SantoNode Catalyst Fund 10 Allocated Proposal Reviews
THIS IS A LIVE DOCUMENT AND WILL NOT BE FINALIZED UNTIL AUGUST 3, 2023
1,045,454 ADA 23 SPO Relay Node Security — Vulnerability Assessment of Relay Node Security
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/100303
Impact (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): As a SPO for 2.5 years this proposal appears to have very little impact. Cardano Ouroboros already has the capability to handle security and attacks on the Relay Nodes. My Santo stake pool has 4 relays located in Singapore, Europe and USA. My servers are locked down with firewall software and are single purpose machines meaning no other applications like web servers are running on them. The relays in Cardano network serve as a mote to protect each block producer server which has pool pledge in them and they get called upon to mint a block. In 2.5 years, my pool has had zero security issues and has maintained 99%+ uptime. Besides that, if a pool relay is offline for whatever reason, the block producer can still communicate with another connected relay (which is why I have four) and still mint blocks. Additional redundancy in Cardano’s security design is that it does NOT need all the pools to be operational to still process transactions because even if the block producer server of a pool goes offline, it just means another pool will get selected as a slot leader and be able to mint the block to process the transaction, so Cardano does not ever skip a beat.
Feasibility (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): I could not find any information on the experience of this team at their website Solutions | Stratous Security they do not give resumes, profiles or anything. This is a Red Flag to me. The proposal also does not give information on the team, only saying that they have lots of experience, but this cannot be validated. I am also a 25+ year veteran in IT server systems administration and can recognize the value in many of the procedures mentioned in the proposal and do not disagree that it is likely many of SPO Relays are vulnerable. But this is why Ouroboros implements the slot leader health check before giving the SPO’s block producer an opportunity to connect and mint a block. If the SPO relay servers are offline, it will be skipped. So again, Cardano already has security built into the base protocol layer to protect it from any kind of attack on the relay servers.
Value (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): In conclusion, this proposals value to Cardano does not match the 1 Million ADA (approx $300,000+ USD) that it is asking for. It is my opinion that the proposal is not needed and provides very little value to Cardano. The reason for this conclusion is that the Security of Cardano has already been proven over the past five years and if this proposal were funded it would be redundant and a waste of treasury funds. I think if the proposal was to be re-written as more an educational resource focus for teaching SPOs to better understand security related issues for their relay servers, I would have been able to write a more favorable review. But the way it is currently presented, I cannot support this proposal. The ask of 1 Million ADA is too high taking 25% of the fund category and blocking too many other good proposals in this category.
550,000 ADA 17 Ecosystem Building & Large-scale Atala Tech Deployment Blueprint
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/102821
Impact (1–5): 4
Review (150 chars): This proposal can have a strong impact on the Cardano ecosystem and its growth. I am a strong proponent of real business supply chain solutions, and this project is attempting to bring the Tea Supply chain onto the Cardano blockchain. Blockchains can dramatically improve supply chains by making transactions more transparent, fair and immutable, leveling the playing field for all suppliers, distributors and buyers. The approach of “boots on the ground” in Sri Lanka to engage the local businesses is a very good strategy. I have been able to listen to Daniel in several Twitter spaces from this team and feel very confident that they can make progress in Sri Lanka and the Tea Industry. They are also proposing to document their journey and provide a template for other teams to onboard other supply chains throughout the world. Details of the Tea Industry and Sri Lanks can be found here. Tea Exporters Association Sri Lanka (TEA) (teasrilanka.org)
Feasibility (1–5): 4
Review (150 chars): After careful review of the ‘teams’ experience and resumes on Linkedin, this proposal has a high degree of feasibility. Daniel’s experience in project management and having worked at IOG give this team solid experience in blockchain and all things Cardano. Sam’s background in economics, Cardano Catalyst and consulting with Oliver Wyman adds to this team’s ability to understand and implement the plan outlined in this proposal. Darrell’s background in SSI rounds out this teams feasibility of implementing Atala Prism in Sri Lanka. The only reason I gave a score of 4 and not a 5 is because the team is spread out between USA, Canada and Australia and they have to fly into Sri Lanka making logistics very complex. But with new technologies like Zoom it is still possible and not un-common. The plan in the proposal is well written and broken down into four milestones to measure progress. I look forward to tracking the project of this proposal.
