IOG Catalyst Team: Value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Over the next three fund cycles spanning over 12 months, Catalyst Team proposes to use ₳2,140,000 per Fund Period of 4 months towards the team salaries, operating costs, and overheads of the Project Catalyst innovation funding program.

Based on the deliverables described and the outcomes that this project will produce, the spend that the Cardano treasury will make generates a compelling return on investment with strong potential of exceeding the estimations of around 1,200 new Cardano innovation and community projects that will be produced in the next 12 months if the community supports this proposal.

Based on feedback and learnings from nine iterations of Project Catalyst, the Catalyst Team understands what it takes to provide a platform for managing innovation at scale, distributing project funding for many hundreds of projects simultaneously, coordinating between large numbers of community members with differing needs across a variety of interactions and stages of the Catalyst decentralized innovation fund program. We have incorporated feedback from clear community signals, following good user-centered design principles, and will continue to iterate as required.

The clear value for money and benefit this provides to the community is that the operating processes and combined experience are already well established to make the program run smoothly while enabling further innovation to present itself and flourish. The Catalyst Team has a comprehensive, technical understanding of the necessary mechanics to deliver decentralized, Web3 grant-making operations at scale, which have been tried and tested many times. We are committed to being a highly collaborative member of the Cardano community. Our mantra is simply, we are better if we’re building together.

Technical maintenance of the Catalyst Voting System (upkeeping infrastructure and mobile voting applications) account for the majority of costs for engineering, the remainder of these available resources are accounted for and budgeted as part of the other proposals submitted by the Catalyst team. This proposal provides the community a secure and trusted ledger plus voting applications and requires no further development to be used in Fund11. Furthermore, the Catalyst Continuous Testnet is a capability that will empower others to experiment and build alongside us. We are committed to producing a training program initiative, which will enable interested parties to learn how to integrate with and run experiments and reference implementations.

Fund administration staffing accounts for the next largest portion of costs, including the community, marketing and communications functions to support the fund cycle campaign promotions. By being closely linked to IOG, one of the largest influential organizations in the blockchain industry, we can count on the amplification of shared successes to reach the wider Cardano ecosystem and beyond, lowering the overall cost for marketing and promotions.

In addition to core fund administration, the team is committed to being open and transparent about how we deliver our services so that, in time, more Catalyst contributors can learn how to cooperate with Catalyst. The result will be an education initiative as an additional value-add and a considerable expertise exchange that the wider ecosystem can benefit from.

The remainder of costs, including overhead, are predominantly attributed to having sufficient coverage on software licenses and hardware required for maintaining the technical stack. We are a lean team so maintaining tight controls of staffing and licensing costs are imperative to our cash flow.

The core team have been working together for a long time which demonstrates their effectiveness of collaboration. They understand each other’s strengths and have built strong bonds with one another, which makes all the difference and helps drive high productivity.

All together, these factors greatly mitigates the potential of disruption and instability that an alternate provider would reasonably introduce at this stage.

Supporting the Catalyst team’s proposal provides certainty that the last three years of operating knowledge (working at the pace and scale we currently do) and the advancements made to date can be leveraged in collaboration with the community and maximized fully for the benefit of Cardano.

The team is dedicated and passionate about making a difference in Cardano and the world at large with an undivided commitment and mission for enabling a transfer of knowledge to the Cardano community, while bringing to life thousands more success stories that the entire ecosystem can share.