Grindery's Retroactive Funding Mechanism

When it comes to the gig economy and Web3, the former rules don’t apply. Traditional contracts are out, smart contracts are in. Monday morning, face-to-face meetings are passé, and 9-5 business operating hours are irrelevant in the age of globally distributed teams. Work is less tangible, and it’s up to the contributor/gig worker/freelancer to determine their own value, not be told what their time is worth. 

And frankly, we at Grindery, wouldn’t have it any other way. 

We’re building “middleware for Web3.” It’s similar to Zapier, but for Web3 and is a decentralized system that interacts with smart contracts as well as Web2 APIs. Grindery Nexus hasn’t gotten here on its own; we had the help of a small community of contributors. Some sourced from Inbound Labs, some brought in from other Web2 and Web3 places; everyone with the same vision: moving payments to the blockchain. 

We’ve welcomed everyone from programmers, to content creators, to members of the Web3 community with specific pain points that we can solve with our technology. Along the way, we’ve been happy to offer financial incentives to those who’ve helped us grow. 

With everything else changing, why shouldn’t the way we reward valuable contributors change as well? 

What is Retroactive Funding?

The goal of retroactive funding has two criteria. On one hand, it allows people to find space where they feel they can contribute best. The work is appreciated, measured in complexity, and rewarded accordingly. 

On the other hand, as Vitalik Buterin puts it, it's easier to agree on what was useful than what will be useful. Much like the startup ecosystem, people create a startup, others invest in them, and get rewarded if they end up correct. Even in a place of creating public goods, and developing technologies that will benefit the Web3 ecosystem, the same mechanism applies. If your contribution is successful, you’re compensated. 

For this funding mechanism, it’s not about giving people money in expectation for future work that the money could help facilitate, but reward them for the work already done, and to change the incentives for anyone working on the projects in the future. 

Retroactive Funding in Practical Terms

This mechanism can look like several things, depending on their focus and priorities:

Gnosis’ Safe Guardians - These are members of the Safe community who use their powers to contribute positively to their ecosystem. They empower their solution and their users, align with the vision of driving adoption of smart contract accounts, and continuously prove their commitment. As a result, they are given SAFE tokens.

Optimism DAO - In the case of this particular DAO, if your contribution, tool, dApp, or whatever you’ve created offers a positive benefit and provides value to Ethereum and the Optimism ecosystem, then you are rewarded with OP tokens.

StakeborgDAO - Contributors function as the heart of the DAO community, and the work they provide is the engine. They appreciate the contributor’s work and commitment, evaluate the contributions and complexity, and then translate that complexity into token rewards, to support their members. 

Grindery’s Retroactive Funding Mechanism

As for Grindery, we are still a relatively early stage project with a few resources, and no token release yet, but we do have funds for the right contributors. We believe everyone should work as much as they want, when they want and where they want. We want contributors to be able to start working as quickly as possible without going through many job interviews or evaluations. We believe the best way to evaluate someone is by working with them. 

That means, we’re ok if you just start working and we reward you on delivery.

Here are the steps:

1. Connect with us in Telegram, Discord or Upwork to find out what the current priorities are. Please make sure you know what you're getting into and bring any required qualifications with you. Otherwise it will be very unproductive for you and us.

2. Once you know what the priorities are, simply start working. Put in an hour or two, ask us technical questions, get your hands dirty. Then estimate how long the work will take you. Run it by us together with your desired hourly rate. We love it if you charge high rates because it allows us to expect high quality output, high degree of self management and a quick turn around.  If you feel you are still very novice and learning then rather charge a lower rate and give yourself some flexibility. In the end we will always compare your proposal with our past experience in developing previous components.

3. When proposals are within the general parameters of acceptance we usually give you a thumbs up and you can start anytime. While you work, ask for help and give us status updates. Great communication is at the core of every great team and every successful project. If you run into trouble, let us know. If you need more time simply explain to us why. We are all building software and understand the reality of it.

4. We encourage you to take on new ideas and initiatives, as long as you've sought approval before starting.
   
   

5. Once you are done, deliver your work for review and report the hours you spent on it. Don't lump your payment request, however. Break it down while keeping it simple and to the point. Each accomplishment, with a set of hours and rate. Ensure that there is a specific task/product delivered. To deliver the code, create a new public GitHub repository and share a link to it via Telegram. Your work will be reviewed by three developers of our core team. They will review it and conduct quality control, we will also have your code peer reviewed by other developers. If your delivery works and meets basic quality standards we will pay you simply the hours and the rate you asked for. If we find the code quality to be too poor we will let you know and allow you to improve. If you took more time than estimated we will take your arguments into consideration

6. Once your delivery has been approved you get paid within 5 working days. If you have applied for the job through UpWork or a different freelancing platform, you will get paid via that platform. Alternatively, you can also get paid in crypto (USDC-ERC20).

 

It’s natural that in any Web3 project, the scope might not always be clear. Especially in a project like Grindery, but if you know what you’re doing, offer value, and demonstrate your commitment to the process, then there will always be work, payments and more work.

Look forward to working with you on Web3 integrations. If you’d like to know more about Grindery Nexus, feel free to contact us on Telegram.