Project Catalyst: Cardano's Grant Machine, Get Funded!

Transcript

all right fantastic we have our last session of the morning that is about uh to start now maybe we can kind of kick off with a quick kind of show of hands are there any entrepreneurs in the room any entrepreneurs looking for funding in the room all right so you are in the right place uh Alex welcome to the stage from cardano and uh he's going to talk about how to get funding through Catalyst thanks for us hello everybody and welcome to this very quick master class on how to get funded on Carano I see a couple of familiar faces here uh but I'll introduce myself nonetheless I'm Alex Maza I'm the sustainability lead at the Carano foundation and in my job I look at two things blockchain for good so using blockchain for

sustainability and then I think about things related to the sustainability of blockchain and one of these things is governance and one of these subcategories is the governance of funds as you know um Carano is a third gener ation blockchain and the cardo Foundation is the Swiss entity that tries to push forward the uh public infrastructure of cardano across a number of different Industries now we've been here at CBC for a huge number of years I think almost since the beginning um but one thing that you may not know about us is that we've changed our strategy a little bit and the way that we communicate where we have three strategic Focus

areas that you can see on screen operational resilience to make make sure that the public blockchain infrastructure that we support uh can be resilient can have the up time that is required by critical use cases we also focus on education this is what we're doing right now but also through an academy product and a number of different initiatives with different stakeholders including policy makers and regulators and then we also look at adoption uh this is something that we all know about this is all something that we'd love to see for blockchain technology ubiquitous adoption and that's what we're working hard at um in terms of lowering the cost of entry and making sure that from an open source perspective we have the things that are

there um to move forward now I want to speak to you about project Catalyst and what I want to make super clear is that the cardano foundation is not project Catalyst project catalyst is a grant funding instrument that is run by input output and uses treasury funding to fund innovation and adoption on cardano now the latest Catalyst round which is closing I think what closed an hour ago had 50 million Ada so take at current market prices you can pretty much just half that for quick maths before I jump into Catalyst I want to share maybe an interesting stat what you see is that

the cardo treasury has 1.5 billion Ada in it today the way that this treasury is filled up is that the more transaction fee transactions exist a 20% tax is taken off that transaction and goes into the treasury now who here knows about decentralized treasuries on blockchain just a quick okay a couple people if you go on defi llama and you search the treasury tab you'll see that in the top 10 there is currently $20 billion worth of assets cardano's 700 million current market prices just in the top 10 there are hundreds of blockchains that have the

centralized Treasury and so this is a massive massive opportunity for people within cardo and in the broader blockchain space now with Catalyst what is catalyst it's an instrument that is run by input output it's a community of 60,000 people that are since 2021 have made proposals reviewed these proposals and then vote on them since 2021 we have close to $80 million of funding of grant funding dispersed to the ecosystem and over 1,600 projects that were funded half of them being completed and Catalyst typically runs on a trimestral basis so every three months or four

months you will have a catalst fund we've had fund 10 or fund 11 and fund 12 this year and fund 13 should be coming at a little bit later uh this year and essentially the way that this is being done right now and this has gone through a lot of iterations where the community used to decide what these categories would be but now they've kind of stabilized so this is why we want to share a little bit more about Catalyst right now is that you can expect something similar in the next round that happens in October and maybe prepare for it now the top is pretty self-explanatory concept super super early early MVP something that goes into the test net something that gets tested

about and tries to break product is something that you're then trying to productize and bring to markets we also invest quite heavily on uh developer focused uh grants as you can see here and then when it speaks about the ecosystem these are more education marketing events related types of categories but I want to zoom in on the last category which is brand new uh for this uh fund 12 and will'll hopefully carry over into fund uh 13 now this targets larger proposals that are a little bit older and more mature than the product category and here we're looking at large corporate entities that would know test out the utility of

blockchain in their systems we're also looking at marketing Partnerships and this is not just uh stick a logo on a car it could be that's up to you to propose but really kind of broadening the scope of of what marketing actually means uh to web three entities and of course accelerators to take young projects and bring them to markets uh from an incubation an accelerator Readiness an investor Readiness level so that they can take their products to markets and drive adoption now just a few names that have popped up I wish I could have added a few more uh this morning uh some of which uh include uh Tech Stars one of the leading uh pre accelerated and Seed investors in the

