First time I heard about Project Catalyst on Cardano Virtual Summer Shelley edition. When I read in IOHK blog on Blockchain governance that Project Catalyst is looking for community members to join the focus group, I didn't hesitate and applied. This turned out to be an exciting and interesting experience to take part in Fund1 and see how on every weekly call the process improves and moves forward.
Today Fund2 was announced on the crowdcast by Charles Hoskinson and Project manager of Catalyst Dor Garbash. (link to the video).
If in simple words: Project Catalyst is a governance and treasury system, which will allow idea to get funded by the Cardano community. It is also called DC Fund - Decentralised Cardano fund and the money is coming from the Cardano treasury. This is also the Voltaire phase of Cardano.
Fund1 (like Fund0 before) was a testing phase, and it still is going on, as voting will happen in the next few days. And Fund2 will have real ADA (worth of $250 000) to be distributed to the successful proposals.
Fund2 Challange is: How can we encourage developers and entrepreneurs to build Dapps and businesses on top of Cardano in the next 6 months? So your proposal should be related to this challenge. Otherwise, it will have small chances to succeed, but if you have something different in mind - don't worry, there will be other challenges as funding via Project Catalyst will be an ongoing process.
The proposal submission for Fund2 starts on September 23, 2020, and will last till September 30. Then there will be time to refine ideas, finalize and review the proposal, voting phase, and the whole process will take around 1 month. So till the end of October, we'll see which proposals receive funding by community.
To vote, Cardano holder must have at least 8000 ADA and hold them for a period of voting. (Voters will receive rewards which equal 20% of funds, so in case of Fund2 - $50K, distributed among all the voters). I assume the mechanics and system of voting might change, so I won't focus a lot on it. The voting process will take place in the Catalyst app.
All the phases prior to voting will happen on https://cardano.ideascale.com/ where it's already possible to sign up and explore the challenge, post the insights, and actively engage.
Project Catalyst is still in the early days. Like block producing process is moving from federated nodes to stake pools, the governance will move to decentralization as well. This stage of governance is only the first step, then we can assume that more and more aspects of the Cardano ecosystem might be decided by voting: from the protocol changes to the elections in the Cardano Foundation and voting for Ambassadors.
I will write a separate article about my experience with Fund1, I don't want to keep this article long, as for newcomers it might be easy to get lost in the flows of new information. For this reason - feel free to contact me for any help, advice, etc.
Additional links:
"Project Catalyst; introducing our first public fund for Cardano community innovation" blog post
"Project Catalyst & Voltaire bring power to the people" blog post
"Governance and Cardano" whiteboard video by Charles Hoskinson
