Proposal for the 1st Quadratic Funding Community Grant for Global Kusama Developers on Hackerlink.io

Proposal:

Kusama’s 1st Quadratic Funding Community Grant on HackerLink.io/en

Date:

March 1st- April 30th

Budget:

Our ask is 600 KSM in total from the Treasury. 500 KSM goes to a subsidy Grant prize pool dedicated to new projects building on Kusama and 100KSM goes to Hackerlink Team for costs generated developing product features, event operating and PR.

Target:

Attracting 100+ new global projects building on Kusama Network in NFT, Defi, DAO and many other cool fields.

Intro:

The vibrant growth of Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem largely thanks to the Grants program. With funding and support by Parity, Web 3 Foundation and Treasury of Polkadot and Kusama, developers and hackers can better boost-start their project and make their product great step by step by optimizing their strategies and attracting talented team members.

Here at HackerLink, we want to introduce a new way to incentivize developers and hackers—— a Quadratic Funding Community Grant. With this QF Grant, we can call upon all KSM holders and community members to vote and donate to the new Kusama ecosystem projects, engage Kusama folks to join the growth of Kusama ecosystem by becoming early curators of interesting projects and useful products. Hacker teams will receive votes and donations directly from donors and supporters, then they will receive a subsidy grant from Kusama Treasury proportionally depending on how many people voted for their project and how many community grants they received. It’s a more decentralized and democratic way to incentivize and support creators in Kusama ecosystem and a complementary way to the current grant program offered by Kusama Treasury and Web 3 Foundation.

The HackerLink quadratic funding features was inspired by Vitalik’s paper Quadratic Payment (https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html) and GitCoin’s early practice. At this moment, Binance Smart Chain is running its first round of quadratic funding grant on HackerLink.

How this works:

For starters, we will invite global Kusama developers, hackers and ecosystem builders to upload their ideas and projects to our landing page on Hackerlink.io/en/grant. Basically any project that contributes to the Kusama ecosystem can apply for the grant. It can be any project ranging from infrastructure-level projects, apps in Defi, NFT, DAO or any concept, an interest group, a media, a community and so on.

As more projects have been onboard to HackerLink, we’ll invite Kusama community members to come visit the page and vote for the projects they appreciate and would love to support with KSM. Here we introduce the quadratic voting mechanism. For instance, if Gavin wants to give 3 votes to an NFT project, the cost of his first vote will be 0.1 KSM, the second 0.2KSM, and the third 0.3 KSM. As you can see, the cost of the votes grows up in a linear pattern, and adds up to a quadratic number of total votes.

As time goes by, projects will gradually onboard to the platform. We can gradually call upon all KSM community to come visit this landing page and see what these new projects is about. Then they can vote for the projects that they like and become early curators and supporters. It’s a great way to actively engage the community to know more about the new projects and participate in early curation.

Eventually, after the submission and voting deadline, there will be a leaderboard where you can see all the projects, how much votes they received and how much they got proportionally from our KSM treasury subsidy pool.

Why QF?

Quadratic funding is an on-chain method for democratic voting and funding public goods. For public chain ecosystems, infrastructure projects, parachains, tools, community efforts, new protocols and new products can all be seen as public goods for the ecosystem. Quadratic voting balanced “one person one vote” and “one dollar one vote”. Quadratic funding further allows community members’ vote to distribute a larger “grant prize pool”, which incentivizes participation.

Case Study: BSC Grant 1

Binance Smart Chain is working with Hackerlink on its first quadratic funding grant of $50000 of BNB. Within 10 days, more than 80 teams applied for the grant and 60+ new projects have been submitted. Global teams from Ukraine, UK, Bolivia, Vietnam, Japan, India, Canada, Singapore, United States and China joined this round.

What to expect:

With support from the treasury, Web 3 Foundation, the Kusama community, we are expecting 100+ new global projects in NFT, DAO, Defi and other fields submitted to the program for this round, according to our experience.

How the budget will be spent:

500 KSM will go to the Subsidy & Matching pool dedicated to the developer team and projects. 100 KSM will be used as incentive for Hackerlink team to 1. develop the front end and back end of this QF system; 2. Operate this whole event globally and 3. Spend certain amount of fees to PR in global hacker communities.

KSM Quadratic Funding Grant Round-1 Procedure:

White Listing:
Starting 15 days before KSM quadratic funding grant, open white list. Voters register KSM address and deposit KSM, input Ethereum address, and a eKSM will be air-dropped to the Ethereum address.

Voting & Uploading:
During Mar 1 and Apr 30, developers and hacker teams will be able to submit their projects to HackerLink, and all voters will be able to donate and in the same time vote for the projects. The grant prize pool will be funded according to quadratic voting results from all voters.

Post-Round:
leaderboard showing all projects and ranking
Fund distribution
Airdrop NFTs to all donors

Product Features:

• Project Submission
  Decentralized Voting & Donation
  Decentralized quadratic funding smart contract
  Live Leaderboard Ranking
  BUIDL page for project details
  GitHub and Twitter verification

Future Work

A quadratic funding pallet (https://github.com/w3f/Open-Grants-Program/pull/227) is being implemented on Substrate by DoraHacks team, aiming to migrate quadratic funding to Kusama and Polkadot networks in the coming months.