Measure 1 - Allocating 90MM Algo to governance rewards for the next two Governance Periods.
I would place a third option for NO governance rewards. I don’t think governance rewards have had the intended impact, what we have seen is an ecosystem that encourages holding and locking over interacting with it. If we want to create value and a long-term economic virtuous cycle, which I think is what we all want, we can’t have this system. Most aren’t encouraged to interact with the system, and instead what you have is EITHER interaction through “liquid governance” systems that you then double dip on due to an unintended “meta” from governance all-together (case and point look at the most popular DeFi protocols, and they all tend to revolve around some leveraged governance play, or encourage this under the banner of “liquid governance” oftentimes having a net-negative impact). The sad reality is that the current state of our DeFi is rather stagnant, we haven’t been able to attract users, or inspire builders to build novel protocols. Most of what we have built so far revolves around leveraging governance rewards, encouraging passive “income” through token emission, or is just sheer speculation. If we want to create actual value, we need to move away from this model into one that encourages constant activity. This is probably the best outcome for both the network and its users (on-chain activity and tx should, in the long-run fuel token demand and network fees which leads to overall network revenue increasing and thus can create a profitable network in the future once full distribution is achieve).If we follow through with just “oh we’re supporting DeFi by dedicating 60MM to it” we are just going to see more products that leverage their governance position to get more of that 60MM, we won’t see any real innovation.
Measure 2 - Allocating Algo for Community Grants via community proposals and xGov process
I am bitter-sweet about this proposal, mainly because we STILL don’t know how the xGov system will look like, so starting off the bat by giving them some responsibility to a body which we’ve not even defined is already a massive red flag for me. I don’t know what the eligibility, conditions and responsibilities of an xGov are, I have a vague idea, but I still haven’t found a concise description an explanation of the program, that could be my fault, but having it already on a governance proposal before it is even rolled out seems to me a bit unnerving.
Second, the amount given is (with all due respect) a bit on the small size. With a 600k maximum budget, assuming that one of the deliverables will be an audit, because this chain is extremely risk-averse, then the reality is that most of these teams will not find this an attractive enough proposal to build anything. It is going to be hard to attract anything of interest with this amount at stake, I hope I’m proven wrong, but from what I’ve seen either given through the now defunct grant program or heard from the new investment program it seems to me like this figure is a bit far from what was dedicated to fund those programs.
Measure 3 - Allocating Algos to direct purchase NFTs from Algorand’s creator community
I don’t think this is the right way to do it. The Foundation direct purchasing NFTs seems to me as a poor way to support the NFT community. From my understanding, must NFTs, specially PFP collections tend to have the community built around it be part of the USP each project has. Having the foundation invest and take a slot in one of those does diminish that. Not to mention that supporting through a single purchase is not likely to help the actual DAO/project AS much. I do agree that we need to support NFTs, I do agree that it’s a place where the foundation has been lacking, specially when compared to the support they’ve given to other parts of the ecosystem, but I don’t agree that straight up market buying is the right proposal.
If you’re open for suggestions I would help the different creators, either directly through a development grant for NFTs specifically, supporting the marketplaces and/or development the NFT community asks for. Sit down with the top 10 NFT projects, and ask them: what do you want and how can we make your projects succeed? I can guarantee you that most of them won’t say “by buying one of our NFTs”