IOG Catalyst Team: How the proposed solution benefits Cardano ecosystem and addresses the challenge

This proposal will produce circa 300-400 new Cardano community-approved grassroots innovation projects per fund, with continuity and no disruption to providing grant-making services over the next 12 months, addressing the scope of the Catalyst Fund Operations category.

For almost three years, Catalyst has helped bring to life projects aimed at solving real-world challenges. Catalyst’s impact to date throughout Fund1-Fund9:

• More than 1.7 million votes cast

• $48m in ada awarded

• 60,000 community members on the Catalyst mailing list

• 6,000+ proposals submitted

• 1,155 projects approved, classified as

• 305 Cardano developer ecosystem projects.

• 349 Cardano community events, marketing, and expansion projects

• 384 Cardano products, services, and Integration projects

• 117 classified as ‘Other’ including research projects that explored Catalyst admin and/or Catalyst infrastructure goals

• At the time of writing, nearly 600 projects have been completed, providing proof-of-project completion assets.

The Catalyst Team is proud of its role to date in helping the community to achieve all of these milestones. To maintain Catalyst and achieve the highest potential for impact for Cardano by providing necessary resources to further grow the Cardano ecosystem, the proposed project enables the Catalyst Team to help facilitate:

• Technical development projects getting to market faster and allowing product-market fit to be validated delivering value back to the Cardano ecosystem quicker than if these resources and processes were not available.

• Easier and faster onboarding of new users to the Cardano ecosystem through deployment of more dApps, products, and services to make use of and community-led events and marketing activations to engage with.

• A growing pool of Catalyst contributors that gain experience in supporting key aspects of project accountability and Catalyst network health; and helping to demonstrate decentralization in practice, whereby the community not only propose and decide on which projects receive funding, but are predominantly responsible for holding the approved-projects receiving funding to account through the proof of achievement accountability model described elsewhere in this proposal.

The Catalyst Team’s Catalyst Fund Operations service proposal facilitates both maintaining and further enhancing Catalyst’s mission-critical operations and infrastructure, by helping the Cardano community to continue to:

• Make high-integrity, collective decisions that use Cardano Treasury funds that are allocated to Project Catalyst .

• Extend the community-operated accountability for those decisions.

• Receive consistent funding disbursements to foster grassroots ecosystem development based on collective wisdom and distributed decision making.

• Audit the decision-making processes and technologies so as to be able to verify the integrity of voting and technical capabilities that the Catalyst voting system offers

• Experiment with alternative Catalyst decision-making parameters by using the Catalyst Continuous Testnet to demonstrate novel governance models in order to develop new understandings for potential future improvements.