Value (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): The value to Cardano for this proposal is very high and I give it a score of 5 of 5. The reason for this score is because it has the potential of onboarding a global supply chain onto to the Cardano blockchain. The ask amount of 550,000 ADA is commensurate of the task at hand for the first year. With the goal of getting boots on the ground and begin building relationships with key players in the Tea Industry in Sri Lanka. This project has the potential to blaze a trail for other projects on implementing SSID and Atala Prism for other supply chains across the world. The project team is experienced with deep subject matter expertise in Project Management, SSID and the Cardano blockchain. In summary, I believe this proposal is well written and is a good use of the Cardano Treasury to foster innovation in the Cardano ecosystem. I look forward to following the team’s journey on this one.
447,493 ADA 13 Cardano NFT Licenses
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/102368
Impact (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): Wow, I dont even know what to say on this one. $125,000 USD for legal advice? I will give all the Cardano NFT projects a copy of my NFT License language for FREE! I am not joking. Here it is right here License — Ada Hackers I guess I should put it my Github. Maybe I will do that. I do realize that I am an experienced business executive who has worked with lawyers on business contracts and licensing agreements my whole career. I have a strong legal and contracts background, so I was able to find a license agreement that and I modified the language myself to suite my needs. We even got a positive review from CNFT Magazine about our NFT license Agreement! In my experience, even in the USA you should be able to find a lawyer to to help with a license agreement for under $1,000 USD.
Feasibility (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): This legal team is from a law firm located in Bolivia. https://wvlegal.com.bo/ I could not find the links of the lawyers provided in the proposal at this website. My experience with law firms of all types is that Associates come and go sometimes as interns without pay in order get legal experience. It concerns me that these lawyers are not on the website even though the links provided in the proposal appear to work. But when I go to the official associates linked page they are not listed. Either way, even if they are employed with the law firm providing a license agreement for $125,000 is pretty crazy. This proposal should have been flagged and archived. Is it feasible that this team could provide a standardized license agreement for Cardano NFTs? Probably not. I don’t think license agreements can be standardized at all. Every content owner and creator will have unique requirements to meet their own needs.
Value (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): This proposal does not provide any value to the Cardano ecosystem. I was able to provide my own NFT License agreement for Ada Hackers at zero cost. https://adahackers.com/license Because the value of approximately $125,000 USD does not match my perceived value, I cannot give this proposal a positive review. I also do not think Cardano Catalyst is an appropriate place to be funding any legal expenses at all. Catalyst is an Innovation Funding program for engineering, software and blockchain research and development of new ideas to row Cardano. Projects that require legal guidance should be required to find other ways to pay for those legal expenses. I don’t think it is an appropriate use of the Cardano treasury. It is my opinion that there is no value in having a framework for NFT licensing agreements. Maybe an alternative approach to provide legal services to individuals building on Cardano could be provided like 400 ADA per hour for consultation or something.
352,860 ADA 30 MLabs — Enhancing and Evolving the Plutus Simple Model (PSM) Test Library
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106705
Impact (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): This is a hard one. MLabs has submitted 29 proposals in this round of Catalyst. I have interacted with many developers at MLabs and have seen great work coming from this contract development team. However, it is also very expensive to contract development with MLabs. So my small engineering team just launched our first Cardano dApp https://tekmirio.xyz and we did not use any Haskell or Plutus at all. We did not use the PLM for testing. We did our own testing on PreProd Testnet with real users in the community. There are many new Javascript type programming languages coming to Cardano like Aiken, Plu-Ts, Helios, Lucid, Koios that enable Web3 applications to easily interact with the Cardano blockchain. I personally think this trend is going to continue. So the question is — what is the impact of this proposal on Cardano? I fear it will get less and less use over time, but I could be wrong. So, for this reason, I give this proposal a score of 3 for Impact on this proposal.
