First of all I would clarify that grant DOES NOT signal endorsement of any project. If one is choosing to invest in a project please DYOR.
The objective of the developer grants is to help support promising entrepreneurs/developers that can add value to the IC ecosystem. This could be in the form of expanding the developer tooling, infrastructure or say by building interesting applications that showcase the capabilities of IC. So the grant program isn’t even trying to optimize for the investment potential of a particular project.
At a high level here is how the process works:
- All grant applications go through an evaluation by a panel of technical reviewers where the committee tries to access the team strengths, GitHub repos of previous work, their involvement in the IC community and their understanding of IC stack.
- The teams commit to their milestones prior to being accepted in the program.
- Each milestone review involves tracking progress against the pre-committed milestones which also involves code reviews.
- Only when the team successfully meets their respective milestones the disbursements are made.
I wouldn’t comment on a specific team but here are some of our learnings that we have implemented along the way:
- We rarely issue a grant to a team that doesn’t have a developer already aligned with them. In the past we have had teams that would commit to recruiting a contract developer but that never materialized for most.
- In case a team has an internal conflict (which has happened a few times) we would immediately dissolve the grant. They could reapply as independent teams but will be going through an independent review again.
- We rarely fund wallets or DeFi projects that are’t open sourced (and do not have a plan to delegate control of their canister to DAO or blackhole).
- Lot stronger weightage is now given to open sourcing. That way even if the team abandons the project the entire work doesn’t go waste and the rest of the community is open to build upon it.
Now these wouldn’t solve for someone losing their investments and we would still need people to do their own research. Very open to any other suggestions from the community.