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

Hermes and Athena offer compounded use cases referred to below which, when matured, promises immense value. The minimum value the proposal can return to the community greatly exceeds the budgeted development cost by delivering scalable infrastructure with composable building blocks that can be operated and further advanced by the community.

1. With a move from web2 to blockchain, increase in availability of Catalyst for voting on multiple events and proposals greatly improves the use of resources on the platform

2. Enhanced features will result in a richer experience where more users and community likely to participate with potential to analyze historic vote data alongside current running proposal votes

3. Inclusivity

4. The ability to cater for existing levels based on a single voting event, will be greatly improved by Hermes’ capability to run multiple events. This represents a major augmentation of capability for Catalyst

5. The ability to access voting event data for current and historic events will help to determine behaviour and interests of votes and help enhance and incorporate feedback

Hermes is being built with the specific intent that it become a powerful and accessible tool for all developers in the Cardano Ecosystem to be able to use. As a fully open source software, additional features to Hermes can be proposed for funding through Project Catalyst. DApp authors can utilize the Hermes engine to develop their own fully decentralized applications, allowing authors to easily integrate all available Hermes features, in order to reuse or re-purpose existing WASM modules without reinventing the wheel, while decreasing their operating costs by not requiring the operation of complex or costly backend server infrastructure.

This greatly enhanced platform improves the accessibility and reduces the barriers to entry to everyone across the ecosystem. The aim is to help foster and drive engagement with non-technical users as well as developers. It is desired that the Project Catalyst community can also meaningfully contribute to proposing and developing enhancements or further modules for Athena and building the system to be modular makes that much easier and more likely that individual proposals can be specified in concrete terms and with high assurance of success.

Our hope is that the community will feel encouraged to make proposals to enhance this engine and its capabilities, building together with us.