Hi @Bob-Rossi I can help provide more context as I know it can be difficult to understand and track all the steps in this grant round, so hopefully this will provide more clarity on the grant round timing.
It was an 8 week contest that started in January and ended in March.
The grant round was operated through the JokeRace platform, where we all applied and voting happened. Here you can search ‘arbitrumdao’ in the search box and see that activity each week:
Each week, there were 4 winners that were to be paid a one-time payout of 2500 ARB. The JokeRace founder told us the payouts could have been made immediately to the winners each week right after their week’s round via the JokeRace platform, but that Arbitrum wanted to KYC check everyone. Arbitrum hired Thrive Protocol to manage the grant program marketing, distribution and KYC checks, and all winners were added to a group Telegram chat with their Program Manager. We were then told to submit KYC, and that we would be paid out after each week had submitted their KYC checks.
It was shortly after (and months after) that we realized that wasnt happening, and you can read more of the details in my summary post of that:
This is what Thrive Protocol’s team shared as a comment to my summary in their third point:
“We empathize with this. Five different parties were needed to facilitate a payment. It was the first time ever that something like this had been coordinated, and it was hard to get info from some of those parties. Still, we could have been better. The impact of the slowness, for us, was that we built a bunch of internal systems and capabilities to take in-house every part of the payment capability. As an example, Milestone 1b grantee recipients have generally experienced much faster, smoother payment times because of the learning.”
Milestone 1b is another ThankARB grant that Thrive Protocol ran and experienced much faster, smoother payout timings due to the learnings that came from our round.
From what we as grantees could glean, there were very long wait times from Arbitrum’s side in responding to the payout times and actually delivering the payouts (Thrive collected those payout dates for us which I added into the summary forum post). As they shared, there were 5 parties needed to facilitate the payment, and the major bottlenecks from what we can see were from Arbitrum’s side (but also because there were so many different parties involved).
We actually anchored the payout timing and valuations to 2 weeks after each weekly round, not all in February. We feel 2 weeks is an equitable range for payout timing, and didnt anchor it to an immediate payout timing as we want to give that cushion timing for KYC checks and currency valuation fluctuations to be fair. I have bolded those dates in the proposal for each grantee so its more clear for you all…thanks for bringing that up.
Please let me know if you have any further thoughts or questions.