Announcing IRIS Foundation New Ecosystem Development Program

Published in

IRISnet Blog

5 min readApr 30, 2021

The IRIS Foundation is delighted to announce the New One-Year Ecosystem Development Program, to put more resources to boost community autonomy and engagement, and accelerate ecosystem expansion through more flexible methods. In this new program, the Foundation will give additional support to applications in the DeFi and NFT ecosystem, encourage the community to autonomously manage Eco-Development Funds, and also continue the validator, developer and community grants programs.

The IRIS Foundation has announced a series of support programs, such as the Token Burn Plans and Tech-Grants Program in the past several years, which attracted wide attention and further increased community engagement. At present, the last implementation of both the Community-Centric Delegation Campaign and Token Burn Plan has completed, meanwhile, IBC has been enabled on IRIS Hub and applications in the ecosystem such as Coinswap have started to operate; At such moment, it’s necessary to take more diverse ways to stimulate the community autonomy and participation and put more resource for the ecosystem prosperity. Therefore, the IRIS Foundation decides to launch a new one-year ecosystem development program.

This One-Year Ecosystem Development Program mainly includes:
🆕 1. (NEW) The Application Ecosystem Support Plan
🆕 2. (NEW) Eco-Development Funds Community Management Plan
3. The Validator Reward Program
4. Technology and Community Grants Programs

Part 1. The Application Ecosystem Support Plan

In this new program, the IRIS Foundation will start using reserved tokens to make a big push to flourish the application ecosystem in terms of NFT and DeFi.
IRIS Foundation’s Reserved Fund Address: https://irishub.iobscan.io/#/address/iaa1p7qu0acxgwrg059va65cl8sq3w9japnkj93vrc

This address belongs to the IRIS Foundation, and there is no token transfer, delegation or other operations carried out in this address since the IRISnet mainnet launched. While during this new program, the IRIS Foundation will gradually delegate using tokens in this address until all of them are involved in PoS. At the same time, the rewards obtained through the PoS delegation will be devoted to supporting the DeFi and NFT application ecosystem.

For example, the delegation rewards will be used as the rewards of yield farming in Coinswap for users to harvest. In the future, this part of the assets will be applied to support more applications in the ecosystem as an incentive.

Part 2. Eco-Development Funds Community Management Plan

Community governance participation to support the ecosystem is a very important theme in the development of public chains. So in this new program, the Eco-Development Funds will not be burned, but handed over to all community members for joint management and used for a booming ecosystem.

The IRIS Foundation will gradually transfer the current delegation part of Eco-Development Funds into the Community Pool where the community can manage directly and autonomously. This means this part of Eco-Development Funds (Currently about 300 million IRIS) can be co-managed by the whole community through submitting on-chain governance proposals. The community is allowed to initiate a discussion draft in the IRISnet forum, then submit proposals to decide the usage (Burn, reward, apply to use for meetups, etc.) of a certain amount of assets in the Community Pool. In this way, the community has more autonomy and can highly involve in the on-chain governance to express thoughts.
The delegation address of Eco-Development Funds: https://irishub.iobscan.io/#/address/iaa1w7ewedr57z6p7f8nknmdvukfxwkwlsvfjumdts

For example, the community can submit a proposal suggesting to burn a certain amount of tokens in the Community Pool, and if this proposal passes, then this amount of tokens will be burned accordingly. Also, community members are able to submit a proposal to apply for a certain amount of IRIS as the budget of community activities (e.g. meetups, marketing campaigns, etc.); similarly, once this proposal passes, then this amount of tokens will be distributed to that community member for their activities.

The IRIS Foundation will undelegate the current delegation part (around 300 Million IRIS) of Eco-Development Funds step by step, and then put these assets into the Community Pool in 24 batches; This will start from April 2021, and be implemented around the end of each month.

The funds into the Community Pool may increase the nominal circulation; But in fact, only when certain funds are allocated to community members for use (through governance proposals and community voting), the circulation may have a corresponding increase. While the undelegated part will be re-delegated using the reserved fund mentioned above so that the mainnet validators are able to get support and the total delegation amount of the whole network can keep stable as well.

Part 3. The Validator Reward Program

It’s been more than 2 years of smooth sailing for the IRIS Hub since its mainnet launch in March 2019, which would be inseparable from the active participation and contribution of global validators. The Foundation intends to become their solid support, so part of Eco-Development Funds have always been used to delegate; Afterwards, the Foundation will continue to delegate using the reserved fund, to maintain network security together with validators.
Foundation Delegation standards: https://forum.irisnet.org/t/how-does-iris-foundation-select-validators-to-delegate/39

At meanwhile, to encourage more validators to make joint efforts for a better ecosystem, the Foundation has launched and implemented the Validators Rewards Program in August 2020, and set the “Rainbow Validator” award to reward those validators who made outstanding contributions to the whole ecosystem.
The application form for the Rainbow Validator award: https://forms.gle/tRDcYeFue7rdeRWy7

Part 4. Technology and Community Grants Programs

In order to boost the development of IRISnet interchain ecosystem, the IRIS Foundation has announced the developer-oriented grants, Tech-Grants Program, and the community-oriented grants, IRISgardians Grants Program, to fund individuals, teams and projects that make contributions regarding innovative development and community growth. The IRIS Foundation will continue to provide these 2 grants, to attract more developers, partners and community members with us to further accelerate the globalization of IRISnet community and the prosperity of the application ecosystem.

* The IRIS Foundation reserves all rights for the final interpretation.
* The IRIS Foundation reserves all rights to modify terms based on the ecosystem development during the period of this program.

Announcing IRIS Foundation New Ecosystem Development Program

Part 1. The Application Ecosystem Support Plan

Part 2. Eco-Development Funds Community Management Plan

Part 3. The Validator Reward Program

Part 4. Technology and Community Grants Programs

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Written by IRISnet