Feasibility (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): After reviewing their Github and the Teams experience and track record, I have no doubt this team can deliver an update to the PLM. After all, this was the team that built it in the first place. Reference here mlabs-haskell/plutus-simple-model: Unit testing with resource estimation for Plutus (github.com) There are ten contributors with 97% code written in Haskell with lots of commits in July 2022 and again in Feb 2023. Not much activity since Feb 2023. As an experienced software engineer myself, I am a big supporter of Unit Testing so this tool speaks volumes to me as an engineer. I just have questions around whether the future of Cardano programming is still in Haskell and Plutus. It is a moving target for sure, but I do trust the MLabs team understand their own inhouse needs. So for this reason, I give this a score of 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): The approximate value of this proposal is $116,000 USD out of about $1 Million for this category or about 10% of the category. This is very hard decision to make. If it was more like 5% of the category, it would have been easier to give a higher score. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 3 on Value to Cardano. As far as the value for Plutus and Haskell programmers needing a Test Tool, I am confident that this unit test tool is quite valuable. Quoting from their Github; Plutus simple model Unit test library for Plutus with estimation of resource usage. Library defines simple mock model of Blockchain to unit test plutus contracts and estimate usage of resources. What are the benefits for this framework comparing to other test frameworks for Plutus? It has minimal dependency set. It depends only on plutus and cardano-ledger. Works for both Plutus V1 and Plutus V2. Good for unit testing of on-chain code.
333,446 ADA 11 Babel Fees and Sponsored Transactions: NOW!
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103962
Impact (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): Wow, another hard one. I have some exposure to this young team of programmers. They are thinking “out of the box” with their new web based GameChanger wallet/IDE/application. This is both a development platform for Javascript programmers and an application that interacts with the Cardano blockchain. It does not work like all the other wallets on Cardano. It is still in Beta on PreProd Testnet and it is missing some of the usual features that Cardano users have come to expect. It is missing the standard “dApp” connector concept so you can’t connect to other Cardano dApps. I have concerns about security because they are taking a unique approach and not following the crowd. As far as doing babel fee with this very early development platform, I would like to see the platform first get caught up with the capabilities of other Cardano wallets and be able to access the rich number of dApps like MinSwap (Defi) and JpgStore (NFTs) on cardano. I have played with the wallet on PreProd and until I can do the things I do on a daily basis using the current methods, it is hard for me to support the platform. But… Catalyst is an Innovation Fund and this is certainly a team that is innovating. For this reason I give the proposal a score of 3 for Impact.
Feasibility (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): This team has already demonstrated that they can develop complex web applications on the Cardano blockchain. They have thorough understanding of the Cardano blockchain and all its details. I have reviewed the two programmers resumes and while they do have about 5–10 years of experience with mostly very small organizations (5–10 employees) in Argentina and Brazil, they have not yet had a chance to learn how to work with very large teams to scale a very large platform with thousands of users. This does not mean they can’t deliver on their design goals in this proposal. My concerns revolve around infrastructure needed to support the platform: like customer service, help desk support, hardware node and database servers to support decentralization, training, documentation, uptime, reliability, testing, QA/QC, regression testing, security auditing, accounting and financial administration, promotions and marketing. I also have concerns about how the team will create long term sales and profits from the platform to create long term sustainability for the platform. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 3 out 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 4
Review (150 chars): The ask of approximately 333,000 ADA for is appropriate for the tasks outlined. The category budget for proposal is over 8 Million ADA, so this is not a massive amount of the budget. I think the innovation value for this proposal is very interesting to see where the ideas can be taken. I would caution the team to go slow, make sure all the edge cases are flushed out on Testnet and to try and get more integrations with DEXs and NFT marketplaces. I happen to know that all Javascript based code can have serious bugs and they require thorough testing to find all the issues. Perhaps use some of this funding to participate in or host your own Hackathons with bounties to find issues that may have been missed. For this reason I give this proposal a score of 4 out of 5 for Value it can bring to Cardano.
250,000 ADA 14 Servitization-Blockchain Accelerator: Revolutionizing Business Models
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/100893
Impact (1–5): 4
Review (150 chars): I had to ask chatGPT what does Servitization mean? The answer was something that I thought all businesses have to provide in order to be successful — provide additional services to augment their products. This is not a new concept. Maybe in France? I am not sure. I have started three successful businesses in my career in the USA and we always had to provide services around our products? Did I miss something along the way? So, this proposal aims to teach basic business skills? Ok I am down with that. But maybe we just call it that shall we? Business Education Services. Ok with that said, the impact of this proposal can have on Cardano is actually very good. I think if you keep all the scientific jargon out of your messaging, it can be really successful and its very much needed in Cardano. And please do not be offended, I was CEO, CTO and VP of R&D for 17 years and we had to convert patented ideas into successful products and services. My suggestion would be to “embed” the authors concepts into the teaching methodology, and then dumb it down so that start up programmers, entrepreneurs and dreamers can get educated on the value of providing services around their products and software code. A business accelerator that teaches the value of services is a great idea. I love that! I would drop the fancy word “servitization” and just teach the principles. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 4 out of 5 for Impact.
