I’d like to add my two cents as I came through the same for past couple of years.
I was a lead developer of Ethereum Classic blockchain since the fork in 2016. ETC was based purely on principles and was a community driven blockchain. It was heavily promoted by ETH as a scam fork, though we just wanted to have a blockchain without transaction reversal. Anyway, we didn’t have any money to continue development, no foundation, no premine, no dev tax, nothing to provide funding. Seems to be the same situation as Grin has now.
Still I managed to find some donations in 2016 and built a full time team to work on protocol for two years. It’s possible to find money, but very hard, and there’re many other problems with that.
There’re some caveats I’d like to share:
- don’t expect much from mining pools, they simply can’t provide significant funding; mining pools has just small share of reward and had to competed to each other for miners; miners just choose a most profitable pool
- don’t expect much from traders/investors, they believe you’re doing the same and because you have some insights (they think so) you’re making more than them
- financial/investments companies are interested in control, nothing more, regardless what they say; they are sharks, be careful, or they will take everything (as it happened to my projects)
- businesses and exchanges are not interested as well, they actually expect you will pay them or at least provide free support, because they already giving you a favor by trading your coin
- an average member of community can donate few dollars, just as a tip, so it’s not going to cover anything, even forum server
- it’s good to be anonymous, because people will be attacking you just non stop, you’ll be responsible for everything in their life, you’ll receive hundreds of treating letters; i.e. if someone bought to some 1000 GRIN GIVEAWAY scam, you’ll be responsible for that and they will demand you to compensate their loses
- people will think you’re already super rich (you’re printing money, after all, right?), so will ask you to give them money
- on a bear market it’s especially hard to raise money; any agreements made year ago are defaulted now, nobody in crypto space has free money anymore
That’s what came to my mind right now, just informing you about potential risks, but I’ll be happy to answer questions, hope it will help you