Hi @LightningLad91 i have passed this question to @zire and few other folks at DFINITY so they can answer.
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Thanks Diego, I appreciate it
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Hi @LightningLad91 , you can find info on many grantees for both Community Awards Program and Developer Grants Program on the ICP Discord server. Once you get in (and have selected language groups so that more channels are unlocked), go to channel _grants and you’ll see threaded list of many projects that have received grants from DFINITY. In those threads, you will find milestones, discussion between DFINITY team and grantees, deliverables (website URLs to events, articles, and videos, etc).
In the current V1 of the Community Awards Program, a lot of content creators, media marketers, community organizers, and NFT projects have received grants. My team is in the process of revamping the current V1 and planning to launch V2 of Community Awards Program in the coming days. We’ll make the announcement via a Medium post to explain how it works and what kind of GTM/community activities we want to support.
The TLDR version is that we’ll continue to support two types of activities: offline meetups and educational content creation. V2 will be more selective, more simplified, more prescriptive, and more focused, with a more streamlined and well structured workflow for applicants. For example, a very experienced and accomplished Chinese IC developer is planning to create a series of tutorials and code samples on Github to teach Chinese Web2 developers how to build on IC, in a similar fashion as what WTF Academy on Github has done for the Ethereum community. We’re hoping the revamped V2 Community Awards Program can attract and support more such educational content creation initiatives.
Hope this helps.
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No problem @LightningLad91 . By the way, I would be the first to admit that in the past, the way we managed the Community Awards Program was a bit messy. The previous team was very short-handed with quite a bit of turn-over right after Supernova. Many questions from applicants were left open for too long we didn’t do a good job of responding. A lot of milestones in rear window didn’t align well with the best interest for the IC ecosystem (in our opinion), or at least they should be more clearly defined with means to verify.
I was asked by the leadership team to take over Community Awards Program two months ago. My team is still short-handed ( 
) but we tried a few things:
- Disabled the links for NEW applications on dfinity.org/community’s landing page. Existing grantees who have already received grants are not affected by this. They can still login and update progress.
- Started working on the V2 of Community Awards Program as mentioned earlier
- Started an experiment to open up our communication with grantees completely to the public, via the newly created ICP Discord server.
So the right way to frame up this whole thing is, we’re not ending the Community Awards Program, but revamping that to a more prescriptive V2. My colleague Beeling Chua and I are in convo with 70+ existing grantees under V1 through Discord (which we welcome every ICP community member to join). Beeling does a much better job responding to many grantees and I’m hopelessly overdue on pending messages on all social media platforms .
There were actually more twists and turns internally in DFINITY about this program. I’ll spare you from the gory details… At every turn, I should have written up a Medium post via DFINITY’s official account and Diego about it (hey @diegop this is my shameless attempt to turn you into a verb… let this post be known that I’m the FIRST one to do so. Can you drop me an NFT for this… just saying…) but things were moving/changing too fast for me to light up the path for all of us. My bad.
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I dont even know how to react to this. not sure what emoji is appropriate.
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If you follow the ICP Discord server channel, you will find many CAP grants not only by name, but also with description, website links, milestone deliverables, and our back-n-forth communication with them.
Honestly, I think we’re probably running the risk of being too transparent than necessary (for Community Awards Program). It’s hard to tell where the line should be drawn, but personally I tend to over-index on transparency as I totally agree with you this is extremely important for decentralization and the future of DFINITY and IC.
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The OP @tsetse has a lot of legit complaints about the way DFINITY discloses info (or the lack of). OP also challenges the way Dom runs DFINITY.
FWIW, I just wanted to say these:
- We have sufficient means to support the team. Nobody has missed any pay check. I think we’re well positioned to live through this crypto winter.
- In this fast changing industry where Aptos/Sui are catching up aggressively and Polygon/Algorand/Solana/Avalanche are full-steam ahead on their way of marketing, I feel very lucky to be part of the DFINITY team working on IC. I used to be a 3-time startup founder myself and used to part of the team that formulated startup strategy for AWS/Andy Jassy. DFINITY’s journey, despite of its roller-coaster ride, is not that different from many other startups, who went from being widely misunderstood and ridiculed to transforming the entire industry and proving everyone else wrong (Jobs/Apple in 2003). We’re far from being a dream team, but it’s fun to work with a fellowship of strong believers.
