A heated debate has sprouted within the Solana community as developers question the project’s process of offering grants. If left unaddressed by Solana’s top officials, the matter may create a rift within the ecosystem.
How It All Started
In July 2022, Maximilian Schneider, the co-founder of the Solana-based decentralized exchange Mango Markets, published a governance proposal addressing Solana’s network congestion issue.
Most projects built on the Solana mainnet help to ensure the project’s smooth running. However, Mango Markets users complained about the blockchain network’s lagging condition, like several other Solana-based protocols. Schneider noted in the proposal that his company’s developers play a primary role in this regard:
“We give up scarce resources and potentially contribute major improvements to Solana which doesn’t necessarily translate into a guaranteed success for Mango,” he wrote.
As a recovery plan, Schneider proposed that the Solana Foundation, a non-profit firm developing the Solana ecosystem, approve a grant of 1,000,000 SOL to “honor the contributions Mango developers will make” to improve the Solana network performance and onboard more hands full-time. He outlined that the grant would be split into 10 batches and be released over five years only through the continued approval of the Foundation.
Solana Community Disagrees
While Mango users who commented on the proposal post supported the idea, broader Solana community members did not endorse the idea. Many stressed that the amount of SOL in question was too high. According to SOL’s current price, one million SOL coins will be $14 million.
Others cited Mango as being incompetent for the job as it once suffered a security breach where a hacker stole over $100 million from the protocol. The community members stated that if Mango should get a million SOL, other Solana-based projects like Jump Crypto should receive as much as 100 million SOL.
Suspecting the request from Mango Markets to be an insider transaction, a community member challenged the Solana Foundation as not being straightforward with its grants program, which is designed to fund growing business models.
Still, Solana Foundation’s Head of Strategy, Austin Federa, echoed the proposal from Mango is yet to be approved by Solana Foundation executives. He added that Solana’s grant program works well, and anyone interested should follow due process.
