Grant Proposal: The Cross Chain Coalition

[admin]

Grant ID: 2m3nh56

Summary:

The Cross Chain Coalition (CCC) is a collective of builders that have united together to educate developers on cross chain infrastructure. Through events & repos, the CCC aims to expand awareness and increase education for cross chain development. We have 3 pillars:

CCC IRL - Once a month, we host a hackathon or side event with our partners. We’ve seen >1,000 members present at our most recent irl events (Amsterdam, Austin)

The Cross Chain Weekly - The weekly email that makes you a smarter cross chain insider, including news and repos. >2,000 mostly technical subscribers & readers from every major protocol.

CC AMA’s - We dive deep on technical topics in an interview with a partner. from zk composability to bridge attestation, our audience likes to talk deep tech!

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If available, please enter a link to your project below:
https://volume.finance/cross-chain-coalition/

Are you applying as a team or individual?:
Team

What type of grant are you pursuing?:
Project (one-off)

Please select the category your project best fits into:
Education

Please select who you think will benefit from your project?:
Subgraph Developers, Indexers, Delegators

How much funding are you looking for? (USD):
20000

Have you received funding from somewhere else?:
No

What’s your vision for how your project will impact The Graph and/or web3?:
We’re building the Cross Chain Coalition to educate developers on available resources to use while building cross chain applications. We believe that the future is cross chain and that sufficient educational resources are lacking to help devs get there. We will be the premier cross chain community providing the most trusted resources and recommendations to our community with the highest regarded partners.

What can you share about any past work that is relevant to this grant?:
Our team comes from a diverse background of cross chain marketing, L1 growth hacking, & L2 business development. We are locked and loaded with an extremely talented team to become the largest coalition of partners educating web3 builders for the future of web3.

Can you share any information about current/past web3 experience?:
We are a team of devs and marketers that have been building cross chain applications for the last year - we’ve been through the pain! While foraging through cross chain development without any central source of resources, repos, credible integrations, or a community we realized the obstacles cross chain developers face. We are going to help cross chain devs because we are cross chain devs.

Why are you interested in contributing to The Graph and/or web3?:
The Graph continues to cement themselves as the integral indexing layer of Web3. With top dApps like Uniswap and Decentraland using The Graph, I’m eager to see the future of web3 integrate subgraphs into their development workflow.

Community Poll

Do you support this grant application?

• Yes
• No

Grant Committee Vote (Closes on Oct 18th)

Do you recommend this grant to the DAO?

• Yes
• No

[Colson]

Hello!

I have a few questions regarding this grant application:

1. How would funding this proposal benefit The Graph?

2. Can you prove the >1000 members present. e.g. attendance list, signup sheet, etc. What is meant with “members”? Which events were the hackathons/side events at?

3. Are the newsletters public? Can I see them? Or do I need to subscribe to it?

4. Could you provide a link to some, if not all, AMA’s? Who is your audience?

5. What is the relation between Volume Finance and CCC? The link you submitted is broken.

6. Could you provide a detailed breakdown of how this proposal would benefit Subgraph Developers, indexers & delegators.

7. Could you provide a detailed breakdown of how the $20000 will used? e.g. $1000 for x, $2000 for y, etc.

8. You answered the question about funding with “no”. However, the website of volume.finance shows multiple VCs. Did these companies fund CCC?

9. Could you provide more details on the applications you’ve build in the past?

I’m looking forward to your reply!

[jiimxjim.eth]

Hello CCC team, here are some questions:

Do you have more detail about the resources you might create for The Graph community?

1. What is the estimated timeline for each of the resources released?
2. How do you arrange this fund for each part?
3. How familiar are your team members with The Graph? Could you provide some pieces for this? (I’m especially curious about the part of the indexer)

I think you refactor the path of the website and replace the URL of the CCC page with Volume

@Colson has mentioned some questions I want to ask!

Looking forward to your response.

[alexm55]

Hey @Colson! Thank you for the questions!! Excited to be going through this process

1. Funding this proposal will give our community exposure to the Graph’s developer resources and onboarding. For certain this will increase exposure for The Graph across a broad base of developers, with the hope that some portion convert to actually build using the product.

2. Yes - feel free to check out the number of subscribers here…
   [image:DDE41097-91C8-473A-BA24-C38BD15C8936-52382-0000EBD9359C558C/Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 4.10.58 PM.png]

Additionally, checkout our twitter page for another peek at our community! Members are those participating in our community. We’ve held a side event and hackathon at EthAmsterdam, Consensus, and EthCC Paris. Take a quick look at our last side event here →

3. Yes - the newsletters are public! Check them out here →
   (https://crosschaindev.substack.com/)

4. Yes - the AMA’s are on Twitter Spaces. Feel free to check out this one between the Connext & Paloma founders to get an idea of how they work →
   https://twitter.com/ConnextNetwork/status/1545053743393083395?s=20&t=GsDcqc73RyVKs6YKLFY-8Q

5. Volume Finance is cross chain product lab that initially incubated the CCC. Try this link → Volume

6. As with any educational play, we sincerely hope that with the right messaging and resources we will be able to onboard new users to The Graph’s ecosystem. Many of our audience fit similar archetypes as subgraph developers, indexers, & delegators.

