Announcing New Bloom Community Grants for 2021
Bloom is happy to announce that we'll be offering funds for research and development grants to the crypto community to collaborate on some exciting new initiatives to benefit the crypto ecosystem. With these grants we hope to help shed light on some poorly understood fundamentals of the crypto space, as well as to build some exciting new solutions for unsolved problems.
Research Grant: Tokenomics
Bloom will be accepting proposals for a grant of 5 ETH, with an opportunity for ongoing funding upon completion, for research on the economic behavior of ERC20 and other native blockchain tokens. The research should examine the economic interactions involved with different types of tokens, and how their supply, demand and price influence the behavior of smart contracts and off-chain mechanisms for different crypto projects, protocols and applications, and how various distribution models, such as token sales and airdrops, impact them. Examples of projects that may be relevant to this research include MakerDAO, Chainlink, Uniswap, Yearn, and the Graph. Grantees will be expected to produce a scientific research paper detailing their findings, as well as a summary to be published on the Bloom blog.
Build Grant: Unsecured Lending Vaults
Bloom will be accepting proposals for a grant of 10 ETH, with an opportunity for ongoing funding upon completion, for building a solution based on Bloom's specification for unsecured data lending vaults. The solution must involve using either Chainlink protocol's query methods, or direct on-chain transactions, to facilitate loading data on-chain to describe KYC status and interest rate for a borrower. This exciting project opens up the door to unsecured/undercollateralized lending to take place on-chain with participation from traditional banking institutions and other entities in the crypto space, allowing competition among different models of calculating risk for lending to emerge in the crypto space, and for the grantee to explore different models for decentralized governance of unsecured lending. Grantees will be expected to produce a working proof of concept, and if the grant is extended beyond the initial terms, grantees will have the opportunity to develop their solution into a full commercial application.
Unsecured lending vaults are Yearn-style vaults but instead of implementing yield farming strategies, they implement unsecured lending strategies based on the vault creator's proprietary risk pricing models. The community can provide liquidity to a lending vault to gain exposure to the lender's borrowers.
Token governance may be introduced to nominate & select lending strategies for the community to adopt. Stakers would receive rewards based on the returns from the adopted strategies. In addition, some strategies may wish to delegate lending terms like interest rates to liquidity providers, enabling the community to optimize the returns for a given cohort of borrowers.
Build Grant: Utility Experiments
Bloom will be accepting proposals for a grant of 5 ETH, with an opportunity for ongoing funding upon completion, for building a proof-of-concept solution for automatically providing BLT tokens to application users in exchange for providing Verifiable Credentials of their personal information via the Bloom App. Examples may include providing data to assist in building credit models, direct payment to users for personalized advertisement, providing data to assist in market research, surveys, or other similar use cases - in every case, through a mechanism similar to scanning a QR code and responding with Bloom verifiable credential data as well as an ETH address at which to receive payments. Grantees will be expected to produce a working proof of concept, and if the grant is extended beyond the initial terms, will have the opportunity to develop their solution into a full commercial application.
How to apply
Applications due by Friday, January 29, 2021
If you are interested in applying for any of the above grants, send us an application at grants@bloom.co. Please include information about other projects you have completed in the space, why you are a good candidate for the grant, and how you would approach the chosen topic, including a time estimate for completing the first submission. Once accepted, we will invite you to our Discord where we can kick off the project!
Joining the new community discord
Soon after the onboarding of our grant recipients to the Discord, we'll invite more community members in to discuss the projects as well as future research, and grant opportunities.
We look forward to receiving the community's proposals and announcing our grantees!
