The following is a handbook to guide LEGO Council Members as to the ins and outs of contributing to LEGO. It is constantly evolving and any feedback can be shared with @lykovalex.

LEGO refers to the Lido Ecosystem Grants Organization (LEGO). Our mission is to provide resources to contributors who help to improve Lido.

By rewarding talent early with developer incentives, bounties, and infrastructure support, LEGO acts as a catalyst for growth and helps to maintain Lido as a leading and most useful liquid staking protocol in the whole space.

LEGO is designed to be simple, not bureaucratic, with a focus on bringing actual value to the greater ecosystem. Our priority is on speed of execution and ease over accountability for smaller grants. Do what works as long as it works, don't let procedure block you, it should actually help you instead.

In the following handbook we cover a number of relevant topics designed to streamline the LEGO grants process. Specific topics include:

In case of questions, please reach out to @lykovalex on Telegram.

If you have thoughts on an initiative that could be relevant for LEGO, or if you are aware of a project/developer working on something which could contribute value to Lido’s liquid staking ecosystem, don’t hesitate to contact them and beg to work for the good of Lido. If it's a sandgrain you're free to make the deal yourself/with a single LEGO Council buddy. If it's more, then invite the person to LEGO Lobby and connect them with LEGO Council.

If you don't think you're the best person to be the contact for a grantee (e.g. you lack qualification or capacity), raise the issue in the LEGO insiders tg group and someone will help you.

It's fine to do retroactive grants ('thank you' grants) for stuff you find cool and useful for Lido that wasn't agreed upon beforehand. See something fitting while browsing twitter - feel free to offer a thank you sand grain on the spot.

Please note that if the funding is classified as a sand grain, you are free to complete the funding on your own. When complete, please add it to the following spreadsheet: LEGO Transactions.

If grantees have been identified, set up a Telegram chat with them and invite the relevant LEGO members. This is where you can coordinate the nitty-gritty details associated with the grant. In addition to this, invite the grant members to the LEGO Lobby where they can introduce themselves and present what they are working on.

One way of encouraging a specific development is to send out an RFP. RFPs represent the communication of a specific activity/project which we’re interested in seeing get built.

To create an RFP:

LEGO grants can be quite expensive to make (LDO transfers take a lot of gas, and trading to preferred denim is even more expensive). Feel free to use a bit of your personal allocation to cover these expenses.

LEGO grants are classified according to 4 categories:

This category combines all contributions that are nice to have, yet not detrimental, whilst also not being too costly and whose quality can be easily evaluated by a single person. An improvement is a sand grain if:

An example of a sand grain is a Dune Analytics dashboard that compares day-over-day deposits of various liquid staking protocols.

→ Sand grains can be handled by a single LEGO committee member out of their personal budget as they see fit.

Pebbles are non-critical, small things that are beneficial for Lido but not so trivial to call a sand grain. An improvement is a pebble if:

An example of a pebble is a StakingRewards-like smart contract that would allow incentivizing stETH deposits into Maker.

→ Pebbles require a second LEGO committee member to agree to the grant approval and participate in the evaluation of the results.

Boulders are big, important things that are imperative to be carried out by experts and thoroughly evaluated by core contributors. An improvement is a boulder if:

An example of a boulder is an implementation of withdrawal protocol for stETH.

→ Boulders require majority approval of the LEGO Council.

Mountains are critical improvements to Lido that have a significant impact on its growth, security, operations, etc. An improvement is a mountain if:

An example of a mountain is the liquid staking protocol for Polkadot.

→ Mountains should be applied for using a regular governance process.

Once funding for a specific project has been completed, please add it to the following spreadsheet: LEGO Transactions. Here we track all LEGO expenses.

To track your deals (pebble, boulder, mountain), please use the following spreadsheet: LEGO Deals Database.

Additionally, you can use the LEGO calendar to track all important dates (launch date, estimated completion date, next check-up time, etc).

To escalate an application to the LEGO Council, you have 3 options:

The LEGO insiders telegram channel is available to discuss all ideas and concerns at all times, so don’t hesitate to publish ideas there.

In case of a Mountain proposal (one requiring DAO approval), please do as follows:

Ask the development team to publish their proposal to research.lido.fi as a Proposal. Once complete, share the proposal with the LEGO Lobby chat.

Once published, raise the idea in the LEGO Lobby channel for feedback. Here, @kethfinex will assist you in pushing the proposal from idea to discussion to voting to get final DAO feedback.

A thank you grant

@vshvsh noticed pintail's great post on validator economics on twitter. Reached out to pintail to see if they want a thank you grant; sent 300 LDO as a thank you and filled in LEGO tx line. Later pintail did a full-fledged grant for us - an update on how validator economics work under Altair upgrade.

UNIv3 incentivization

Reached out to David; fixed a cost of $10,000 in LDO by the rate of the day the grant was given, to a total of 2,400 ldo at start and 4,600 LDO on delivery. When it was delivered, we paid for an audit by Quantstamp from LEGO funds as well. Never went live as there was no one to own the product/business side of it.