promise us to get 25 projects built on Shimmer. These Hackathons holders are not loyal to any ecosystem or chain. We are just another client they have, and for them, they might tend to go for the quantity instead of quality. It is really hard for a project to be successful in crypto space even for selective teams.

The main benefit of this Hackathons might be branding. Also since EasyA is not a really top service provider comparing with its competitors. The branding will hardly get out of the IOTA ecosystem. Highly likely the money is spent so that IOTA community knows we are trying in a lively and happy atmosphere but it is not the goal. We need real effect.

At the end of the day, we will need to incubate about 50-100 projects, among which 10-20 projects are priority projects with the hope that we will eventually have 2-5 star projects. If we have lots of SMR with a hug marketcap, perhaps we could try to spend money with different Hackathons service providers just to try our luck to count on them. Otherwise, we need to incubate solid open source projects slowly but more effectively.

Now we can move into the Grant Evaluation Score System,

Relevance to the Shimmer/IOTA Ecosystem: 1

Plan and Funding Model: 3

Execution: 3

Verifiability and Quality of the Team: 3

Overall Quality & Originality of the Idea: 1

Total: 11/20

Tier 3 (Funding budget 50.000 - 200.000 USD) - required score minimum 15 of 20

Result: No

Reasons: Please check the information above.

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