Protocol Foundation Grants

If it's all you have you're ngmi

If you need grants to survive, you’re ngmi in crypto.

This is a potentially hot take, but I find it true.

If you are a crypto startup and majority of your revenue comes from blockchain foundation grants, sometimes between $5K-$250K/year, the incentives align for one off deals, grifting and less innovation.

You can have milestones attached to grants where a company brings in X amount of users, liquidity, tech features, etc, but they lead to more back and forth demands than anything else.

If you are a new L1, it is necessary to fund your infra products: wallets, oracles, analytics, on/off ramps, but you shouldn’t be giving money to the 100th Uni fork.

Original use cases, inspiring founders, quality devs need the foundation to give them their critical attention to help them raise and find PMF.

Giving a team a grant is like fishing for them. Teaching a team how to fish:
- Building community
- Raising a round
- Creating a venture scalable startup
...are the key ingredients to making them self-sufficient and successful.

You have to be bullish on teams that choose your ecosystem to dominate on and build meaningful relationships before jumping around to others in search of money. It’s sad talking to teams about their chain strategy and the answer is "whoever pays us the most"

We can do better as an industry.

Money is cheap. Time & attention are not.