0x Governance Update #2

This update:

• highlights noteworthy actions and outcomes related to governance over the past six months;
• provides insights as to the impact and implications; and
• looks forward to how governance and grants may continue to iterate and evolve.

Actions and Outcomes

Since our previous update, several noteworthy milestones were either influenced by, directly set in motion by, or the result of community stewardship.

In February, ZRX tokenholders overwhelmingly approved ZEIP-93, which added NFT order support to 0x v4. Some immediate benefits included:

• Users can now trade ERC-721 and ERC-1155 assets on all the networks 0x supports
• NFT orders are up to 54% cheaper than other alternatives
• Property-based orders enable traders to create floor bids for any asset
• Instant royalties for creators

More strategically and with an eye towards the long term, adding best-in-class support for NFT orders is a critical success factor in positioning 0x Protocol as the most relevant, reliable, and credibly neutral infrastructure for value exchange across all asset categories.

In April, to generate momentum from the protocol upgrade, we developed a grant initiative focused on NFT projects on Polygon. Our hypothesis was that this would have outsized impact in comparison to a more generalized approach to grant making. In large part, this was because Polygon is aggressively growing its ecosystem via Polygon Studios, which is investing heavily in NFT, gaming, and metaverse projects. Because 0x is not widely known in the developer space as an NFT exchange protocol, we theorized that a focused effort could help to create broader awareness and also influence early tech stack decision making, which is critical to establishing a center of gravity for network effects to take hold.

Additionally, adoption on Polygon could also contribute to future adoption on other EVM chains. To best enable this outcome, we established the following Polygon grant application criteria:

1. Be ‘Powered by 0x’ (preference given to 0x v4)
2. Use the NFT Swap SDK
3. Support Polygon network
4. Use the feeRecipient or AffiliateID parameter in orders
5. Plan to launch within 60 days of grant award

In May, we applied for a Phase 0 Governance Fund allocation of 300k $OP from the Optimism Collective, which was approved via an Optimism community vote in June. The $OP tokens are now available for a new grant campaign to support builders on Optimism, similar to our initiative described above that supports builders on Polygon. We are also looking into a similar initiative for Celo.

Trader.xyz is continuing to work on the open-source NFT Swap SDK v2 and the debut of their full-featured marketplace, along with an upgrade of their P2P swap application. A growing number of projects are using the SDK to build their own products, including Coinbase’s social NFT marketplace and Prysm’s collective NFT ownership platform. We continue to seek out and engage with these types of novel, emerging projects to support their efforts in various ways and are excited to see the strategy of funding developer tooling starting to bear fruit.

💸 Grants Rollup

Total grants to date: 16 / $1.3M

Top application categories

1. Polygon
2. Orderbook (tie)
3. NFT (tie)
4. Non-DeFi business models and use cases

$ value of grants

• High: $1m
• Low: $5k
• Average: $82k
• Median: $14k

🔦 Grant Spotlight

Acilia is aiming to make the NFT Swap SDK library that was built by trader.xyz accessible to any programming language. While 0x has some really great libraries for Javascript, non-Javascript developers have to build their own custom integrations via ABI-encoding, which can be very tricky and error-prone.

To solve this problem, Acilia is developing an API that leverages Open Source GraphQL to empower any backend or frontend developer (with their programming language of choice) to create 0x orders for ERC20, ERC721, and ERC1155 tokens, greatly expanding the reach and composability of 0x Protocol. The open-source API will be deployable by anyone as a Docker image, and in the future will be available as a service, similar to 0x API, growing the pool of developers building on the protocol, particularly web2 developers.

Some use cases include:

1. Low throughput order creation for applications that don't involve a high volume of order creation, where the maker can afford to spend up to one second creating an order and where simplicity and lack of dependencies are valued.
2. Informational purposes, where developers can use the API to determine whether 0x Protocol is a good fit for their use case. The API will enable them to discover and evaluate the protocol end-to-end by using the GraphQL Explorer UI to explore the API schema, and construct and run queries via a GraphQL interface.

💡 Insights

When projects choose which protocols to build on, in addition to having confidence in battle-tested code and contracts, we can logically assume that observing and assessing how governance is conducted and performs over time is a contributing factor in their decision-making.

Distributed governance experimentation is necessary, and there is no one-size-fits-most model yet for protocols to coalesce around. But for enterprise infrastructure protocols, we tend to believe that “commercial” applications will gravitate towards the predictability, reliability, and trust that will naturally derive from informed, thoughtful, and sober stewardship - including what the right level of governance should be.

Said another way, as mental models for Web3 business models emerge and mature, we believe that enterprise-grade infrastructure protocols will play a critical role in providing reliable composability and reducing “supply chain” risk for the applications that build on them.

Grants serve an important function for ecosystem development, as they are streamlined mechanisms for manifesting ideas, reducing risk, and supporting builders experimenting with product-market fit, along with expanding the developer community via better tooling.

Relationships formed via grants can create powerful and long-lasting collaborations with benefits that vastly exceed the outlays. Grants can also help to surface features and capabilities that have the potential to be integrated directly into the protocol, further increasing usability and value.

🎬 Wrapping Up and Looking Forward

Building on the experimentation, achievements, and learnings from 0xEVE, we've established the 0x Grants program as a sustaining ecosystem partner with a focused mandate. Alongside grants, we continue to actively evaluate governance constructs in the context of emerging Web3 business models.

To get involved, ZRX token holders can participate in governance at:

• Governance and Research Forum
• Discord
• ZRX Portal