world but here what you'll see is really a mix of everything you have Barcelona football club's web three entity uh that's bringing uh a certain aspect of uh Community uh management and tokenization in their systems or asking the cardo Community to fund this you have um you have Brave that wants to run its partnership programs which usually runs business to Foundation here they want to partner with the cardano ecosystem and that's what they're doing through project Catalyst and then of course we have things like Salesforce uh we have Salto systems include multi multiservices that are looking about uh digital identity and access systems and these are for some you know

multi-billion doll uh companies and of course a million dollars for uh blockchain R&D is peanuts to their innov Innovation budgets but what this kind of funding allows internal Champions to do is to accelerate Cate the company's decision- making in terms of experimenting with this technology and we've actually seen this uh in this fund where companies had ideas about using blockchain technology they had internal alignment but perhaps the immediate budget was not there maybe it was going after AI projects that are all the hype right now and so we believe that using um decentralized funding and availing these

kind of Grand fund instruments can actually accelerate uh the way that some of these companies might test out uh blockchain technology and of course I'm really happy to see you know International organizations like the United Nations development program and the International Rescue committee putting forward some proposals uh because that's a little bit of also of what I do with uh blockchain for good now Ledger actually did it first they didn't start 2024 they figured this out in 2021 um Ledger live who here has used Ledger live

before cool so usually what would happen with Ledger live is that you would be the foundation or the labs or some kind of you know founding entity and you would contract with Ledger in order to uh have that integration and then maintain it what they've done is they've managed uh to bring together well our community wanted this this is the most important thing it's not that the CF or anybody else decided we want Ledger live no our community like you were users of a ledger product they were on Ledger live they were frustrated that they could not use cardano on Ledger live and so they got together in 2021 at the very

earliest days of project Catalyst and um they then started working with Ledger and Ledger was kind enough to actually try this stuff out now how do you do this right how do you navigate these things and so what you the way we've seen this done is that you work with ecosystem partners that can educate drisk and uh simplify your approach as a an organization that's trying to get into web 3 by guiding you through the technology questions the ecosystem questions the financials the how do you custody Ada which is a major topic for many you know

early stage uh let's say industrial uh organizations that that try to to to to take on uh web 3 uh Technologies and so what we've seen is not only do these companies uh these ecosystem Partners accompany partners that may come in through the CF or through other organizations but they also bring them in themselves and so what you have here is a vibrant economy of Business Development firms that are essentially ecosystem Partners we have storm with Marco over here we have n maker over there and I'd encourage you to go and speak with them for you to understand

exactly how they help organizations navigate the space because it can seem very complex it can seem very uh new but at the end of the it's pretty simple if you uh if you take your time to uh listen to some of these experts now you cannot put a proposal in today unfortunately or you'd have to go back in time an hour what you can do is participate as a voter in this first instance see how you enjoy project Catalyst see how you enjoy supporting certain kinds of projects or not that's up for you to decide but I just want to do a quick test does anybody

here have cardano or Ada in a wallet okay so everybody that lifted their hands if you have a self- custodial wallet you can very easily vote on any of these and more and you can see what it's like to be a part of the cardano community to decide how you allocate the cardano community's funds and so what I'd encourage you to do is just scan this uh QR code over here read through the launch guide so you understand project Catalyst a little bit more there's a specific link about wallet registration and if you are able to do

this before the 18th of June so you've got two weeks you've got some time you'll be able to vote with your uh relative Ada power right so the if you have Ada it's a minimum of 500 for security reasons that if you have a minimum of 500 data you can participate in this round of uh project Catalyst as a voter I think that's for me that was the first step that I took into uh cardano in well yeah beginning of 2021 where I registered as a voter and I saw the power of decentralized funding uh generally and so I'll just leave this up for a quick second um but otherwise I'd encourage you to visit our booth uh to find out

more about what the cardano foundation does uh where our strategic Focus lies what kinds of products and tools we're focusing on developing and where we'd like to go next so with that I'd like to thank you and open the floor for any questions uh that you may have and questions yes what's your interesting games games blockchain games so I'm just going to go back back to Big Esports right uh as the CF so for us one of the really important things is um adoption right and adoption is measured by

activity on chain activity in terms of volume in terms of uh diversity so what kind of transactions exist on chain are they purely you know uh Crypt to crypto transactions are they purely or do they have an nft component or a native asset or a smart contract um my understanding is that uh web three games are quite aligned to these kinds of things um but as the foundation we take a let's say more neutral view to the let's say General thematic areas that that we'll typically see that being said uh we do look at questions around uh authenticity uh supply chain and um