- Dom is not a conventional leader by any means, but he’s our Dom. None of us would be here without his vision, innovation and tenacity. He’s no Jack Welch or Andy Jassy. He’s not a crowd pleaser but a fighter who will never back down. In my own personal experience with Dom, I find him very authentic, accessible, and actually more open-minded than I thought. As an employee of DFINITY and a believer of IC, I’m betting on him, and I’d imagine that’s not that much different than how Apple/Tesla employees followed the torch carried by Jobs/Musk. He’s made many wildly controversial decisions and many people will never make peace of those (or forgive him), but personally, I think he’s demonstrated uncanny sound judgments on important P0/P1 decisions that really matter.
- Many people tend to conjure up all kinds of conspiracy theories on DFINITY. Just let it go, folks. There is no conspiracy theory. We always want to run fast but often stumble here and there - all those are part of the growing pains. There is no Karl Rove. We don’t have the answers to many questions faced by Web3 DAOs/communities and we’re also just learning as we grow. The IC community has been a great source of feedback and learning for all of us. Keep up the fire! But let’s not let the fire over-burn ourselves. We’re all in this together.
- No, we do not favor ICPMN led by @wpb . We’re trying to be supportive of all the IC communities around the world and rooting for the success of all of them. ICPMN is one of the earliest communities out there and they’ve been very vocal on many topics. This is a good thing. Does it create an optics where we end up taking more often to ICPMN than others? Duh, naturally, yes.
You don’t have to believe in anything I say, as I’m obviously biased with too many filters. I reckon that I won’t be able to back up my above arguments with data and charts that are typical in an Amazon 6-pager, and I don’t want to carry the burden to prove my assessment. But anyway, these are just some thoughts from one IC believer to another. Thanks for calling us out and hope this helps.
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Yes, and I know this might not be possible because holdings are usually private. However, given the conflicts of interest that exist and are bound to arise in the future, I think some kind of policy ought to be in place where Dfinity staff reveal to the organisation any holdings of, say 10% and over in dApps, and Dfinity in turn reveals the total holdings of Dfinity members in dApps when these exceed 10%. No names need be disclosed to the public, just a statement like, “Dfinity staff own 27% of dApp X”.
Thanks for engaging, @diegop and @zire your input is greatly appreciated.
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Ah good question. No such policy exists, that I am aware of.
I personally would support some version of it. For example, I would support dapps applying for grants showing any DFINITY members having equity in it, but would not support dfinity members to disclose their assets.
That being said, what is the problem you are thinking could be happening? Conflict of interest where DFINITY gives grants to teams where the folks who decide on grants own equity? Personally, I have not seen that come up, so it has not been high on my priority list, but would not be against anything that furthers trust in the network and the foundation.
@zire @Lomesh-dfn1 what do you think? You are closer to grants than I am.
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Hi @tsetse I would have the same question as Diego. What’s your concern here?
Are you concerned about conflict of interesest where DFINTY employees give resources to certain projects of which they have a personal stake?
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Yes, @diegop , @zire , mainly grant giving, but also influencing votes that assist particular projects, publicising them more prominently than competitors and so on.
Well you have been nothing but professional here. I don’t think I want to continue this conversation anymore.
Thanks for the response
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I can only speak for myself. I DO NOT have any stake in any IC project because I feel this is a conflict of interest for my role as a member of the grant committee. I am waiting for SNS where I would get an opportunity to participate in IC projects alongside everyone else.
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This is a good step forward:
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I want to thank @tsetse for raising these questions. They are ones I also raised several months ago, going through the exact same steps, finding (and translating) the same docs. I think like @tsetse, I was genuinely hoping to find some great answers, something I could use to settle my growing doubts and commit myself, my money and my dev skills to making ICP flourish.
I did not quite get the responses you have, and you did not get the pushback I met, and it gladdens me to see the community moving forward in this way. I see similar shifts in people questioning other elements I questioned then, and being met with resonance, rather than an instinct to call FUD and do away with unpleasant cognitive dissonance.
But much as I appreciate @diegop’s brave attempt at damage control (I feel for him in the circumstances) I don’t think this long thread has moved the discussion forward one iota. It’s been responsive and polite and “we are all friends” and “hope that was clear, let’s just stop thinking about this now and get back to talking about how great ICP can be”. But I don’t believe a single one of your questions has been satisfactorily answered any more than mine. So having been reasonably gentle and watching the wheel come back round, and 76 answers later no movement forward at all (perhaps a couple of movements back) I ask your indulgence if I allow myself a little bit more emphasis and directness this time.
For all the tone of normality in the replies (“just boring bureaucracy”), the fundamental fact is anything but normal, and boils down to this: the great society-decentralising, trustless agent, Dfinity, has exactly 2 people in absolute legal control. Dominic, and a stand-in lawyer required by Swiss law. So make that 1 guy (and his token Swiss lawyer).
