IOG Catalyst Team: Goals for the project, validation, and feasibility?

The primary goals of the Catalyst Team will be to:

GOAL 1: Coordinate, launch, and fully execute the next three Catalyst funding round campaigns at a level of circa 50m ada per fund or comparable equivalents, to produce 300-400 new Cardano community-approved grassroots innovation projects per fund, administering the following stages:

1. Community Communications & Events

2. Fund Campaign Setup

3. Proposal Submission / Innovation Stage

4. Community Review Stage

5. Catalyst Voting Administration / Tally / Results

GOAL 2: Maintain all existing Catalyst voting system infrastructure and tools so they are readily available for use during each funding round, providing:

1. Backend:

   • Deployment environments - Operation and maintenance (prod, pre-prod, testnet, QA, dev)

   • Production fund deployments (pre-planned - three month interval)

   • Continuous pre-prod / testnet deployment (two week cycles)

   • Fund parameter setting (community coordinated)

   • Ideascale data management

   • Community review data management

   • Execution data management

2. Voting application interface:

   • One year of maintenance

   • Compatibility with back-end changes, such as when migration to cat-data-service backend takes place.

   • Operational and published application on iOS + Android

     • Support iOS 16.2+ and Android 10+ today

     • Will continue to support latest versions with minimum supported version subject to change

     • Release notes and support documentation

   • Fixes for discovered bugs

   • Access to Catalyst’s production, pre-prod and testnet environments

GOAL 3: Coordinate and manage the milestone-based funding and proof-of-achievement processes to welcome and onboard newly approved projects, implementing transition plans if necessary, to assure their continuity, administering the following stages:

1. Proof-of-life onboarding of funded projects

2. Project accountability management

3. Catalyst Treasury actions / management

GOAL 4: Initiate an education programme to help onboard new participants and enable growth in community-led competencies to co-operate Catalyst, supporting important Catalyst stages covering:

1. How to experiment and integrate with Catalyst Continuous Testnet

2. Proof-of-life onboarding supporting the participation of new LV2 Community Reviewers for each fund

3. Proof-of-achievement verifications supporting at least 100 LV2 Community Reviewers participating regularly by end of Fund13

4. Community audit of Treasury actions and management

GOAL 5: Deliver interim and annual evaluation reports of project outcomes to demonstrate the significance and impact that Catalyst has achieved during the scope of the project.

GOAL 6: Create additional transparency and good governance around Project Catalyst by introducing an arms-length relationship between the operation and administration of each Catalyst funding round (Catalyst Operator) and the custody of funds allocated from the Cardano Treasury for each funding round (Catalyst Funding Vehicle).

Goals [1], [2], [3] and [4] stated above are broadly feasible as they have been demonstrated over the past nine iterations of the Catalyst fund cycles. In particular, goals [3] and [6] allows for funding to be managed carefully, minimizing risks that funding resources are misappropriated and only discovered such as when the project has supposedly completed, only to find that the funded project’s deliverables were not met and little to no value has been delivered.

Additionally, goals [3] and [4] enable the Cardano community to play an important and ongoing role of actively cooperating and auditing Catalyst outcomes.

A retrospective period will be held after each fund, starting from the end of Fund10 to reflect on what went well, what could be improved, and any considerations to changes to operational processes that may need to be made.