GRANT - A Circular Economy Token

Encouraging founders to spend their grants within the Near Ecosystem, GRANT tokens are only fully redeemable after they've been spent within the ecosystem. Can't be swapped or off-ramped, only spent.

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Inspiration

When we recently helped create NDC, an entity designed to deliver grants we realized that heavy spending from blockchain treasuries is usually coupled with price pressure on their coins and does not always result in the desired outcome: increased real usage of the blockchain and a circular economy.

What it does

GRANT is a token designed to stay within the ecosystem. Grant-receiving founders are encouraged to buy services from providers in the ecosystem who accept payment in tokens. Founders represent the demand side in the market, and the GRANT mechanism stimulates the creation of a supply side: more services offered which accept tokens as payment.

GRANT is a wrapped multitoken, where the underlying can be Near, or USDC, or any other fungible token with value. The Grantor will wrap their underlying and create GRANT, which is then sent to the Grantee. The Grantee can either unwrap it immediately at an 80% rate, or they can spend it with service providers, who can instead unwrap it at 100% redemption value.

Grantees are also discouraged from swapping, off-ramping and staking their GRANT tokens by way of a blacklist. The reason Grantors give grants is to help Grantees with buying the services they need to build. This is why other use cases such as swapping and off-ramping should be discouraged.

How we built it

  • GRANT is built on the new multitoken standard NEP-245. Each grantor can create their own version of the GRANT token, which is great for traceability and also allows us to funnel any non-redeemed funds back to the right Grantor.
  • We also built three different widgets on BOS, the Blockchain Operating System on Near

Challenges we ran into

  • We originally wanted to build a "memory" function, to be able to track where the token has been and thereby increase a "circulation counter". In the end we decided to not include this feature in v1.
  • If a Grantee unwraps the token at 80% then we need to know where to send the remaining 20%. Ideally it should go back to the Grantor who created it in the first place, but with fungible tokens there is no such memory. This is why we opted to use NEP-245 and create a new version of GRANT for each Grantor, allowing us to know to which treasury we should send any un-redeemed funds.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

Teamwork makes the dream work

What's next for GRANT - A Circular Economy Token

  • Collaborate with Grantors in the ecosystem, such as NF, NDC, DevHub, MetaPool etc and have them adopt GRANT, which could be used for part of all of their grants.
  • Collaborate with Near Horizon around the whitelisting of service providers
  • Add the accounts of all known swaps, DEX, CEX, off-ramps and staking protocols to the blacklist
  • Build a whistleblower bounty program for anyone who finds non-allowed use cases, such as swaps and DEXes

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