About Our Proposals

What happens if the community does not approve the Catalyst team’s ‘Fund Operations’ proposal?

Catalyst has been operating as an experiment for a number of years. With that, the Catalyst team at IOG and the community have accomplished many impressive feats together. With the extensive experience gained from managing Catalyst for an extended period, the Catalyst team is highly confident in its ability to offer reliable fund management to the community for the subsequent three funding cycles. As an integral part of the IOG organization, the Catalyst team enjoys collaborating with top researchers and developers with years of expertise in developing cutting-edge technology, including the Cardano blockchain, to enhance the Catalyst system. In addition, the Catalyst team members bring a wealth of experience from working on innovation grant programs for significant projects at government agencies like Innovate UK. Regardless of which proposal is voted on, Catalyst will remain a pivotal institution in Cardano. Should the Catalyst team not secure the vote to continue running Project Catalyst, they will actively support and facilitate a smooth handover to the team funded for the Fund Operations category. Facilitating such a handover would require substantial effort and inevitably result in a delay in the launch of Fund11. In the scenario where no winners emerge for the Fund Operations category, IOG would gradually conclude its involvement in Catalyst’s fund operations, granting the community the autonomy to decide how Catalyst should proceed in the future collectively.

As the operator of Fund10, can the Catalyst team rig the system in favour of its own proposals?

Two different rounds of community reviews review proposals submitted during Fund10. While Catalyst has automatic scripts that scan reviews for profanity and the use of AI, the community ultimately determines which proposals meet the funding criteria during the community review stage. Although we will openly discuss our roadmap and proposals in town halls and other public platforms, IOG has a long-standing policy about not participating in Catalyst voting. This policy will continue to persist throughout Fund10.

As Catalyst operators, does submitting your own proposals create a conflict of interest for the Catalyst team?

The IOG Catalyst Team has operated Catalyst for nearly three years. Over the last months, many discussions have occurred with Cardano’s pioneering entities (CF, Emurgo, IOG) about the fairest way to enable the community to decide how Catalyst continues. It is crucial to acknowledge that sustaining and running Catalyst comes at a cost, and there is a broad understanding that Catalyst must eventually become self-sustaining. To become a self-sustaining entity, that cost cannot be born by IOG in perpetuity. To date, IOG has not participated in casting votes on proposals to receive funding from the treasury and will not be participating in the vote itself. Instead, the community will decide whether or not to support the proposals the Catalyst team has put forward. Ultimately, we want the community's confidence that our roadmap over the next 12 months is something we want to see realized.

I thought that Catalyst was an innovation sandbox. Why is there a need for the continuous TestNET?

When considering the long-term sustainability of Catalyst there are a few things we need to consider. One of the most important things to consider is how to build a distributed network that allows the community to experiment and implement changes in a decentralized manner while avoiding the risk of undermining the legitimacy of an active vote due to insufficiently tested new voting mechanisms. The first step to doing this is to make sure anyone can pull down the Catalyst system and inspect the code base for themselves. Not only will this allow the community to get a better understanding of how the system works, but they will then be able to use this code to deploy their own instances of a live fund in a testnet environment so they can tweak the parameter for voting and experiment with their own voting mechanisms.