This is a proposal to make significant changes to the Community Grants Program

Over the past 2.5 years, the Moonbeam Community Grants Program has played a crucial role in driving ecosystem growth. The community-driven committee model has led to strong project selection and a high milestone completion rate when compared to industry standards, demonstrating that thorough diligence in reviewing grant applications results in quality outcomes.

However, as the current committee’s term comes to an end, it's clear that certain aspects of the program need to evolve. While the intentions behind a larger, fully elected committee were strong and well intended, the practical execution has revealed challenges in efficiency, integration with the broader Foundation processes; and post-grant support.

As a result, we are proposing several key structural changes to improve efficiency, enhance milestone tracking, and provide better post-grant support. These updates are designed to address challenges that have emerged over previous seasons, ensuring that grant-funded projects receive the guidance and ecosystem support they need to succeed.

Summary of Key Changes:

Smaller, More Focused Committee – The committee will be reduced from 9 members to 5 to improve efficiency and engagement. Instead of holding an election, three community members will be selected based on past contributions to ensure experienced and highly engaged participants. This change will be put to a community vote before being finalized.
Extended Term Length – Committee terms will be extended from 6 months to 1 year, allowing members to oversee grants through their full lifecycle, from approval to milestone completion.
Dedicated DevRel Support for Milestone Reviews – A DevRel representative will now join all grant calls (advisory role, no voting power) to assess technical feasibility, guide milestone structuring, and conduct initial milestone reviews.
New Account Manager Role – A Foundation-hired Account Manager will act as the single point of contact for teams, helping bridge grants, marketing, and community programs while also handling administrative workflows.
Increased Compensation – To reflect the workload and expertise required, community committee members’ compensation will increase to 3,000 USDC per month.

These changes are aimed at making the grant process more effective, reducing bottlenecks, and ensuring that projects are better supported from application to completion. The following sections outline the specific challenges that led to these changes and how we are addressing them.

1. Improving Milestone Review & Feedback Loops

Current Challenges:

🔸 The committee season is too short for the committee to see results - In the previous 5 seasons, the committee was always installed for a period of 6 months. However, practically speaking; once the grant gets approved, the agreement needs to get papered, the team KYC’d, development and deployment need to happen; and then marketing to commence. This can take anywhere from 2 to 9 months and as a result, when the application is fully up and running, the committee that approved it is no longer in place. This essentially means that the committee doesn’t get sufficient feedback on how approved grants perform in the real world.

🔸 Disconnect between grant approval and milestone review – The committee approves milestones but currently receives no feedback when milestones are completed. This means committee members have no opportunity to reflect on how well-designed their milestones were and leads to a lack of iteration and improvement in future grant agreements.

🔸 Inconsistency in how teams report milestones - Up to now, we’ve not given teams clear guidelines on how they should report milestones. That means that frequently it happens over Telegram; and teams are inconsistent in what supporting information they provide.

🔸 DevRel’s late involvement causes delays – Further compounding this, technical milestones are reviewed by the DevRel team, but since they have no prior interaction with teams, they must first learn what the project is all about and a lot of context is often missing at this stage. This results in:

Unnecessary back-and-forth with teams, slowing milestone approvals.
Disconnects between the intent of the committee in designing the milestone and the verification of those milestones by DevRel.
Delays in payment processing, which can affect project momentum.

How We Are Fixing It:

We are planning to do a level of automation and streamlining in how teams can report milestone completion; as the current process of reporting via Telegram is too chaotic and often results in further delays. A standardized reporting form will get created; with behind-the-scenes automation to DevRel, our grant tracking system and the committee
A DevRel representative will now participate in grant review calls, advising the committee on the technical feasibility of proposed milestones. This representative is in an advisory role only and does not have voting power.
DevRel will provide recommendations for structuring technical milestones, ensuring they are achievable and well-defined.
When milestones are completed, DevRel will conduct an initial review before briefing the committee on whether the team delivered successfully.
The committee will then make the final determination as to whether the milestones were achieved and met with the expectations that were set when the grant was awarded.
This closes the feedback loop so the milestones for future grant applicants can be determined based on the experience of how previous recipients performed.
The term for the committee will be extended from 6 months to 1 year

2. Strengthening the Link Between Grants & Marketing

Current Challenges:

🔹 Marketing lacks context when engaging with teams – Currently, teams reach out to marketing when they need co-marketing support. However, since marketing was not involved in the initial grant review, they often lack critical context about the project. This results in:

Difficulty in prioritizing requests – Teams are supported on a first-come, first-served basis, rather than based on ecosystem impact.
Misalignment in messaging – Marketing campaigns have at times contained incorrect information due to lack of familiarity with the project’s progress and objectives.