sustainability um but what could you expand on your question with games weeling different products one of them isun okay they might be it was a little bit slow on the click I really trying to punch it through so there is a big appetite uh there is a big appetite for gaming in certain parts of the cardano community uh we have seen some stakeholders uh actually that have

spun off from a company called DC spark uh who have founded Pima Studios and what they've managed to create is uh a um a bridge between arbitrum and cardano uh to some extent uh and they focus exclusively on gaming um so there is an appetite there is a community and essentially the power of cardano maybe as opposed to other um other blockchains is that we're we're really we look at decentralization in a number of different ways and in this case this is uh decision- making about what direction do we take uh with our grant funding and so so it's what you

see typically are interest groups that are forming and for example for gaming or memes um that are forming and putting together proposals for some of these uh these categories and trying to advocate for why their particular um industry or use case might be most beneficial to the blockchain ecosystem itself because at the end of the day a blockchain is only as sustain able as it can remain secure and many blockchains require Economic Security which means utility usage of the public infrastructure and so if games are the right way and you believe that's the thing and that can that can

reach that goal then you just have to convince a few people and I want to kind of also maybe take a step back this is one very specific case of uh blockchain governance so it's just treasury governance of project catalst right 50 50 million Ada funds now cardano is embarking in what is called voler so that is the last era of its development road map for cardano 1.0 and voler is all about governance this is about uh governance of the blockchain's parameters it's about governance of the blockchain's uh upgrades um and of its treasury in and

amongst a number of different you know governance actions and so there this is where I don't have a laser but I'll point this is where this comes into question right so here you're not only trying to convince people at a 50 million Ada fund that gaming is the way to make colano grow very soon you'll be advocating for how this is spent and where that's spent and where the gaming is actually uh the right thing so these are the opportunities that exist here and in other blockchain ecosystems that have uh decentralized treasuries where essentially if you're a token holder if you're a validator and whatever special kind of um role you might play in their governance uh setup you're able to

influence that um oh so that's that's a very good question so this is what happens let's say we're in um we don't have a date yet but it should be somewhere towards the late latter part of the year so let's say we just come back from Summer it's September everybody's ready to get back to work uh you're waiting for fun 13 you're starting a proposal um and so you'll set this proposal up once the application's open for fun 13 you will make a submission to that propos uh with that

proposal during that period of time there's a review uh there there's a time for review so essentially you can get Fe feedback from the community about your proposal and then you can kind of make some edits to make it more aligned to maybe some of the needs that exist and based on the feedback it typically happens over a two we period then that's locked in and then you have a horde of community reviewers so these are people that sign up that are passionate about cardano and its future and they will review um a huge amount of proposals usually there's over like a thousand of fund um um so that's the way that reviewing scales when it comes to the cardano

partners and real world Integrations uh category there it's done in a little bit of a different fashion because for that category we only have sub 50 um proposals and there there's a Review Committee uh that looks at these uh judges them on the criteria but then all of these um all of these uh proposals to different categories they all get voted on equally at the same time so essentially what you get out of this uh category over here is a short list and what you get out of these other categories over there is a rating uh that has been and and some comments from Community reviewers and you can really see what people have said about this

kind of stuff so um that's essentially the process and once uh the the votes close there's about a couple of days before uh they released the CU they audit the uh results all this all this stuff and then um they start onboarding people uh through uh grantee agreements um and Milestone based funding May that could be your strategy um but that that is so that is and that is a really good comment right so um State based governance systems do tend towards plutocracy right um and so what you're saying here is like if I'm maybe

outside of the ecosystem it might be difficult for me to to come in right um and the so this is an observation that the Caro Community has actually had and they funded a proposal to look at alternative voting schemes uh to be implemented in Project Catalyst um so Merit based uh experience based Etc I think yesterday they they did a presentation midpoint of their research um so hopefully this is something that they can Implement uh pretty soon to make things easier for externals uh from that ecosystem even if they're in web 3 um to not have to you know for example rely on large incumbents uh for votes it's a pleasure um any other

questions comments if not I will not hold you back for lunch and uh yeah thank you for your attention and have a great day take care fantastic I think it's time to fund our stomachs uh we have an hour and a half break uh before we kick back with some masterclasses thank you so much