Feasibility (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): After careful review of the two proposers linkedin resumes (it was in French, so I had to use Google Translate) the Doctor is clearly a professor at a university with an academic background, but likely has never brought a product to market. The other proposer is Sales Engineer and probably has at least seen how products and services are brought to market. My concern is that I see very little discussion around pricing, financial forecasting and a business model that will create a sustainable business for the long term. How will the Accelerator make money? How much will it charge other businesses? What is the connection to blockchain? Why is blockchain technology required to implement or educate businesses to add services around their products? Why blockchain? This is a very big question for me regarding this proposal. For this reason, I give a score of 3 of 5 for Feasibility.
Value (1–5): 2
Review (150 chars): Having businesses and Cardano projects focus on adding services around their products is not a novel idea in my opinion. I think if they are not doing this will not succeed. Maybe I am missing the scientific benefits of the proposers, but I did look for them. Things like real customer engagement that saw real increase in sales or customer loyalty. Customer testimonials that say things like “I tried it, and it works” — I did look on their websites and in the proposal. I think most savvy business minded people would add services to their product to increase satisfaction and add more revenue. There is a chance that all the scientific research went over my head (but I have and MBA and BSME) so I don't think so. I think it is all in the marketing messaging. All that said for Cardano as a Global Financial Operating system, decentralized and permissionless — this proposal does not add much value to the ecosystem. For that reason, I give a score of 2 of 5.
239,200 ADA 9 Incentivized Onboarding & Identity in Africa — Leveraging Atala PRISM
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103779
Impact (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): Ok this is an easy one. Primarily because Darlington has been very accessible on Twitter, in Spaces and active in Catalyst Zoom weekly Townhalls. He has good communication skills (tolerance skills is a better choice of word) and is a good web front-end and backend developer which is a rare combination. This proposal is to continue building on a Fund 9 proposal of teaching students in Africa how to use the Cardano blockchain and adding the Atala Prism digital ID steps to the learning process. Cardano has chosen Africa as geographical location with the “lowest hanging fruit” - meaning the country is a great target market for a variety of reasons. Primarily because of growth, but also because of not having to battle with entrenched existing and competing technologies already in place like is the case in other more developed countries. I can easily give this proposal a score of 5 of 5 for impact to the Cardano ecosystem.
Feasibility (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): Because this Proposer already has a track record of delivering in Fund 9 the feasibility is very high. The goal of doubling the number of people reached with their Learn to Earn program from 500 in Fund 9 to 1,000 in Fund 10 is a reasonable goal and should be obtainable within the allotted 12-month time frame. The only risk I can see is the learning curve of Atala Prism as this is a brand-new technology and things could break or not go as planned. The proposal is well written, and the plan and goal setting are also reasonable and conservative. I think it would behoove the team to start attacking the Atala Prism parts now and maybe they are to make sure they hit the ground running and try to determine any unknowns as soon as possible. I am happy to give this proposal a 5 of 5 for Feasibility based on past track record and look forward to seeing the progress in 2024.
Value (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): This proposal is asking for approximately 239,000 ADA or about $80,000 USD. This feels like a reasonable amount of funding to accomplish the tasks outlined in the proposal. The team has already demonstrated it can deliver on this type of activity. The value that this proposal brings to Cardano is onboarding new users to Cardano at an early age establishing a strong penetration for years to come. It also aligns very well with the overall marketing strategy of other projects like World Mobile Token that is also laying groundwork in Africa with telecommunications. In fact, it would not surprise me if many of these students find jobs working at World Mobile because of the onboarding efforts of this team and their proposal which is a win-win for the value of Cardano. I am happy to give this proposal a score of 5 of 5 for value to the Cardano ecosystem.
213,495 ADA 8 Cardano Lounge by BrazilPool — A Cardano Dedicated Coworking and Events Venue in São Paulo
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/104822
Impact (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): Another hard one. Funding for permanent real estate space for meetups seems like a stretch to me. Cardano has “pop-up” meetups happening all the time all around the world and the teams are paying for it themselves without any funding. I am sure it would be great for the proposer to have a really fancy place to work from all the time, but I think there is better use of treasury funds for innovation in software engineering, Dapps, and projects to improve performance of the blockchain. The impact of this proposal does not match the amount of funds being requested. I don’t think it is a good user of treasury funds to pay for renovations of what looks like an upscale facility. How will this facility be sustainable in the future? The proposer just wants free rent. For this reason, I give a score of 1 of 5 for Impact to Cardano.