🔹 Lack of connection with community, moderator and ambassador programs - Currently, grant-funded projects are not consistently integrated into Moonbeam’s broader community ecosystem. This leads to several issues:

Community members often learn about projects too late – Moderators and ambassadors are sometimes unaware of new projects deploying to Moonbeam, making it difficult to provide informed responses to community questions.
Missed opportunities for early engagement – Grant-funded projects often struggle to build traction within the Moonbeam ecosystem because they aren’t connected to existing community programs, moderators, or ambassadors early enough.
Reduced impact – Some projects fail to leverage the full support of Moonbeam’s community, simply because they were never properly introduced to the people and programs that could amplify their impact.

How We Are Fixing It:

A new Account Manager working for the Foundation will act as the single point of contact for teams before, during, and after their grant is completed.
The Account Manager will participate in all grant discovery and committee calls so they can learn about the project as early as possible. However, this person does not have voting power on the committee.
The Account Manager will interface directly with marketing, ensuring they are briefed early on high-priority projects and their strategic goals.
The Account Manager will also be the voice of the project towards the community - their role will be to consult on any community programs and keep moderators and ambassadors informed of new grant recipients deploying to Moonbeam
This will help avoid miscommunications and ensure that marketing and community are engaged at the right time to maximize impact.

3. Budget Considerations & Why We Aren’t Expanding the Committee

Current Challenges:

🔹 Committee members have signaled that compensation is too low – The current hourly wage for committee members is not sufficient when compared with the workload.

🔹 Expanding the committee’s scope would require too many hours – Addressing the BD, Marketing and Community challenges highlighted earlier would require a significant increase in workload beyond what committee members are already contributing and beyond what they can realistically deliver beyond their other responsibilities.

🔹 We need to prioritize funding for grants, not process costs – The combination of a higher hourly rate with expanded hours would result in a very high budget cost for the committee. We would rather see these funds go to more grant applicants than overall grant process.

How we are fixing it:

Community committee members will now receive 3,000 USDC per month, reflecting the effort required.
The committee will be smaller and more focused, so that we can achieve greater efficiency without excessive budget increases.
The new Account Manager will take over administrative tasks, allowing the committee to focus on high-impact grant reviews.

4. Enhancing Committee Efficiency While Maintaining Oversight

Current Challenges:

🔸 Larger committees are less efficient – A 9-member committee has made scheduling and decision-making difficult. As a result, ensuring quorum for votes has been a challenge and we’ve had fairly high abstention rates.

🔸 Uneven committee contributions – Elections have resulted in members with varied levels of experience and engagement. While some have been highly active, others have participated inconsistently, making decisions less predictable.

🔸 Lack of integration with Foundation teams – The committee has operated largely in isolation, leading to gaps in post-grant support for teams.

How we are fixing it:

The committee size will be reduced from 9 to 5 members to improve efficiency and engagement.

3 community members will be directly appointed by the Foundation. These three individuals were consistently voted in by the community and they have proven that they are highly qualified and engaged in research, diligence calls and the ensuing committee discussions:

Andrew Lifey: Andrew brings deep DeFi expertise to the committee and has played a key role in ensuring rigorous evaluation standards. His insistence on demos and proven traction has helped maintain high accountability within the committee, ensuring that projects demonstrate real impact before receiving funding.
Raphael Yahlomi: Raphael has been highly engaged throughout the grant evaluation process, actively researching projects, participating in applicant calls, and contributing meaningfully to committee discussions. He is not afraid to take strong, well-reasoned positions, often presenting insightful arguments that have influenced the committee’s final decisions.
Jim Farley: Jim has been a pillar of consistency and accountability across all five seasons. His thorough background research, proactive leadership in calls, and sharp questioning of applicants have strengthened the committee’s decision-making. He has also been a reliable participant in discussions and voting, helping maintain the integrity of the grant approval process.
2 Foundation members (Prasanna Ketheeswaran and Sicco Naets) will continue to participate, ensuring alignment with ecosystem goals; these are:
- Prasanna Ketheeswaran: the Foundations’ Head of Finance
- Sicco Naets: the Foundations’ Head of Ecosystem
A DevRel representative will join all calls (advisory role, no voting power) to provide technical insights and milestone guidance.
The Account Manager will handle administrative work and ensure marketing, community and BD remain connected.

Summary of key changes:

Change	Season 5	Season 6
Committee Size	9 members (6 community, 3 foundation)	5 members ( 3 community,2 foundation)
Term Length	6 months	12 months
Community Selection	Elected by open vote	Appointed based on past contributions
DevRel Involvement	Reviews technical deliverables	Joins calls, advises on milestones, reviews technical deliverables, reports back to committee
Milestone reporting	Ad-hoc via Telegram	Form with automation and validation
Marketing Coordination	Ad-hoc process	Account Manager ensures marketing is looped in early and will produce a formal marketing brief
Grant Support & Administration	No single point of contact, handled by different people at the foundation	Account Manager serves as the primary contact for teams
Compensation	1,500 USDC / month	3,000 USDC / month