Thanks @asteeber. I appreciate the kind words.
Just to touch on some of your points.
The W3F grants while extremly useful for building out new ideas, wont go far beyond already having an MVP
Why is that a bad thing for grass root chains? Surely it is a good thing and we want to encourage innovators to go down this route.
Would the goals of grassroot teams align more with the treasury whose goal is to build products and encourage adoption and onboarding of users or with VCs who some might argue are net value extractors rather than value adders?
Also I did not mean fund all parachains, rather to define what is fair? Is there a baseline we can agree on that is fair? Is it really fairer to treat teams that raised 30x the same as 1/2x or 0x? I would argue that it is clearly not
Additionally, I do not mean to fund any parachain purely for runway, but rather ones that have a clear goal on what they want to achieve and there is demonstrable consensus that it adds value to the ecosystem
Hypothetically - the numbers are here to explain only, not a proposed solution but to give the reader an idea of what a solution could look like - what if we say that given the below conditions are met:
- The team have a clear goal or plan of what the value add is and how the funds will be used?
- The team have demonstrable and proven track record of delivery in the ecosystem
- The team built a functioning MVP to demonstrate that value
Then we have a route of the treasury that will fund you a max of $300k (assuming you are a parachain team) provided you did not raise anything over that amount previously? the amounts could be reflective of your costs. E.g a parachain team will most likely have far more costs than a dapp team.
Do we really have more than 10 parachain teams in the polkadot ecosystem that can meet those very reasonable requirements? 5 even?
And to put numbers and perhaps more context to it, assuming the most expensive amount 300k is approx 10k $KSM. According to bright treasury The treasury currently has 513k $KSM, so even if we funded 10 teams that amount during this bear market thats 100k i.e 20% of the the kusama treasury spent to fund real teams building real utility and adoption for the entire polkadot ecosystem, we havent even discussed the dot treasury which is multiple orders of mangnitude more than the kusama one
Finally, The numbers are actually going to be far less since not everyone is asking for that amount but you get the overall idea. You can also set a max cap on it that gets slowly replenished by replacing some of the burn mechanisms we have as proposed on this post