Feasibility (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): It appears the proposer is only one person and does not have a team to support him. Implementing this proposal and the feasibility is likely to be very difficult to accomplish with just one person. After reviewing the proposers LinkedIn, I don't see any experience in real estate renovations and improvement project. I know that working with contractors, deadlines, getting estimates and following up on contract work is very challenging. I also have questions about lease liability and down payments which most landlords require multiple year commitments in my experience. This was not addressed in the proposal. We also have a weekly ZOOM townhall meeting run by IOG which does not cost anything and provides a way for SPOs to contribute. I suggest the proposer get better at Zoom and remote social skills as many of have had to adapt including myself. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): The ask amount of if this proposal is approximately 213K ADA or about $70,000 USD This actually feels quite low to me based on the tasks presented in the proposal. The time to get it accomplished only 8 months is also not realistic. The requested amount probably feels low to me because it is missing things that have been over-looked like lease deposits, guarantees, cost over-runs and administration and accounting support and other misc expenses. The value of this proposal is very small and is not innovative enough in my opinion. I suggest the proposer figure out how to do meetings and meetups virtually or at his own expense with locals rather than using treasury funds for this type of activity. Maybe consider finding some local developers to build a networking Dapp that brings users together to educate and innovate? I am giving this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for value to the Cardano ecosystem.
210,000 ADA 21 ALDEA NFT Marketplace V2
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103292
Impact (1–5): 2
Review (150 chars): The proposal is a new NFT marketplace application with a focus in Spanish and aims to support approximately 30 SPOs in the LATAM region. They appear to have been funded in Fund 5 ($6,000 USD) and Fund 7 ($27,000) and completed their close out reports. The NFT marketplace space is currently dominated in Cardano by JPG.STORE and competing for projects to list on a new platform will be very difficult. Even with a focus on LATAM, I think it will be very difficult to convince creators and artists to list in a new NFT marketplace because all the potential buyers of NFTs are using JPG.STORE. I also have concerns that very little traction has been made since Fund 5 and Fund 7. While the impact of a LATAM based NFT Marketplace could be valuable I think it needs some features that make it stand out in order to attract new listings. For this reason, I core this proposal a 2 of 5 for Impact.
Feasibility (1–5): 2
Review (150 chars): This proposal team does have some experience developing on cardano. However, when I went to the dapp at https://aldea-nft-marketplace.vercel.app, I got client-side application server errors, so it clearly needs more testing. Also, the vercel platform is for testing purposes so this is not a good sign either that they are running a mainnet application using vercel. It concerns me that no further progress has been made since fund 5. perhaps the team did not raise enough funds to find a full time team with strong front-end and back-end development experience. My bigger concern is marketing. In order to get new NFT creators to list their NFTs on this new marketplace they need to know the marketplace has users and buyers. Marketing is always harder than development and many programmers dont understand this. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 2 of 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): This proposal in my opinion will provide very little value to the Cardano ecosystem. While it may be providing some value for the 30 LATAM SPOs supporting it, the problem is one of scale. It is very difficult to build any kind of marketplace. It takes years to build trust and to grow a large enough user base to attract both buyers and sellers to participate. JPG.STORE is 2 years ahead and has already captured market share and raised $6 Million in funding outside of Catalyst. What happens if JPG.STORE offers a version of their marketplace in Spanish language? Then what? This would make it even more difficult to capture new users. There is also a technical limitation in Cardano in that creators of NFTs cannot list them on multiple marketplaces because there is no standard to support this. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for value.
206,000 ADA 12 Minswap Liquidity Bootstrapping for DAOs
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103138
Impact (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): This proposal could potentially have a very large impact on the Cardano ecosystem. Having soft launched vADA and pADA from Testnetcoins.io myself, I understand the need for a fair token launch mechanism. MinSwap is the largest DEX on Cardano and carries with it much responsibility. I also participated in the LBE v1 with Mocossi and can say that worked pretty well from my vantage point. Price discovery of a a new asset is a very complex event that requires a lot of attention by the token owner, the community, market makers, traders and the systems that manage the trading like MinSwap. They all have to work together to make sure trading activity is not compromised by bad actors. Because a DEX is permissionless, it has become normal practice for bad actors to make fake token pair pools in effort to trick naive traders into buying the wrong assets and then getting dumped on. I am hopeful this proposal puts an end to this practice. I give this propasl a 5 of 5 for Impact to Cardano.
