Hi Moonbeam Community,
We haven’t formally met, but I wanted to take a few moments to introduce myself. My name is Sicco Naets and I’ve had a 25+ year career in technology - first as a full-stack developer and systems architect; later in various team lead, management and senior management roles (although I never lost my love for tech, devops and programming and always managed to get a bit of coding in here and there when the opportunity presented itself).
I got interested in crypto in 2020 - what really attracted me to the space was the concept of decentralized governance as an alternative to more traditional enterprise structures. I was fortunate to be able to join the Moonbeam foundation at the beginning of last year. I’ve been helping to administer the grant program for the past 6 months or so; and I’ve been serving on the committee as a Foundation member as well.
I helped the committee develop a standardized approach to due diligence where we try to look at the grant applications from all angles - technical, business sustainability & viability, team background, runway, marketing, community building, decentralization, security … I’d like to think that as a committee, we’re perhaps a bit more thorough in that research than most other crypto projects - several grant applicants over the past 6 months at some point have remarked that “ you really did your research”; which always makes me smile.
Keeping the focus on decentralization in mind; I’m happy to say that at this point, it’s really the non-foundation members that lead the charge ( I think they do an absolutely outstanding job; given the wide range of projects and different life-cycle stages we see) on the due diligence process.
I do believe the grant program and the work of the Grant Committee specifically is of vital importance to continue to grow the adoption of Moonbeam as an ecosystem; and to further diversify the use-cases; while keeping a strong focus on Connected Contracts. For that reason, I’ve started a discussion to extend the grant program for an additional six months; as well as renewing the overall program; albeit with some tweaks from what we learned over the past 6 months.