I think a real conversation should be had about giving out money. We need to change the process to do it. Let’s do token swaps instead of grant funding for most projects.
In a bear market, the grant funding should be at a max of 15,000 – that is more than enough to help push certain key issues through the dev pipeline.
Above it, it should be token swaps. Harmony for project X’s coin, and project X receives Harmony and has the option to immediately sell it for liquidity purposes.
However, above 15k and up to 200k, it should definitely be a token swap instead of a grant. This means Harmony should get pre-seed valuation tokens. If a project needs 50k-200k then it can offer a valuation, with metrics, KPIs, etc. and give an approximate market-cap post-money valuation in its application. If the project swaps 1% of its tokens for ONE tokens, and gives Harmony a 2 year vesting period with a 6 month cliff, then that would be EXTREMELY generous in this market. Such kind vesting terms basically amount to a grant.
Let’s move Harmony away from grants and towards a decentralised VC fund. It would remove a lot of the frustration and resentment in the community regarding “free money” being handed out.
It also removes a lot of the obstacles to granting funding. For example, I see a ton of projects stuck in a pipeline where its waiting for approval for milestone 3, the multi-sig milestone. If it just a token swap, then anyone on the other side can receive the tokens and sell it to pay for their project’s development. It would ease the congestion that I can see in the forums where probably a dozen projects (as of right now) are waiting to actually get money sent to their accounts after an initial milestone approval.