Feasibility (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): The team behind this proposal has a proven track record in bring products to market on Cardano and therefore the feasibility of the proposal is very high. I am a little concerned about the timeline of only 3 months but perhaps this is because much of the work has already been accomplished. The MinSwap team is an active participant and leader in the Cardano ecosystem, so it is my opinion that this proposal is highly feasible. The audit budget of $25,000 seems a little bit low but maybe this is due to the larger number of partners they have in Cardano. I am also pleased to see Aiken being used to develop the smart contracts for LBE V2, this is a trend that I believe will continue. I am very excited about this proposal and plan to follow it closely. For these reasons I give this proposal a score of 5 of 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): Having a fair launch capability for new tokens on Cardano is badly needed. MinSwap is in a great position to bring this feature to market on Cardano. The amount of funding is they are asking for is commensurate with task outlined in the proposal. Reducing front-running and helping projects with price discovery at launch, bring great value to the Cardano community. I support this proposal 100% and look forward to the article, the design and will be assisting in the testing on Testnet of this project. I am particularly interested in how well the LBE V2 is utilized by new project going forward. I never understood why LBE V1 was not used by more project token launches. I am hopeful that this capability can be completed on time and on schedule. For this reason, I am scoring this proposal a 5 of 5 for bringing value to the Cardano ecosystem.
200,000 ADA 27 Taxi DAO
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/100857
Impact (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): What in the world is going on here? I found three websites related to this proposer. peakchain.io peak-soft.de and nexus-lab-io Oussama Benmahmoud Linkedin shows that he worked as an engineer for Volkswagen 2013 to 2018. The proposer has submitted 29 Catalyst Proposals in Fund 10 for a total of 11.5M ADA requested. They are all related to automotive industry with different words like Taxi, Car, Ride-hauling, Uber, etc. As far as this Taxi DAO proposal, it appears they want to compete with Uber. What happens if all 29 proposals are funded with only will they deliver on all 29 proposals? Because the proposals appear to all be similarly related and just have been worded differently — this makes me very concerned about the real intention of this team. I would much prefer a single focused proposal to prove to the Cardano community that this team can deliver and provide an impact. It also appears that similar proposals were submitted in Fund 8 and Fund 9 and were not granted. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for impact.
Feasibility (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): The issue I have with this team and proposal writing is the approach. It appears they have 6 people on their team (probably working other jobs to make ends meet) but they keep proposing in a shot-gun style approach hoping one of them will get passed. I suggest to the team that they focus on building a demo, or a proof of concept in their spare time. Get some testimonials or small number of users for ONE idea and then present this proposal to the Catalyst reviewers. Even reading this proposal I do not see how this small team could compete with Uber who has already obtained significant market share. Simply by setting up a DAO, which is just a governance style of running a business will not compete with Uber. What is the competitive differentiation of this offering versus what Uber is offering? Can you provide evidence that it is a better business model? So many questions I have. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for feasibility.
Value (1–5): 1
Review (150 chars): As far as value to Cardano, I lump this proposal into all 29 proposal which is asking for 11.5M ADA from a total Catalyst budget of 50M ADA. The shot-gun approach of proposal submission does not sit well with me. Because I cannot see focus from this team, I see this one proposal as have pretty much zero value to Cardano. Again, I suggest the team pick one idea, develop a prototype or demo, engage with a few customers, collect feedback and then use this information as a basis for a proposal. Sorry, I am an experienced VC backed technology CEO and I know how hard it is to raise capital. I think Catalyst is no different. The Cardano treasury should not be used as a cash grab. We need to pick teams that can deliver world class businesses in order to grow the value of the network. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 1 of 5 for value to Cardano ecosystem.
200,000 ADA 24 Sorbet Wallet Debugger, by Sundae Labs
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/102671
Impact (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): This proposal is from a proven team. I have some personal experience with our own dev team on this issue and can confirm that debugging wallet connections is really difficult and time consuming. It is difficult to figure out the problems when wallets get over 1,000 assets in them. We have found that users are splitting their assets into multiple wallets making it even more difficult to track what is going on for both the user and the developer or support person. Any kind of tools that would help diagnose issues in real time like this proposal is suggesting would be a great additional tool and have fantastic impact to the Cardano experience. I would love to see a demo of this tool as soon as possible and hope that team brings it to market as fast as possible. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 5 of 5.
