IOG Catalyst Team: Catalyst Ecosystem Accelerator - Solution and Ecosystem Benefits

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The proposed solutions offered by Hermes and Athena will significantly advance the state of the art of the Project Catalyst technology stack, delivering voting using a fully distributed database and immutable ledger, instead of relying on a controlled side-chain mall number of nodes

The key benefits of this approach provide:

• Ability to hold multiple voting events in parallel

This enables the Catalyst infrastructure with capabilities for running more than one funding event at a time, unleashing the ability to compose and automate funding events to begin and end in parallel and/or over different or overlapping time frames.

• Ability to continually view history voting data

Enabling voting history to be audited with confidence the data has not been produced from within a single ‘black-box’ set up.

• Improving security using immutable blockchain (Cardano)

Directly connecting to a Cardano relay node to gather voter registration transactions and calculate voting power. Wallet transactions are securely signed for cast votes using the P2P network.

• Performance of system being improved

By leveraging technologies such as LibP2P / IPFS for distributing data, the Catalyst system no longer relied on Web2 infrastructure to deliver voting. The current capabilities of WebAssembly (WASM) enable the building of robust and secure business logic for the application layer (Athena) or for any builders that would like to build applications atop of Hermes.

• Accessibility through light client and wallet connection

This is enabled by web-browser based voting and a third-party wallet connector as defined by CIP-30 and CIP-62, meaning only an internet connection and web browser is required to participate in voting.

• Inclusivity to allow greater access to non-technical users

The proposed design offers DApp builders the flexibility to develop their own fully decentralized applications, allowing easy integration of all available Hermes features, so that UIUX can be tailored to the needs of their audiences. In the same way Lace wallet is intended to be simplistic, developers can implement their own simple front-end applications, if they choose, to help onboard new users while benefiting from the security and performance features of the underlying Hermes design.

• Community capabilities are extended with custom voting events

Developers can use the system to customize voting events in parallel without negatively impacting Project Catalyst voting events.

Overall, the Catalyst system will be more scalable and extensible with proposed design