December '22

Highlights

• Two grants approved with $50,000 in funding. 
• Five grants completed and further updates from existing grantees. 
• AMAs, Website updates, and Commonwealth Threads. 

Funding Rounds

In December, the DGP issued two grants for a total of $50,000 in funding. We have now approved a total of 88 grants with over $2.8M in funding throughout the program.

December was among the smaller months in terms of issued grants. We continue to explore productive use of funds across our existing budget, with an emphasis on our International Growth allocation. As a reminder, our International Growth budget is dedicated to funding brand awareness and user growth efforts on a global scale. Projects of interest include sponsoring major events, media partnerships, local community workshops, and promotional content production. If you have a project or idea that fits this category, give us a shout and submit an application!

Funded Grants

While our funding efforts were quieter, our existing grants were buzzing with excitement and progress in December. Many of our grantees spent the holiday season hard at work with the grants team to hit milestones and finalize their projects. We couldn’t be prouder of the commitment seen from our grantees, with a special shout out to the merchandise and academy teams working hard to launch their initiatives in January.

Below we’d like to highlight updates across both Completed and Ongoing grants from the past month:

Completed Grants

dYdX Merchandise Webstore

Paperclip Labs shipped the final version of our merchandise store in time for the January 3rd launch of dYdX Merch, a community run merchandise campaign to grow the dYdX brand. This completes a four month project to build a custom dYdX webstore, including Hedgies NFT gated products. Check out the live website here: https://dydxmerch.shop/

Early shout out to our merchandise team for launching dYdX Merch as well. We’ll save the larger update for our January report!

Layer3 Quest #1

Layer3 launched the first dYdX Quest, an initiative funded to promote dYdX and onboard new users to the platform. The Quest asked users to deposit $500 and execute an order on the exchange. 201 users completed the deposit and 188 fills were recorded on the exchange. Of the depositors completing this quest, 87% were new users of dYdX.

Metagals dYdX Workshop #2

The Metagals team hosted their second workshop, an online interactive course helping attendees onboard to dYdX and interact with important features. The session, led by Kary Sahaguian, had 30 active participants engage in a hands-on approach to raise awareness of dYdX.

dYdX Builders Workshop

The Workshop Turkey team hosted a dYdX Builders event in Istanbul, bringing together 15 local crypto builders to hack a dYdX trading bot using Python. The event was a big hit with lots of eager participants learning hands on how to programmatically trade on dYdX.

Promotional Greek Video

Cryptocapitalist, a popular Greek Youtuber, completed their promotional video of dYdX and hit our goal of reaching over 2,000 views (currently at 2.2K). This grant was funded as part of our International Growth budget to raise awareness of dYdX across global crypto communities.

Ongoing Grants

dYdX Academy Page

The team of academy grantees have been hard at work to meet the end of January launch target, with awesome progress seen across the website, POAP designs, branding, and content production. The academy page will host educational content and interactive courses to onboard new users and engage our community to learn more about dYdX.

Trading Fee Optimization Research

0xCLR and 0xCChan have shared an initial draft of their fee report, a research paper exploring methods of optimizing the exchange fees on dYdX using historical and comparative data. The draft is being revised with the goal of making a final version public in the next couple of weeks.

Trading Journal

Kagan and his team of developers are making great progress on the Trading Journal, an application enabling enhanced reporting tools and custom performance sharing to improve user experience and engage the community. We have already seen initial designs of the build, and the team is now hard at work on infrastructure.

Applications Data

Applications dropped a little in December with only 29 received, which can be expected with the holiday season.

Program Initiatives

AMAs

The Grants team hosted two AMAs with previous grantees to discuss their projects and highlight accomplishments. Our first AMA was joined by Elaine Hu and Chris Longden to discuss the dYdX Analytics Dashboard and the challenges they overcame to compile exchange data. The second AMA was hosted with Arr00 to cover dydx.vote and gasless voting mechanisms.

Commonwealth

To improve feedback gathering and community input on our projects, the grants team now has a dedicated section in the dYdX Commonwealth to share updates on both the program and ongoing grants. Look for more posts there going forward!

Website Updates

Community members shared feedback on improving transparency around the timing of ongoing grants. As a first step, we added a “Start Date” header to all projects in our Funded Grants section to help track timing and expected complete times of ongoing grants. 

Operational Updates

The grants program paid out the following expenses in December:

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Conclusion

Although our funding was small in December, we’re elated by the work done with existing grantees and look forward to kicking off 2023 with new initiatives!

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