Cardano Fund 4 overview and Top proposals — Part 1

Published in

Coinmonks

4 min readMar 14, 2021

I have previously explained in detail how Cardano is pioneering decentralization through its Project Catalyst. Through various rounds of funding, Cardano has started distributing ADA to facilitate the development of important projects which will help develop the overall ecosystem.

Project Catalyst is a series of experiments that seeks to generate the highest levels of community innovation. Catalyst is bringing on-chain governance to the Cardano blockchain by allowing the community to self-determine priorities for growth. It also lets participants deploy funding to proposals that tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities that arise in the life cycle of Cardano.

Fund 4 focuses on incentivizing solutions that make it easier for developers to build on top of Cardano. To achieve this, the guiding questions for the voters when they vote will be

• Identify the tools to be prioritized

• Attract developers for outside the existing community

• Enabling the developers with the necessary support required

• What would attract the interest of the developers to go through Cardano docs and code

• Building for enterprise development managers, either internal or commercial?

The fundamental pillars of Fund 4 are classified as below:

• Developer ecosystem challenge: Create a positive app developer experience. Allocation — 400k in ADA

• DApps and integrations challenge: Ways to help the app developers drive the adoption of Cardano in 2021. Allocation — 200k in ADA

• Distributed decision-making challenge: Develop better-distributed decision-making in the next 2 Catalyst rounds. Allocation — 50k in ADA

• Proposer outreach: Encourage entrepreneurs from outside the Cardano ecosystem to submit proposals to Catalyst in the next two funds. Allocation — $50k in ADA

• Catalyst value onboarding: Encourage community members to participate in Project Catalyst in the next two funds. Allocation — $50k in ADA

• Local community centers: Mobilize the community to solve local problems using Cardano. A Local Community Center model. Allocation — $50k in ADA

These will be tracked via:

• Reporting by funded proposals every two weeks

• On-chain annotations

• New user survey

• Growth metrics

Campaign Timeline

• Insight Sharing: View all the insights shared by community members at the start of the challenge. Valid till 25/Feb/21

• Submit Proposals: After successful submission of proposals, the community starts to give feedback. Valid till 04/Mar/21

• Refine: In this stage, Community members give proposals feedback and help proposals evolve. Valid till 11/Mar/21

• Finalize: In this stage, idea teams are called on to provide additional details about their ideas. The teams answer the questions, provide insights on the ideas, and refine them into proposals for implementation. Valid till 18/Mar/21

• Assess: In this stage, ideas are assessed by experts from your community. Assessors rate ideas based on a specified set of criteria to help uncover the ideas with the most potential. Valid till 25/Mar/21

• Assess QA: View proposals in the voting app. Discussion is now about which proposals should be funded, and Q&A with proposers, rather than how to improve them further. Valid till 01/Apr/21

• Governance Phase: In this stage, voters discuss the merits of proposals and pose questions to the proposers.

• Archive: Where inactive proposals are stored

• Insight Sharing Reserve: View all the insights community members had to share at the start of the challenge Valid till 25/Feb/21

Note that in Fund 4 people will be able to vote using their mobile app (Catalyst Voting, not Yoroi). The Yoroi chrome version has been charged up with voting capabilities which can be synced up with the catalyst app for voting. I will write a separate guide about it later.

In the next article, we will review some of the proposals under the different pillars. I will also select some of the proposals I like and I would like to vote. This will give you visibility of the early-stage development of the Cardano ecosystem, the state just after the development of the core chain and onboarding of applications.

Read the Previous article: How to play Dark Forest, the zkSNARK powered MMO Game — Part 1

Note: This post was first published here for Cryptowriter in association with voice.com.

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