1 guy. In total, absolute control. Can shut down Dfinity tomorrow. Can replace anyone. Can veto any project. Or shape it. Can implement a backdoor (not saying there is one, just speaking to the power of his position). A single monarch of Dfinity, as an evangelist of the utopia of decentralisation. Cognitive dissonance anyone?
People will shout “alarmism!” “conspiracy theory!!”, but it is not. It is, to paraphrase Diego, a boring, bureaucratic fact. When you concentrate the power of the CEO and the power of the Board in one person, and your articles of association do not incorporate checks and balances (annual reports, financial disclosures, minimum board numbers, rotations, conflict of interest rules and registers, etc, etc, etc) you give absolute power to the CEO. When 1 man alone (and his token Swiss lawyer) is the board, the CEO and the Chief Scientist, without constitutionally mandated public information flows, you’ve taken a legal structure designed for accountability, and turned it into the emperor’s new clothes.
“But it’s a non-profit!” I hear a believer shout. Doesn’t that make him one of the good guys - or rather the single good guy (and his token Swiss lawyer)? What’s the worry about the concentration of so much power, influence and commercial intelligence in a single person, if they can’t profit from it?
Well, here are some questions:
Who decides Dom’s non-profit salary and benefits?
Dom does.
Who knows what Dom’s salary and benefits consist of?
I can’t guarantee it, but I would be astonished, given the general approach to transparency, if anyone beside Dom and the token Swiss lawyer knew. What really matters, is that if Dom doesnt want to disclose it to anyone in Dfinity, he doesn’t have to.
If Dom wants to fund projects he might derive a personal interest from, say via friends, family or proxies, could he?
Why, yes, he could.
If he did fund projects he, his loved ones or proxys benefit from, would he have to disclose it to anyone, inside or outside Dfinity?
Probably, to the token Swiss lawyer. That’s it. He wouldn’t even need to tell the token Swiss lawyer that it’s a personal associate, just: “we’re funding this.”
Does anyone know if Dom has any ties to the early ICP rug pullers who made the billions?
No one can ever know. We do know there is no legal, consitutional or administrative process that would lead him to verifiably tell us.
Is there one, single, tiny check or balance on Dom’s ability to benefit from sole control of Dfinity in ways direct and indirect?
Nope. As long as he doesn’t obviously break the law, there are no constraints.
The entire philosophy of the blockchain is trustless transactions. Is it not ironic that the entire organisational, financial and legal philosophy of Dfinity is “trust Dom, he is a dom, but he’s our Dom”?
You may think this is hyperbole. But this was precisely the answer to the question of legal, financial and institutional transparency that opened this thread.
“we have been advised that since we are living in a world of highly-financed bad actors launching surreptitious attacks and FUD, we have been advised to hold off on financing info.”
= “sorry, you will never know what goes on with our finances.”
That makes absolute sense and is pretty boring and conventional. For a small commercial entity. In some jurisdictions. Sometimes.
(Shhh. Don’t mention that there are of course plenty of businesses, including the biggest ones, living in a world of even better financed competitors eager to launch attacks and FUD. Who nevertheless publish their annual accounts.)
There is a HUGE zone between “we will keep sensitive financial info confidential”, and “we will disclose not a single fact about our finances to the thousands who have poured their savings and energy into our project”. That HUGE zone, occupied by every listed company, as an example, and 99% of smaller companies in UK for example, doesn’t exist for Dom, and therefore for Dfinity, since, legally and constitutionally, Dom’s will, is Dfinity’s will, no ifs, no buts.
Who is the “we” and who is the advisor here?
This model is not unheard of in private businesses. It might not get you a responsible business award or qualify you as a B-corp: but it’s a common way of running a private company. But Dfinity is not a private company. Dfinity, for all the money it manages, the VC funding it attracts and the startup feel of its operations, is (meant to be) a non-profit entity. Ask most non-profit foundations in the world (I run one and advise many): Dfinity’s total lack of financial transparency, their one person governance, their absolute absence of governance checks and balances, is not good, or even normal, non-profit governance.
“Yes there is a board. It really is no different than other Swiss foundation boards. Dom and Gian Bochsler are on the board. Why is it not on the website? They are both in the “leadership” tab of https://dfinity.org/ . Is it obvious at first glance? No, I do not think so. I take blame here as the new manager of the website team.”
Nothing to see here folks, it’s just a website issue. Should have added a mention in the about us link. Sorted. This is exactly how non-profits work. Boring, normal stuff.
