I’ve been exploring the DFINITY Grants program and noticed that some projects have received substantial funding (around $300,000, https://codebase.org/) but have minimal public updates—sometimes just a couple of pages of content or brief documentation over the span of years.
Could someone help clarify what’s happening here? Are there specific expectations or deliverables that aren’t visible publicly, or is there another context I might be missing?
I’m genuinely interested in understanding how these grants are managed and assessed, as transparency seems crucial for the community.
Actually 300k is pretty cheap for a splash page these days.
In all fairness i was looking through to codebase github repo and it seems there was significant work done as far as experimentation in research in the early days. That while they never published their own product, their codebase was likely useful to the community at some point. Apparently they did the first rust implementation of the replica.
I asked for clarification on this as I work pretty hard but it was clear to me that grants are just a lure to get you in the door. Like really, any good app is going to need $25K for good branding and a bit of marketing. $100K isn’t even that much when you hire a few people, so I really think the grants procedure needs to have more measurable controls and should be for a lot more money.
Fewer, higher valued, better thought out, transparent grants.
Normally Dfinity won’t give 100% money to developer after approved grant.
They give 50% of grant for team and 50% after finished the milestone included grant application.
His last public work on ICP stuff was over 3 years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was part of the swamp group that took grant money and used it to help competitors.
Do you really think it is helpful to make accusations and conspiracy theories out of everything. Some of your posts have merit and show that ICP has potentially bad actors and architectural problems. But if you go in every thread and make these accusations — some without any evidence at all — it seems more likely that you just want to push an agenda.
What would be really helpful is a single website/document where you collect all the evidence. It’s sometimes hard to follow everything and keep an overview, especially for people not super active in the forum. This would be far more beneficial to the community than just going full conspiracy imo.
So what for you asked grant for? Blaming not getting grant and then not telling what for, is like provideing missing info.
As time goes on, grant goals change, when at first wallet and dex developers got it, now they most likely cant. I remember James was crying for not getting grant, than we asked what for you asked it, he said youtube videos about ICP vs other crypto, so basically for attacking other projects on youtube.
Times change, when you did not get grant than, might now you get.
What are you even doing with your app? Who uses your app? How many users do you have? You are just stealing ICP from everyone and expect more money from IC. Stop posting and go back to work.
What I mean is that there are things you can do with $20M, $10M, or even $5M that just aren’t possible with $500K—especially when any attempt to spend it gets FUDed to death. Not your fault, of course.
We need proper funding on the IC, and stop fighting between us.
Want to add to this thread that for those that didn’t know Paul was a DFINITY Engineer who helped build important parts of the Internet Computer (SDK, Motoko language & more).
Now on the grant situation.
I remember that during the year just after Genesis (2021-2022), it was much easier to get a grant, and usually with bigger amounts. You had an early mover advantage, with the fact that the Internet Computer was a completely new platform, almost any experimentation that would bring new developers onto the platform was approved as a grant. Also, this wasn’t just happening with DFINITY/ICP - it was common across all Web3 foundations. There was plenty of money available, and foundations were competing with each other to attract the most developers to their platforms, like a gold rush.
Now, the grant programs have changed, the grants funding have reduced across the entire space and grants are usually delivered for products based on track records and potential for quick market fit. I think it’s unfortunate, because many of the best Web3 innovations need space for experimentation, but it’s also normal that projects need to step up their game.
He did, and then apparently just took a load of money and vanished.
I was following his neuron back then and after a few votes where he was obviously pissed off with the foundation, I changed my followee.
Anyway, I have enough enemies right now. I just want to highlight people who are in this community under the guise of “helping” but are really sabotaging the project and shorting it into the ground.
While I don’t know Paul personally, as I never worked with him, we did have occasional contact back when he was active on Twitter. When he stopped working on Codebase, I reached out to him. He told me that his funding (grants) had ended and that he was also dealing with family issues, which prevented him from continuing the project.
We haven’t been in touch since, so I can’t say what happened afterward. One thing I can confirm, though, is that I remember him giving a demo at a Global R&D (I guess I can mention it here in this context), and it was pretty promising at the time.
Also worth to note that even though the project ended, the work remains. Codebase was open source, and the code is still available on GitHub. I haven’t gone through it in detail, and don’t know if it’s all or parts of the code, but it looks like there are over 400 commits in the main repo.
So while I can’t say for sure or speak to the total amount of funding and to some extension it’s none of my business but, to me and spontanously I would say it doesn’t look like he just took the money and vanished - i.e. it seems he delivered.
