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For several months, Cardano’s Project Catalyst has been funding proposals which have been voted upon by ADA holders.
Stake Pool Operator [EASY1], who we already interviewed for the Cardano SPO Column, will help us understand what Project Catalyst is and how it is financing projects in the Cardano ecosystem.
What is Project Catalyst? Interview with Cardano SPO [EASY1]
Project Catalyst creates, funds and delivers the future of Cardano
Hi there, welcome back. Can you explain what Project Catalyst is and how the voting is done?
Project Catalyst is an open innovation platform, developed on IdeaScale’s software and used by the Cardano community to solve problems related to blockchain technology and its adoption.
Every six weeks a new fund from Cardano’s treasury is allocated, anyone can propose a project they think might improve Cardano’s utility and/or adoption, and ADA holders vote to determine which projects get funded. Currently millions of dollars are being granted to winning proposals every six weeks, so it can be a great way for projects to get started.
Each of the Funds has different Challenges. Can you give an overview of what this means?
During each 6 week funding period, in addition to voting on current proposals to fund, the community also determines what the funding challenge categories will be for the next funding period and the amount of treasury funds that will be allotted to each challenge category. Simply put, these challenge categories are areas of development the community wants to prioritize. The categories (or “challenges”) help focus proposers’ energy on areas the community cares about, and they help voters identify the strongest proposals addressing a specific issue.
In Fund 6, one of your proposals was the Stakeboard project, please tell us more about this.
The beginning of Fund 6 seems like ages ago now, even though it was only several weeks ago. At that time, only our co-founder Sebastiaan and I were working on Stakeboard, and it was a struggle to meet our development goals and engage in the Catalyst process at the same time. I think we put a strong proposal together, but Catalyst is a competitive process. You not only have to create and refine a proposal. You also have to promote it to potential voters, and the whole thing takes a lot of strategy that’s hard to excel at when you’re also developing a project full time. That said, we weren’t awarded funding for our Fund 6 proposal, and have had to self-fund Stakeboard’s development till now.
Thankfully though, we learned a lot from our Fund 6 experience, and we have a bigger team now and were able to create three strong proposals for Fund 7. I think each of them is among the strongest in its challenge category. And we also have more resources to promote them and get our growing community of supporters to vote. So I’m hopeful about our chances of being awarded funding this time around.
What kind of proposals are you putting forward for Fund 7?
For Fund 7 we’re addressing 3 challenge categories that seem tailor-made to fit the things we’re working on with Stakeboard. To summarize, these categories are about disarming cyber disinformation attacks, promoting the growth of a globally distributed community of Stake Pool Operators (i.e. Cardano network validators), and developing new business opportunities for Stake Pool Operators (SPOs).
So much of what we’re doing is promoting trust in Cardano’s staking ecosystem by disarming scammers and imposters. And likewise, one of our core missions is supporting the sustainable growth of Cardano’s SPO community, largely by creating new business opportunities for SPOs in a staking-centered economy currently emerging on Cardano. This new staking centered economy we’re helping to build is still in its infancy. And there’s so much potential for the Stakeboard platform to bring value in addressing all three of these challenges Cardano stakeholders are concerned about. So I really hope we’ve done a good job of articulating our proposed solutions this time. I believe we have, but soon enough ADA holders will get to decide what gets built.
Thanks for your time, any final words?
Anyone who wants to check out our Catalyst proposals can do so at stakeboard.net under the Proposals section. And we welcome any feedback or questions either on Ideascale or by sending us a message via our website.