About Voting

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 allow 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.

What are you doing to mitigate bad actors putting forward scam proposals?

The remarkable aspect of a decentralized innovation fund like Catalyst lies in its inherent self-governance, accountability, and resilience. Catalyst is a bunch of mini ecosystems working together to bring innovation to Cardano from the ground up. Since everyone is interested in seeing the highest impact proposals get funding, the community does a great job of doing community reviews and sorting out which proposals aren’t the best fit for Catalyst funding. Another fail-safe measure in place is the moderation of submitted proposals. Incomplete or spam proposals are filtered out before undergoing a thorough round of community.

How transparent will the voting be? Will it be on-chain?

Catalyst voting has always occurred on-chain, utilizing the Jormungandr sidechain, initially utilized to test the Ouroboros Shelley Incentivized Testnet's infrastructure. This allows Catalyst voting to benefit from the same high level of security as the Cardano mainchain in many cases. Catalyst voting is designed to be privacy-preserving. While there is a degree of transparency surrounding the voting process, it is impossible to determine the specific direction of an individual voter's choice. As with all blockchains, the ledger itself can be audited. In Fund10, we are taking additional steps to ensure transparency and verifiability. We will make the tally independently verifiable, and all voting data will be publicly available to the community.

How will Fund10 avoid whale voters influencing the results?

It's essential to remember that all participants in Catalyst voting share a common goal of supporting proposals with the potential to impact Cardano significantly. We firmly believe that every ada holder should have the opportunity to take part in Catalyst voting. As fund operators, the Catalyst team does not have the authority to dictate who can or cannot vote in Catalyst funding cycles. We focus on enhancing community transparency by providing detailed voting outcomes. As part of this effort, we will publish a snapshot of all wallets as part of the encrypted tally, allowing the community to gain insights into the voting process. While liquid democracy is still in development and won't be ready for use in Fund10, it is getting closer to implementation. In the near future, the community will be able to pool their ada with a trusted delegate to help combat any concerns about the influence of larger stakeholders.