Feasibility (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): As far as feasibility, 2 months seems like a short amount of time, but maybe the team has most of the work already completed. This team has already demonstrated that they can deliver on building tools on Cardano. Even of the project is delayed to 6 months this tool would be welcomed by all Dapp builders on Cardano. The milestones seem well thought out and should be very feasible. Having a tool available that emulates Cardano wallets without having to run the live wallets during testing is brilliant. I also like the ability to perhaps go live with the user and get feedback from the user wallet system would enable experienced support teams to quickly diagnose the system without screenshot or having to try and reproduce the user scenario. We need this now! For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 5 of 5 for Feasibility based on reading the proposal milestones.
Value (1–5): 5
Review (150 chars): This proposal from this proven team would bring great value to the Cardano developer ecosystem. As a developer of Dapps, myself I can attest the need for better wallet diagnostic tools. Bringing this tool to market would improve time to market for new applications and improve the end user experience tremendously. In web2 world some of are accustomed to help desk teams taking control of the user's computers, while a bit scary, this is very safe and very helpful because it speeds up the diagnostic process. A similar approach is done with automobiles. Standard communications protocols are put in place to help mechanics diagnose on board computers systems of the automobile. Have this type of tool in Cardano would be a giant leap forward and I can't wait to give to my development teams. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 5 of 5 got value to Cardano.
196,000 ADA 29 Revolutionary pro-community NFT Smart Contract. Splitting service fee between multiple parties, on-chain affiliate, precision in lovelaces without any rounding up to the detriment of creators or users.
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106978
Impact (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): Ok So I understand the proposal. The plan is to try and get the market leader in NFT trading JPG.STORE to be more fair with their fees. I think this is a noble effort but because JPG.STORE has 100% market share they will never agree to a standard that hurts their business. The only chance you have is to partner with other NFT DEX and attempt to gain market share from JPG.STORE with more favorable pricing for creators, buyers and sellers. I would suggest you build these relationships before you ask the treasury for funding and before developing and smart contracts. This a marketing problem not an enginering one. While I understand you need that code and the audit, I think a proposal to build a coalition to compete is a better way to spend the treasury funds. This why I give this proposal a score of 3 out of 5 for Impact. See market share of NFT marketplaces. Cardano NFT Data: market cap, size, data, growth, volume in chart — OpenCNFT
Feasibility (1–5): 2
Review (150 chars): I think the team is perfectly capable of delivering on this proposal, however the 5-month timeline seems aggressive to me. This team has already built a working NFT marketplace, and I have used it with my own NFTs but abandoned it because the buyers are all on JPG.STORE. There is also another major problem in Cardano NFT buying and selling, and that is creators cannot list the same assets on multiple marketplaces and just take the best offer from any one of them. This is because the marketplaces custody the assets until they are sold. What we really need is for marketplaces to become — non-custodial so that assets are not locked up in any one particular platform. But again, because JPG.STORE has a 100% share of user's time and attention they have no incentive to do this. This is a marketing problem, and the only way is to make change is to combine forces create a non-custodial platform with more fair fees to compete with the incumbent. Markets are brutal. Speed to market with new features can effect change but it will be very difficult.
Value (1–5): 2
Review (150 chars): The use of the 196,000 ADA treasury funds in my opinion is very hard to justify as a valuable use of the Treasury. My suggestion would be to spend more time on partnering with other marketplace builders to create a non-custodial trading platform for NFTs. This would be of interest to me personally, because we have our ADA Hackers NFT collection that is still minting and in order to trade we have to lock them on JPG.STORE. https://adahackers.com It would be great to have more options with more fair fees and price structures. Many of Cardano’s largest NFT projects have built their own trading platforms for their own holders. I would suggest trying to work with them on a non-custodial competitor to JPG.STORE. Without a solid plan on how to compete and overcome JPG.STORE, it is very difficult for me to support this proposal. For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 2 of 5 for Value to Cardano.
179,300 ADA 20 Enable use-cases that require frequent message signing by introducing a safe standard for message signing without wallet prompts.
