Hello All,
We wanted to give our report on the grants programme.
First, some feedback, we found the programme a little disjointed in a few ways:
- Our PoC/Programme Manager changed twice, and the purpose of the programme from the perspective of each PoC was very different.
- Receiving technical support for teams from the Polygon team was difficult. Even when the Polygon team asked to be connected with our grantees, message chats and calls were ignored/missed.
- Uncertainty about when the grants initiative would end and whether or not there would be follow-on support (for example, we were led to believe it would be expanded and this would be merely a pilot).
As a result, we incurred significantly more costs in running the programme than anticipated, had difficulty in planning ahead and have significant question marks over the long-term support for teams we are introducing into the Polygon ecosystem.
At the moment, it is likely these great teams below that we have brought into the Polygon ecosystem will not be able to receive the mentorship, technical and funding support to continue their journey within the Polygon ecosystem.
Nevertheless, we have funded some excellent teams. We (in the most part) chose to prioritise only teams that we knew had public track records and Encode track records. This allowed us to speak to their ability and trustworthiness. It is accepted wisdom that grant schemes can be a significant source of waste, often giving money to teams who go around from chain-to-chain bounty hunting.
The teams we chose to support are:
Ohmyyield from a hacker acquired from the Solana ecosystem (raised VC funding) - OhMyYield is a conversational DeFi yield finder that lets users discover optimal investment opportunities through natural language queries.
NexML from a hacker acquired from the Algorand ecosystem - NexML is a revolutionary platform enabling individuals and organizations to use, buy, and sell AI models and datasets in a transparent, secure, and decentralized manner.
Poly-mev-sync which aims to create an MEV-aware Gas Estimator, a tool that uses AI to analyzes mempool data, recent blocks and DeFi protocol transactions.
MetamaticAI is an AI-enhanced MetaMask wallet for Polygon that explains every transaction in plain English, flags risky behaviors, and protects users from scams before they sign.
TroveFI is a no-loss, AI-routed yield vault with optional to exchange boring drip-feed yield with big wins.
Market Melee is a physical card game that simulates cryptocurrency trading and financial literacy through strategic play
Web3GPT from a founder acquired from the Near ecosystem which helps with smart contract development using specialised agents
In addition, we allocated some money to bounties in our hackathons.
We have a small amount of POL to return back which will be liaised privately.
We will be sharing further updates directly from the teams shortly.