Is it really though? Find me a multimillion dollar non-profit with hundreds of employees and complex financial operations, who has a single person on the board (and the token lawyer), who also happens to be CEO. It is pretty rare in the non-profit world, and they tend to wear shirts that say “I’m sketchy”. To be fair to @diegop, this internationally extremely rare breed of non-profit tends to be found in Switzerland, for the same reason other birds of “sketchy” financial plumage are observed in that habitat: secrecy laws.
" Yes, the foundation has all the paperwork, meeting minutes, etc… of a Swiss non profit. Tbh, pretty boring stuff."
Sounds normal. Apart from the fact that it is not really that normal, for the minutes to consist of whatever Dom (and his token Swiss lawyer), decide to write down. Do the minutes state any bonuses the board decides to award its CEO? Let’s ask the CEO, who is the only member of the board (with his token Swiss lawyer). Do they state what projects money will go to? Who knows? Who cares? Who gets to read the minutes?
If you were the only member of your company’s board (with your token Swiss lawyer), how often would you arrange to meet yourself? How would you handle disagreements with yourself? Would you put it to a vote? I suspect those board meetings are, as Diego puts it, boring indeed, and very, very quick.
Asked by @tsetse if Dfinity are aware of the reputational costs of zero transparency, @diegop replies:
“DFINITY definitely very much aware. We know it is a painful, painful stand DFINITY has.”
It definitely must be painful to Dfinity staff sent out to defend the indefensible. And I am sure Dom is very, very aware. After all, he could have chosen any jurisdiction to build his non-profit. He must have searched hard and wide until he found the single most secretive jurisdiction that would legally entitle him to run a foundation as a sole board member (with a token Swiss lawyer) with absolute control and, precisely speaking, zero accountability.
But I don’t think it’s painful for Dom, let alone painful, painful. I think it’s actually quite nice for him really. He doesn’t even have to answer himself, because, as Diego explains, this doesn’t meet the “super-important” C-level threshold. The current situation, for Dom, is a carefully curated feature, not a bug. I have founded many non-profits, local, national and international. I have worked with over 1000. I can tell you that you don’t achieve such lack of transparency and accountability, with such singular control over so, so much money, without serious effort.
Astonishingly, Diego’s answers did not end the questions. Some people bizarrely still wanted to know how to find out whether Dfinity was solvent enough to keep running, to decide whether to invest. Absurd right?
@zire then chipped in.
"FWIW, I just wanted to say these:
We have sufficient means to support the team. Nobody has missed any pay check. I think we’re well positioned to live through this crypto winter"
Ah good then. Let’s carry on creating our trustless system. After all, that was pretty much the same thing SBF said about FTX a few days ago, and it worked out for them. Wait.
“Dom is not a conventional leader by any means, but he’s our Dom… As an employee of DFINITY and a believer of IC, I’m betting on him.”
So that’s what the entire legal, financial and ethical structure of Dfinity boils down to: be a believer, gamble, and make Dom your dom.
Finance records? Who needs them to invest:
Believe, gamble, follow your Dom.
Conflicts of interest? Who needs checks and balances:
Believe, gamble, follow your Dom.
Unlimited authority? Who needs observability into the decision making process or even the decisions themselves:
Believe, gamble, follow your dom.
The problem, to close the circle and return to the origin, is that every single non-technical decision taken by Dom speaks to a lack of trustworthiness. Out of all the institutional frameworks, he shopped for jurisdictions worldwide until he found maximum control, maximum secrecy, and minimal accountability. He then oversaw a launch that displayed the fastest inflation of a currency, the buying of currency from his own employees, a set of demonstrable, universally acknowledged but still shadowy transactions that made people billions, precisely when 99.99% of investors were locked out and could only yearningly watch; before plummeting just as the lock expired at a rate far exceeding that of the wider crypto market and in rhythms that tracked precisely with the movement of ICP coins during and after the lock-in.
I don’t think it’s FUD (“heretic!”) to question, in a collective endeavour to build a decentralised internet why Definity (ahem Dom) choses to structure itself as an uber-centralised pyramid calling the shots with a single man at the top with absolute no accountability and zero checks and balances.
I don’t think it’s FUD to question why in a beautiful project to achieve a trustless economy, Dfinity (ahem Dom) chooses to operate entirely on trust, or really, more accurately, entirely on faith in our benevolent leader (he may be Dom but he’s our Dom), that requires everyone whose investments and life goals are tied to the project, to just say “whatever you say” to their Dom, particularly when Dom has not given any sign of being particularly worthy of retail investors’ financial or institutional trust. Who needs an investor’s trust when you can have a believer’s faith?
