Our million-dollar baby: Project Catalyst

Original author:

Dor Garbash - Head of Product

Originally published on IOHK.io: February 12, 2021

Summary:

The next Catalyst funding round will be our most accessible and ambitious round of funding yet

Article:

We launched Project Catalyst six months ago as a series of experiments to advance on-chain governance and accelerate community-driven innovation on Cardano. The project seeks to achieve the highest levels of community collaboration and to seed the best ideas with development funding via a community-moderated process. Community, innovation, funding, value, growth – Catalyst creates powerful synergies, and ultimately a self-sustaining engine of growth for Cardano’s future. 

Each funding round has grown in its scope, level of funding, and community engagement. We already have 7,000 members on the IdeaScale innovation platform with 1,800 active voters. Adoption is growing by 10% every week and we have only just begun. 

Fund4 will be our most accessible and ambitious round yet and our first million-dollar round – that’s the size of the ada pot to fund development projects on Cardano. Proposal teams will use these funds to develop tooling, build decentralized applications, launch education and training initiatives for developers, and so much more. Every fresh contribution adds fresh value to the ecosystem. And since the community is at the core of Catalyst, 20% of treasury funds are set aside to reward and incentivize community advisers, referrers, and participating voters for their contribution.

Throughout 2021, we will continue to encourage engagement with the project across the Cardano community by making it more accessible. In Fund3, voter registration has been significantly improved. Registration is now fully integrated with the Daedalus wallet, within a new registration center. This replaces a separate user-unfriendly and time-consuming process we had to use in Fund2 for technical reasons, now addressed. For Yoroi light wallet users, a browser extension provides easy registration. Voters will then use a dedicated mobile voting app – downloadable on iOS or Android – to complete the process. In a future Daedalus release, users will ultimately be able to register and vote from the wallet. To participate in voting you need to meet a threshold currently set at 3,000 ada - a threshold set to help protect the voting system from malicious attacks. To get a Cardano wallet, make sure to download Daedalus only from its official site or use the official Yoroi browser extension.

In less than half a year, Project Catalyst has grown to become the world’s largest decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It is a fulcrum of future development and sustainable innovation, driven by the Cardano community, for the Cardano community. This latest fund is a huge step up for the proposers, advisers, and voters collaborating already. We want to encourage everyone to become part of bringing on-chain governance to Cardano.

If you are an ada holder and you want to influence and contribute to the future direction for Cardano, then bring your ideas and join us at Project Catalyst.

*Please note, due to an editing error, a previous version of this blog erroneously stated that voter registration and voting would be included in the forthcoming Daedalus release. Our apologies for any confusion.