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/107668
Impact (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): This proposal seems a bit rushed to me and also a bit self-serving for Paima. But it still could have an impact Cardano and other developers. A strong messaging protocol would be very helpful for Dapps to talk to one another as well as wallets and Dapps. This proposal is just to develop a specification, but I did not see much about how other community members could be involved in writing the Spec. I looked and CIP8 and could not figure out what improvements are being proposed. Is the CIP8 lacking in some way? This feels like an add on to the spec that would benefit Paima, which is cool, but what about other Dapps, wallets etc? Its coming from an experienced team so I am sur it would have impact on their gaming platform. I just wish I could have seen more detail on how it could benefit other applications in the Cardano ecosystem. So, this reason I give this proposal a score of 3 out of 5.
Feasibility (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): I think the team is perfectly capable of developing or improving on CIP8 to meet their own needs. So, from a feasibility standpoint, I think it is very feasible. I just wish there would have been a broader discussion of the overall benefits of enhancing the existing specification I some more educational discussion on why the current specification is not in a usable state. My issue is that this proposal seems rushed and does not give the reader much context on very complex topic. I am pretty familiar with generic protocols like http, ftp, html, xml, xls. xmtp etc that are used in web2. I think the proposer should have taken the time to explain in more detail. Example from the CIP8 Spec: “Private keys can be used to sign arbitrary data. If you have the public key, you can verify the data was signed by the owner of the private key. This is how transaction signing works internally but its utility is not limited to transactions.” For this reason, I give this proposal a score of 3 of 5 for Feasibility.
Value (1–5): 3
Review (150 chars): I did try to find some discussion on CIP8 on Cardano Forum. Message Signing specification — Developers / CIPs — Cardano Forum What I found was many unanswered questions dating back to 2020. This validated my concerns about not involving the entire community on the expansion of CIP8. Example 1. “Hi Sebastien Thanks for this needed CIP. I would find it extremely helpful if there were a couple of examples for the signing and verification process of arbitrary using the emugo/message-signign library (browser/wasm). Basically, picking up from the output of the CIP030’s wallet.signData() API method.” Example 2 “Not sure where to put this, in the CIP-30 section or in this CIP-8. CIP-30 is using CIP-8 as the underlying layer of the COSE_Sign1 / COSE_Key format. The COSE_Sign1 specification allows all kind of different labels in the unprotected Headers.
Currently i only saw the usage of the label { “hashed”: true/false } in there.” The proposer is asking for 179K ADA and this seems a bit high to simply expand on an existing CIP. For this reason I give this proposal a 3 of 5 for Value to Cardano.
169,413 ADA 7 MeshJS SDK Operations: Supporting Open-Source Library Development, Developer Resources & Builder Community
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106254
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141,613 ADA 10 The Goal Mechanism and Dynamics of Incentivized Compliance for Task and Goal Achievement
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106757
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128,380 ADA 1 [C2VN]: Opshin-pioneer-program for non-native English communities developers
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/104656
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109,617 ADA 2 Treasury System Knowledge Resources — Web 3 Association Sponsorship 2023
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103501
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104,500 ADA 6 Fostering Innovation: Swiss Cardano Hackathon Series in Geneva — Inspiring collaboration & creativity for blockchain development
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/107734
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30,000 ADA 3 Clarity <> NMKR: Governance Token Creation Integration
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/101684
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82,341 ADA 4 Cardano SPO Club for non-English speaker
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106567
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80,000 ADA 15 Charli3 Oracles — Multi-DEX SDK : A Pythonic Gateway to Decentralized Exchanges on Cardano
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106575
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76,883 ADA 25 Decentralized Voteaire Ballot Counter
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106639
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75,000 ADA 22 Beyond Catalyst Funding | Investor Directory for Funded Proposers
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/102846
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75,000 ADA 28 Whitepaper: How can Cardano support creatives in Africa? (open source)
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/107369
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54,780 ADA 19 Threshold Signatures for Cardano Wallets
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/103599
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30,000 ADA 18 [4] A Methodology for Enabling Self-Driven CommunityDAOs
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/105090
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19,250 ADA 5 OpShin Education — Free Educational Videos about Python Smart Contracts
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/104238
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15,000 ADA 16 Teaching Turks Cardano Through Online Workshops, Youtube videos, and Community Building
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/105691
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15,000 ADA 26 Expand PypeDreams — Anti scam community protection tool
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/106836
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