In closing, I just want to emphasise the key word in my last two paragraphs: choice. Dom is not tied by some existential constraint. No FUD goons are pinning Dom to his chair. In one instant, he could add seats to the board. Include ICP investors, creators, advocates. Literally in one instant. He could tell his token Swiss lawyer: please copy and paste the statues of 99.99% of non-profits and reword for our purposes. Voilá. Checks, balances, accountability, and trust, for when faith won’t carry you.
It would take an hour with a financial advisor to say: what information can I share without risking the future of Dfinity, ICP and the planet? And then ask his accountant to share it. It might actually take 15 mins of his time, since there is not exactly a lack of examples to draw on for public financial disclosures that miraculously have not destroyed the companies making them every year.
@diegop wrote: “No one has answered this thread for boring bureaucratic reasons.” I think this remains the case. The bureaucratic reason of a non-profit with Swiss jurisdiction with a sole person of significant control, who has no interest in sharing with anyone any facts whatsoever that could curtail his ability to do, say, pay others or himself, exactly as he pleases, with zero external visibility outside of what he himself curates.
The ethics of it aside, and that’s an unbridgeable aside for me, I don’t think this is either viable or sustainable. I think, with the many fragilities around ICP ecosystem centralisation, node concentration and inflation, voting power concentration, acknowledged gaps in data protection, environmental impact of a costly architecture, and other tricky, but perhaps solvable stuff, the current institutional and legal structure, privileged and opaque information environment and Dom’s unrestricted, unaccountable, secretive and ethically compromised position of absolute authority; coupled with the irrationality of crypto belief (as opposed to trust and verification); are existential risks that don’t bode well for Dfinity, ICP, and specially ICP’s investors (as if the devaluation was not enough indication!).
I also think, whether Dfinity and ICP thrive, or crash and burn in the future, Dom will be just fine, and profit from the outcome. Leaders in his position tend to implode from the cummulative impact of character choices, not a particular set of logistics, and thrive until the moments before implosion. Just ask FTX.
I genuinely love the concept of the Internet Computer. I hugely appreciate the extraordinary brain power, innovation, creativity and community. It is deeply seductive, because I want to believe. I am perhaps somewhat shielded by the lack of a personal profit motive: I’m not imagining myself an ICP millionaire in addition to this wonderful project.
But if I replace the urge to believe, with an urge to trust and verify, then I find this fantastic, inspiring structure resting on a foundation of cards. Probably bank cards. Probably Dom’s and a small circle. Probably not (any longer) in ICP. And one character flaw away of taking the whole thing down.
I’d like to be wrong, and I’d check against the facts, if only one could, beside Dom. And his token Swiss lawyer.
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I’d have upvoted this 100 times if I could, it’s sad your initial inquiries were met with a poor response and since then you have moved to other projects, we need more people asking tough questions and less of the “It’s alien tech” style of propaganda I often see in IC’s circles.
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Speaking of transparency I’d like to know why the ICA’s VP has almost tripled since September and is the highest it’s ever been, last AMA with Dfinity made it look like the ICA was kind of a failed or paused experiment and it didn’t do much at this time, but somehow they now have 3 times the VP they had on the 25th of September (5.4mil to 16.9 mil).
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Thank you for your much needed criticism of DFINITY’s lack of financial transparency in this current financial climate.
Even if @diegop and DFINITY fail to produce any financial documents, hopefully people in the ecosystem read your thoughtful post, realizing that given the financial secrecy and single party rule of DFINITY, they are undertaking insanely high platform risk by building on the IC.
Maybe this is also why developers are having so much trouble integrating with traditional businesses - why would a non-crypto business take on that type of risk with their product or data?
Even if the “tech” is novel, the finances and ownership of DFINITY are a big part of the reliability and redundancy of the IC (even though DFINITY is not the IC).
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I have to say, it’s amazing how sentiment and discourse have shifted in the last 8 months! I was stunned when I first raised these and more technical issues (see my post history) that they were somehow novel or unusual. And the reactions really different. On several threads now I’m seeing people return to these questions and the community engaging with them with maturity and seriousness. If anything bodes well for ICP, is the growth in these kinds of responses. It gives the system a capacity to adapt. When feedback loops face hermeticism at the top, and uncritical assent at the bottom, with the middle not minding, they essentially collapse, and the system quickly becomes maladaptive. Cognitive dissonance is a very useful warning system, to assist in course correction. When you keep it at bay, either burying the information, or your own head in the sand, you’re cruising for a bruising, in my experience.
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