May '23

Highlights

• 13 grants approved with $48,900 in funding.
• First grant funded for dYdX testnet services.
• 175 new applications received.
• Transparency updates and a sponsored webinar.

Funding Rounds

In May, the DGP issued thirteen new grants for a total of $48,900 in funding. We have now approved a total of 116 grants with over $3.2M in funding throughout the program.

With the public testnet quickly approaching, we are focusing our efforts towards projects that will improve the testnet environment for the community. Grants in this category include public services, tooling, and resources to improve the experience of developers and participants. We approved our first grant with All That Node testnet services, including public RPCs, archive nodes, and faucets, to launch as soon as the testnet is live. We’re actively exploring other opportunities for the testnet, including a grant to run the Indexer node.

Meanwhile, the community cauldron had a great first month with nine of the thirteen new grants being allocated to active community members. As a reminder, the community cauldron is a special grants initiative to allocate smaller funding amounts to active community members participating in dYdX. In the last month, we funded community run events, treasury reports shared on the forum, and sponsored community members to attend a DeFi event. Reach out to us if you’re an active community member interested in participating more proactively!

Funded Grants

Below, we highlight a few of the latest updates from our ongoing grants.

LP Rewards Formula Optimization

0xCChan’s research to update the LP Rewards formula, a calculation used to determine the amount of DYDX rewards distributed to liquidity providers on dYdX, hit its first milestone with a draft shared internally. 0xCChan is now getting ready to publish the research for public review and proposal consideration.

Vote Extensions Development

Skip and Bez have been hard at work to include VoteExtensions in the latest release of the CosmosSDK, a feature that will improve oracle pricing mechanisms on dYdX v4. Thanks to their efforts, we expect VoteExtensions to be ready in time for the public testnet launch.

MEV Research

Chorus One has completed the final draft of their MEV research, exploring areas of possible manipulation and extraction from a validator perspective on dYdX v4. They will be publishing their research in the upcoming month.

Application Data

Application skyrocketed in May with nearly triple the amount received compared to previous months. In total, 175 new applications were received in May. We’re thrilled to see a growing interest to contribute towards the growth of dYdX on its journey to v4.

Program Updates

Payment Dashboard

The team released a new dashboard that tracks and categorizes all payments issued from the Grants multi-sig. Our goal is to promote transparency and openness of all operations and payments, allowing the community to keep track of our activity. The new table can be found at the bottom of our Dashboard.

Trading Webinar

The grants team sponsored an educational trading webinar hosted by Shaun McDonogh. The webinar covered guidelines and best practices for implementing trading bots on dYdX. We recommend anyone interested in this topic to watch the webinar here.

Expenses

The program paid out the following expenses in May: