well it sounds like priority should be shifted to making the network more self-sustainable without the interference of grants. There’s a number of ways to expand the protocol to do this. Firstly, clients should implement onion support and have the first announced relays be locally-spawned Tor onions. For a great example of this in the field, look at Ricochet Refresh or Cwtch.im — it spawns a local hidden service to receive messages at. This would reduce requests to public relays, by allowing my followers to query relays running on my machine first, which generally stays online. Secondly, media should be served off of a DHT, Bittorrent or IPFS with a social pinning model. My followers should be making my most recent images and videos more highly available, up to a reasonable quota. Requests to things like blossom et al should be failover only, if nobody is in a DHT. Finally, DHT can also be used for relay discovery and pubsub. I should be able to announce my relays via DHT as well, and push notifications and my content as a side channel. These measures not only would make the network cheaper to run, but would also enhance decentralization and make it far more censorship resistant. Win-win for everybody.