Announcing the Cosmos Community Contributor Grants Recipients of Q2

Greetings Cosmonaut 🖖,

Earlier this year, we announced the recipients of a Cosmos Community Contributor Grant in Q1. For a bit of background behind this “grants program”, the idea came around late last year when Adriana Mihai came to me with an intriguing problem. The problem was this — we were missing good schemes that actively rewarded people for building up their parts of the Cosmos community. In an effort to gather our thoughts and identify those who had been doing some solid work in all areas pertaining to development, research, building in general, and running meetups—all without pay that whole time during year 1 of mainnet, mind you—we put together a spreadsheet with names of Cosmos contributors and what they did. Then we passed that sheet over to Interchain Foundation in hopes of getting something to fund that list of names with.

After months of back and forth with the foundation lawyers, the ICF ended up deciding against sending direct contributions to recipients who were not part of their greater grants application process. It’s important for them to be conservative in the operation of the foundation where moving slowly is a feature and not a bug. They did, however, allocate some funding for specific deliverables—Today in Cosmos translations—as well as budget for meetups. The need, however, to support more types of work beyond just translations and hosting meetups remained unsatisfactorily met.

Ultimately, we ended up breaking down what each organization was good for, what each organization was good at, and forming a program that balanced those considerations with the needs of the community.

The ICF is great at recognizing important research needs that cater to the longevity of Cosmos. They’re good as a source of funding for amounts that range from “under $10k to over $100k, depending on the scope of the project” according to the ICF. Their mission is to pursue the ends of an Internet of Blockchains — a very broad and sweeping one with a very long-term outlook. Read the Q2 funding recipients post ICF Q2–2020 Funding Recipients for a better sense of what types of projects ICF funds.

In contrast, Tendermint keeps a much shorter telescope that caters to the short to medium-term needs of the network — specifically, the needs of the Cosmos Hub and the ecosystem of ATOM holders. Tendermint is fantastic at recognizing important practical integrations that are needed today in order to bridge the gap between users and Cosmos. Tendermint is able to move fast while giving smaller grants to the tune of $50 to $5000 — microgrants, if you will.

All this work having been done in the background culminates today in an official Cosmos Community Contributor Microgrants program that we are very excited about and finally opening up to the public for applications. (If you have a more catchy, less lengthy name for this program, I’m all ears.) As we enter the 2020 crypto bull market, I expect to receive a tidal wave of new blood propelling themselves past the Bitcoin moon and into Cosmos out of a renewed interest in this rapidly warming market. As such, this program will allow all new and existing Cosmonauts to apply for, submit contributions, and get microgrants for in any one of these categories:

This is meant to be a complementary measure until the Stargate upgrade is deployed on the Cosmos Hub. What’s lesser-known about Stargate is that it includes a feature in Cosmos SDK that will allow anyone to send ATOM to the community tax pool and supplement the total funds such that governance will be able to review and fund future Cosmos community contributions with its bigger pool of funds. But before this feature is on the Hub, this program will act as the main pillar to fund community contributions and act as a framework to inform future contributions that will ultimately land on the Cosmos Governance table for the broader community to fund.

🌟 Join the 🚀 Space Program 👉 cosmos.network/contributors 👈

🌟 See what else is happening in the 👉 cosmos.network/community 👈

And without further ado, I’m proud to announce Q2’s recipients—in no particular order.

👨‍🚀 Q2 Community Contributors 👩‍🚀

🗒 Will your name show up on next quarter’s list? ⭐️

🚀🤠 Space Cowboys/girls go here 👉 cosmos.network/contributors 👈

Live long and prosper