Funding Smaller Network Engineering Initiatives

This roadmap item was discussed during the latest Water Cooler. The overlap Onchain Treasury Allocation Improvements should be recognised, but potentially works alongside it as a short-term solution.

Objectives

Create a delegated, standing funding pool for small-to-medium engineering initiatives validated through the community roadmap process.

The aim is to reduce the friction for individual contributors and small teams to access funding for smaller, experimental engineering initiatives, aligning funding disbursement with the cadence of the community proposal and review process, as well as maintaining transparency and accountability without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Problem

The current SPE model works well for larger programs, but creates significant friction for smaller, community-driven engineering contributions:

• Writing a full SPE proposal requires a major time investment before any work begins

• The onchain vote cycle adds weeks / months of delay for work that could otherwise start quickly

• Community contributors are unlikely to run a full SPE process for a $2k–$20k scoped piece of work

• The overhead-to-value ratio is poor below a certain funding threshold

The result: genuinely useful, well-supported work doesn't happen — not because the community doesn't want it, but because there's no efficient path to fund it.

Potential Solution

A Network Engineering SPE — a standing, delegated pool of capital that finances a rolling portfolio of smaller engineering initiatives sourced from the Livepeer community roadmap process. An initial funding period could be ~3 months with around $80-100k budget.

Initiatives range from $2,000 to $20,000 and must originate from roadmap.livepeer.org. Each initiative must include a clear impact hypothesis — a falsifiable statement of what should change in the network and why it matters — and a verifiable deliverable agreed upfront before work begins.

• What gets funded: Protocol improvements, gateway and orchestrator tooling, observability, developer SDKs, integrations, and technical documentation — scoped for 1–3 contributors to complete in roughly 1–4 weeks.

• How payment works: Scope and pricing are agreed before work starts; Tranche 1 is disbursed on verified technical completion, and Tranche 2 after a review period confirms the initiative's impact hypothesis has been borne out.

• Governance: A 5-member SPE Council (including Orchestrators, Foundation, Livepeer Inc) reviews applications and signs off on payments, with all decisions published publicly with written rationale.

The above is just a potential solution and it is all open for discussion.

Outside of Scope

• Small proposals that have not gone through the community roadmap validation process.

• Work that requires a dedicated team with ongoing work.

• Large, sustained programs ($20k–$150k+) — these should have a standalone SPE.

• Foundation strategic priorities — funded directly by the Foundation.

Questions To Answer

1. Does the problem resonate? Are there contributors with ideas they haven't pursued because the standalone SPE path felt too heavy?

2. What's the right budget size? What 3-monthly pool would be meaningful without being wasteful?

3. What governance works best? Should the community vote on individual disbursements, or is Foundation discretion within the SPE mandate sufficient?

4. How does this fit in with broader discussions on onchain treasury? Is it worth an experiment in the short run?

Note: this has been elaborated and proposed by Rich O’Grady based on prior Water Cooler discussions, but does not represent a Foundation priority.