<aside> đź’ˇ To provide grants to projects, ideas, and events that benefit Opyn and its ecosystem.
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<aside> đź’ˇ Opyn has allocated $150,000 USDC for funding grants. The program will run from March 26, 2021 to December 31st, 2021. The grants program was created after a community discussion on the Opyn Discord.
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We've been blow away by the community's acts of stewardship and generosity, and we want to continue to facilitate more members to propose technical updates to the protocol and Opyn interfaces. One example of a significant community contribution even led to a full-time role at Opyn (see the interface work done by Anton Cheng on Gammaportal & Opynmonitor). Our goal is for gamma protocol to innovate as quickly as possible in a dynamic and competitive market. To encourage community members to propose changes, the program will fully or partially pre-fund development and audit costs. In doing so, we hope to encourage more proposals, which will lead to more innovation and as a result, a far better Opyn for all of us. Options are imperative for DeFi’s maturation and eventual mass adoption, and our focus is on enabling more innovation within the space.
Making technical updates to the protocol is risky business: smart contracts are immutable and control billions of dollars in user funds. An error in a technical update can have serious consequences. Because of this, it is considered best practice is to have an auditor review the proposed update for soundness prior to its submission. Unfortunately, these audits are expensive, particularly for individual contributors who need to pay for them out of pocket. We intend provide grants that subsidize audit costs for the smart contracts of soon-to-be proposals. We hope this will encourage more individual contributors to propose technical updates to the protocol.
A better user experience and greater amount of options liquidity makes options a better investment vehicle and product for all users. To increase liquidity, Opyn should be integrated with as many applications as possible. To that end, we aim to fund integrations that grow usage of Opyn and options within DeFi.
It’s very likely that there exist uses for Opyn that haven’t been explored yet. Hackathons are a fantastic way to explore design spaces, and the program intends to sponsor them.
It’s difficult to know ahead of time all of the grant applications that will come through. Just because an application does not fit neatly into one of the above buckets doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to the Opyn ecosystem. So long as an application benefits the Opyn ecosystem directly, we will consider it for a grant. Applications for miscellaneous improvements to Opyn fall into this bucket.