@0xKrillin, thank you for starting this discussion and i see this is a passionate topic from our community. i can touch on a few points.
first, as @Jacksteroo mentioned, this application is not for funding from the harmony foundation, but for connecting with venture investors who are interested in our ecosystem. “Harmony Ventures” is to match projects with investors. any project can apply for this. we just kicked this off so it’s our responsibility to explain and publicize this more so that all projects can apply. @Abhi will help publicize this.
as for the larger incentives and campaigns that we have done, we focused last year in 2021 on getting some of the blue chip projects from the ethereum and evm ecosystem on to harmony. i’ll speak for myself that after coming home from ethcc last july, i felt we needed to aggressively pursue some of these projects to bootstrap our ecosystem.
sushi and kashi: $2m
curve: $2m
stake dao: $3m
aave: $5m (planned for aave v3)
later, as our native ecosystem grew very quickly in the second half of 2021 and into 2022, we also started to invest resources into our ecosystem projects.
defi kingdoms: $1m
tranquil: $500k (btc bridge campaign)
our ecosystem fund, launched in september 2021, has guidelines on the types of grants and investments with the goal of standardizing our process as much as we can. see our guideline article as well. there’s always some human judgment applied as a layer on top.
for ethdenver, we executed project x where our teams went out and made approximately 40 investments and grants - hermes was one of the project x investments. we chose to do this as ethdenver is one of the longest running and largest web3 community conference, with 12,000+ people this year. we went all out at ethdenver because it’s one of the largest events for builders and it’s essentially our hometown event of the year that the entire team can participate in. it’s also the first major one of the year that we invested time and resources so that the seeds planted here will blossom in the months to come.
this doesn’t preclude teams who we didn’t meet in person to apply via our public forum (here) and get in touch with the team in various other channels. for example, my twitter direct message is open to everyone. do we always get it right? of course not, there will be projects that we miss and others that we grant that doesn’t work out. we’ll still do our best every day to review all proposals and constantly improve the way we grow the ecosystem.
i actually looked into fantom’s grant program as part of my q4 2021 offsite talk to the team though i have yet to study how effective the program is in the long term in growing users. if there are any good articles, please post them here and we’ll review.
i’m also interested in ideas for community voted grants that we could (quadratically) match, such as this proposal with dorahacks, and ideas where we reward projects for onboarding users (vs total value locked).