The community has allocated 5,000 COMP for funding grants. The program will run from March 12 to September 12. The grants program was created after a community discussion. which can be found on Compound's governance forum [here](https://www.comp.xyz/t/compound-grants-program).
Apart from acts of stewardship and generosity, there is little to no incentive for community members to propose technical updates to the protocol. With no carrot with which to motivate community members to propose changes, the protocol isn’t able to innovate as quickly as it should be innovating in a dynamic and competitive market. We should note that in a minority of cases community members did receive payment for work done (for example, see the work done by Gauntlet on theCOMP Contributor Grantsproposal), although here too, the incentive to contribute was not well-designed since it required Gauntlet to front audit and development costs before knowing the proposal to pay them would pass. To encourage community members to propose changes, the program will fully or partially pre-fund development and audit costs. In doing so, we hope to encourage more proposals, which will lead to more innovation and as a result, a far better Compound for all of us.
Making technical updates to the protocol is risky business: smart contracts are immutable and control billions of dollars in user funds. An error in a technical update can have serious consequences. Because of this, it is considered best practice is to have an auditor review the proposed update for soundness prior to its submission. Unfortunately, these audits areexpensive, particularly for individual contributors who need to pay for them out of pocket. We intend provide grants that pre-fund audit costs for soon-to-be proposals. We hope this will encourage more individual contributors to propose technical updates to the protocol.
A greater amount of liquidity makes Compound a better product for all users. To grow liquidity, Compound should be integrated with as many applications as possible. To that end, we aim to fund integrations that grow usage of Compound. In funding integrations, we will effectively be funding the business development function for the protocol.
It’s very likely that there exist uses for Compound that haven’t been explored yet. Hackathons are a fantastic way to explore design spaces, and the program intends to sponsor them.
It’s difficult to know ahead of time all of the grant applications that will come through. Just because an application does not fit neatly into one of the above buckets doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to the Compound ecosystem. So long as an application benefits Compound directly, we will consider it for a grant. Applications for miscellaneous improvements to Compound fall into this bucket. Because the scope of this bucket is broad, we consider it to be low priority compared to the narrowly scoped buckets above.
Fill out [this](https://compoundgrants.org/Apply-here-b5249135633645a0bf902d0517b377fc) application. The application will only be shared with members of the grants committee.
#### Community Grants
Post your application in the [grants category](https://www.comp.xyz/c/grants/10) of Compound's forum.
### Which application is right for me?
If you're applying for a rapid grant (<$125k), we recommend going through the [private application](https://compoundgrants.org/Apply-here-b5249135633645a0bf902d0517b377fc) process. It's a faster process, so you'll get an answer more quickly
If you're applying for a community grant ($125k+), we recommend going through the public application process by posting your application in the [grants category](https://www.comp.xyz/c/grants/10) of Compound's forum.
Still not sure? Email us at support@compoundgrants.org and we'll help you figure out the process that's right for you.
