I echo the motivation outlined by Coach in his post above. I also want to offer some further context and clarification to statements made in this thread so far. First, I want to point to Arbitrum’s recent airdrop as a relevant comparison for token grants from platforms to integrating projects. Arbitrum recognized the importance of DAOs and the communities they represent and thus airdropped tokens directly to these DAOs with the plan to distribute additional tokens to projects via grant proposals. Arbitrum’s primary motivation for airdropping tokens to DAOs was “the localization of community governance”, a goal I think the UMA DAO also shares. Polymarket’s liquidity mining program has been tremendously successful in distributing UMA to a “subcommunity” which has further strengthened the UMA oracle. A continuation of the liquidity mining program will continue to broaden the UMA community.
I mention this comparison to Arbitrum as an aside to the explicitly stated goal of “encourage[ing] protocol growth” for which the ~35M UMA development fund has been earmarked. The plan since 2020 has been to release tokens “as they are judged to be well spent to grow the protocol”. To this, I affirm Coach’s comments; granting a small piece of this ecosystem growth fund to a project as promising and established as Polymarket is $UMA well spent.
Finally, I want to directly respond to @mhari where she cites that there was reassurance made in the previously accepted proposal that it was “not [going to be] the first of repeated requests”. The brief summary of the referenced proposal summarized the request as “liquidity mining rewards on Polymarket for 12 weeks with consideration for a longer extension”. The door was always left open due to the anticipation of potential success. The skepticism that the previous proposals were met with has been quelled. At this point Polymarket has sustainable product-market-fit without artificial incentives in large part due to it’s new CLOB which was referenced as a key development goal under which Polymarket should be evaluated for future proposals. The additional UMA will be focused on super charging growth of Polymarket now that a sustainable foundation has been established. This growth-focused mindset is the exact stated goal of the UMA-ecosystem treasury. Polymarket was also extremely responsible in the management of the original grant, adjusting distribution based on development timelines, growth, market factors etc.
In summary, Polymarket has proven results to the UMA-DAO and deserves consideration for an additional, larger, UMA-ecosystem grant which will come at a pivotal inflection point in Polymarket’s growth trajectory. Ultimately, I am confident that this grant will be regarded as extremely symbiotic.