Impermax Finance - OP Grant : Growth Experiments for Cycle 11

[GFXlabs]

Thank you for submitting this grant application! Throughout the application process, this forum thread will be one of the official means of communication. Please be sure to monitor it for updates over the course of the review period.

At this stage, applications are mainly being reviewed for completeness, and nothing at this stage should be construed as support or opposition by any members of the Grants Council.

@Pareto

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative?:

12 months as described above

We typically recommend that grant plans be no longer than six months in length, though that may not be a hard and fast rule.

@Pareto

10% for initial liquidity on OP pools.

We recommend clearly stating what happens to this portion of the grant at the conclusion of the grant plan. Is it returned to OP governance, or is it then the property of the grant applicant?

@Pareto

Please provide benchmark milestones for this project. These milestones should guide the Optimism community on the progress of your project throughout your work on the project. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

• Month 1 : 1-2 millions TVL - with the uses of 100k OP ±;
• Month 3 : 2-5 millions TVL - with the uses of 40k OP ±;
• Month 6 : 5+ millions TVL- with the uses of 50k OP ±;
• Month 12 : 10+ millions TVL- with the uses of 60k OP ±;

Given the market price of OP, these seem very aggressive from the standpoint of how much OP is being spent per dollar value of TVL. 100k OP for 2m TVL represents a 120% dollar-denominated, annual yield. We recommend providing clear justification for this type of yield, as well as a breakdown of what kind of yield you think is needed to attract new users. At the least, there should be some clarification why this grant would be better than OP governance just directly providing liquidity, which would then earn a profit and be assured of stickiness.

Note also that Impermax’s entire TVL according to DeFi Llama is just north of $5m across all chains. This suggests that to bring new users to Optimism, the grant plan should include how to target users beyond the existing user base of Impermax.

@Pareto

Please define critical milestones for this project. Critical milestones are meant to show good-faith efforts to accomplish the project. Non-completion of these milestones could lead to revocation of remaining grant rewards. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:

• 1000 users;
• TVL mentioned above;
• Onboarding of current and strategic project (dozens of partners/collaboration from our other chains experience) currently not exposed or underexposed to Optimism;
• Providing consistency and stable high APRs like we are currently doing on Arbitrum.

While benchmark milestones are simply a “soft” way for the community to judge the process of your grant plan, the critical milestones must be met in order to unlock each tranche of your grant.

We recommend more specificity, such as “Impermax will have 500 unique user wallets. Impermax will provide an update with documentation to verify this milestone has been reached no later than X weeks after receipt of OP tokens. In the event this milestone cannot be met at this date, a revised plan will be submitted to the Grants Council to either continue or wind down the grant plan.”

Typically, we also recommend clearly stating that team wallets will be excluded from both rewards and any key metrics being measured.

Further guidance on milestones can be found here: Milestone Assessment

Thank you, and GFX Labs or other Grants Council members will follow up here with any further questions throughout the process. Do not hesitate to ask questions here (tagging whichever Council Member a question is for, or @GrantsOps generally, will increase the speed of response).