7. Yes - the $20,000 will be used to pay our community contributors, events, and marketing spend on promoting education around The Graph. Though not official, you can picture the breakdown something like:

   • $3,000 / month for 3 months per project contributor.
   • $1,500 in event contributions
   • $4,000 in marketing spend over 3 months

8. The CCC is a completely bootstrapped community that has never taken funding, as the majority of early stage growth has been organic. For ops, we survive off of generous contributions from partner protocols.

9. Yes - in the past, one co-founder worked growth at a major L1, one worked business development at an L2, and another did marketing for a cross chain vault product.

Hope that shines some more light on why we’re looking to get The Graph involved!

[alexm55]

Hi @jiimxjim.eth!!

Yes, typically we will work closely with the head of marketing / community / partnerships from our partners to carefully craft the messaging to our community. Resources we might create include but are not limited to:

• Academic deep dives
• Twitter threads
• Newsletter announcements
• Community Posts
• AMA conversations
• Github distributions

To answer the remainder of your questions:

1. The estimated timeline for each part varies on the level of technical difficulty and coordination. Typically we see timelines of around 2-3 weeks.
2. I’m not sure what you mean by this part?
3. Our team members are familiar but could definitely use some up-to-date briefings on all the new hot things going on over there!

I hope this helps. Please let me know if I can answer any more questions!

[jiimxjim.eth]

I found the 2nd question I asked was answered in Colson’s 7th question.
If there will have a more further detailed breakdown, please let us know.

The grants not only make the awareness of The Graph but also grow up community members.
If you had planned and prepared some topics, I hope to get more detail about them!
e.g., How does the indexer set up the pricing model, and how does a user assess it?

Thanks for the reply!

[alexm55]

yes - all about growing the exposure of The Graph and the community members

As for the topics - we have some ideas for our thread breakdowns but for the others, it all depends. Typically, the AMA topics are something that are decided with the guests. The news shared is something usually based on current events. The academic deep dives are usually reviewing a detailed repo or blog post pushed by a Graph community member!

[jiimxjim.eth]

Thanks for your reply.
It looks good to have a variety of resources, and it’s better that if you have confirm some topics in the schedule.
Because this funding amount is not small, we want to dig out specific cost and detailed breakdown as we can.
I tend to support this application, and hope you provide us more plans for each of resources.

[259tim]

After listening to the explanation on the grant application interviews I am thoroughly convinced that this proposal can be valuable for the Graph and our community, I would absolutely support the DAO following through on it and potentially arranging something. Great explanation and clearly professional!

[pooria]

@alexm55 Thanks for your great proposal. Would love to get connected with you and your team on how individual GraphAdvocates could help support this initiative with any tasks, bounties, or other forms of support to a) reduce time of getting each resource done and b) possibly the cost.

Personally would love to get involved and BeeHouse DAO we have contributors ready to support this initiative. Let’s chat on the discord (mention me) or on Twitter.

Few questions:

-What are the specific things/resources you would be creating for the Graph (please be specific both in type, length, format, and any other info)?

-What metrics are you tracking for the ROI/benefits to the Graph? How are you tracking them? (Please be specific both quantitatively and qualitatively relevant to the resources you wish to create e.g. an event with xyz features tracked with abc metrics over k time)

-For the budget breakdown:
—$3,000 for 3 months per project contributor. How do you define project contributors? Who are they? What are they responsible for?

–$1,500 in event contributions. What is this specifically dedicated towards? Rental, food…and for how long and how many events?

–$4,000 in marketing spend over 3 months. What does this mean? Please be as specific as possible. Is it for compensating contributors, software, paying influencers…?

[Mr.1776]

First off, thank you for applying for a community grant. This application seems like it would provide a lot of value. However, in my opinion $20k is just a bit too much for what is being offered and I haven’t seen a precise cost breakdown of how the funding would be spent in this thread (if it was provided in the committee presentation my apologies and I’d love to see it!). While I think the items listed below add value to the community, without further details or justificaiton I don’t see how it warrants $20,000 in funding. It also is non-committal as a deliverable by saying “we might create”

@alexm55

Resources we might create include but are not limited to:

• Academic deep dives
• Twitter threads
• Newsletter announcements
• Community Posts
• AMA conversations
• Github distributions

and

@alexm55

As for the topics - we have some ideas for our thread breakdowns but for the others, it all depends.

I think there is potential here, I’m just looking for a little bit more specific details on this application before voting yes. Again, if this was included in the presentation my apologies and I’d love to see those details. Thanks!

[pdiomede]

Thanks for submitting this interesting grant proposal.
I do agree with @Mr.1776 that the fund request is too high.
I would start with a smaller amount to build reputation and show the value you guys can create.

[Mr.1776]

The majority decision of the Grant Committee concludes to not recommend this proposal for DAO funding. Please recognize that this is not a statement on the proposal itself, but rather an aggregated reflection by committee members taking into account a number of factors, such as alignment to The Graph and web3 ecosystem, budget available to support grants and prioritization relative to other proposed grants.

Below you find brief feedback brought up within the committee to not recommend DAO funding that may help you to submit successful grant applications in the future:

Funding amount requested was too high for the contribution proposed.

Thank you for submitting this proposal and you are encouraged to stay engaged in the Graph community. You are also welcome to submit new grant applications in the future with proposals that may generate stronger support from the committee.

Sincerely,
Graph AdvoatesDAO