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AADAO 2023 Recap
Recorded: Dec. 23, 2023 Duration: 1:36:12Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey, everyone.
Welcome back, Bendy.
See you, guys.
You all right?
Like it or not, you're a permanent team member.
Well, we'll see if anyone wants to hear us have a chat.
Exactly.
I shared on Telegram, so see if I can retweet it again.
Is it only the three of us right now?
Looks like it.
Well, we just started, so...
Yeah.
I think let's wait a bit until we get at least like one, two people maybe.
What do you guys think?
Well, yeah, because there's no point us just talking to each other.
But yeah, how are you guys doing?
Good, good.
Look, the...
Merry Christmas, one day in advance.
Yeah, happy holidays, guys.
Yeah, and...
I feel, Yusuf, it was a year ago that you got in touch with me about AA Dow.
Yeah, exactly.
It was a year ago.
Totally.
Totally.
Yeah, it was end of December.
Maybe like one, let's say, probably December 15?
Around this area?
No, because I think I spoke with Better Future for the first time on like a call on Christmas Eve.
I think.
It was definitely Christmas Eve.
So it's like...
Yeah, you're right.
Yeah.
It's like a year to the day since you sort of first told me about AA Dow, which is funny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Wow.
Well, happy holidays and happy anniversary.
Cool.
Well, we've got an actual listener now.
But we'll keep kind of stalling until we get a few more people joining the space.
And then we can start talking about 2023 and your plans for 2024.
100%.
Very excited about it.
And the on-chain vote is going well so far.
We're close to reaching quorum.
I think we're at 28.5% right now.
Still one more week to go for the vote.
So, so far, so good.
Just need to make sure that all the validators aren't off for Christmas, right?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Just sharing on some socials so we can get more people to join.
Yeah.
I'll just do the same right now.
Yeah.
So in terms of what we'll talk about, I think we'll start by running through kind of what
what you think the, you know, from your points of view, Yusuf and Johnny, what you think the
kind of big wins across the last year have been.
And then we'll kind of move into, you know, learnings, future plans, the kind of RFPs you're looking to do next term.
All of that kind of good stuff.
And then I've got a few kind of community questions for you.
And obviously then we'll kind of open the floor to anyone else that wants to ask anything.
So, yeah, that should, that's roughly our format.
It shouldn't be, you know, super long, but obviously we can go for a while.
And, and, you know, if people have questions, I'm sure you guys will be up for answering stuff.
A hundred percent.
By the way, for the audience, this is, this is Yusuf.
All right, let's start, Benji, I guess.
Yeah.
Brilliant.
Okay.
So just for a little bit of context, then, it was pretty much around a year ago, exactly,
to the Yusuf first spoke to me about Atomic Accelerator DAO.
It was January, February, when it was sort of first put on the forum and went on chain and the vote passed.
And obviously at the moment, there's a new proposal for a second mandate on the, on chain at the moment, which is voting on.
But I guess, you know, for, for those that haven't read the kind of full end of mandate report that's available on the Atomic Accelerator DAO's website,
Yusuf first, and then Johnny, would you both kind of give like maybe two,
two, three things that you think are kind of the big wins out of the last year for Atomic Accelerator DAO and for the hub by extension?
A hundred percent.
Thank you, Benji, for the question.
So I think at a very conceptual level, I would say the first major win is EEDA itself, as a fully funded, fully owned, fully aligned organization with the Cosmos Hub.
It is still, to this day, the only organization that is 100% funded by the Cosmos Hub.
So that in itself, I would say, is a win.
Is a win.
Now, in terms of our own wins, I would say that the fact that the, we were able to bootstrap the program at such a rapid pace, where we, within six months.
So we, our, our applications were open only for six months, and we were able to, you know, process above 200 applications.
We founded, our objective in year one was to fix the atom tokenomics.
And I would say that this is well underway now.
I would say it is by far our biggest win.
It's not over, obviously.
So the research, the research phase is finished now with the three teams, RMIT, Blockworks Research and Binary having completed the research.
And now we're entering the most interesting phase, which is the governance phase, which is obviously full of uncertainties.
But the very first governance module, I mean, research module from, from Binary Builders is up for voting right now.
Curiously, it was posted to, proposed to governance one day before our own funding proposal.
That's a pure coincidence.
And so far, so good.
99%, yes, quorum is, has been achieved.
And the governance, so the module itself is what we call the Atom Alignment Treasury.
It is a piece, an unbiased piece of infrastructure, basically to allow for trustless protocol on liquidity.
So just to give an example, the EDAO has helped bootstrap and is currently custodying the first ever protocol on liquidity that was directed by Stride for the hub.
So we deployed 450,000 ATOM on Astroport within Neutron, so within the AEZ.
And right now it is custodyed by our multi-sig.
When we build the Atom Alignment Treasury module along with TimeWave smart contracts, we will, the hub will be able to deploy as often as it likes protocol on liquidity in a trustless way, which is obviously a huge difference than, you know, regular custodying on a, on a regular multi-sig.
One other thing we're very proud of, and Benji has obviously played a major role in that, is the redirection of the neutron airdrop, the enclaimed airdrop actually, to the Cosmos hub and the Atom community pool.
So just as a reminder, maybe Benji, you should actually share something about that because you played a big role.
So I'll just let you maybe give some context on how EDAO was the catalyst in directing the neutron airdrop to the Atom community pool.
Sure. So essentially when Neutron first proposed being a consumer chain, one of the things it did was it published its kind of tokenomics.
And within that, it included the details on the airdrop.
And I want to say it was 7% airdropped and then 5% within their lock drop.
And that was the kind of like community distribution.
The original thing, obviously you have to, you have to actively claim the airdrop.
It wasn't one that would be directly just sent to your wallet automatically.
And partly because of the geo-blocking of people in the United States, plus just, you know, inactive wallets, etc.
There was a provision in there for what would happen to the unclaimed airdrop.
Now, some chains like Stride have the kind of continual airdrop where people continue to claim them.
But what Neutron originally proposed was that this would move to the Neutron Dow, sort of effectively their community pool.
We were looking at the proposal and there was a conversation internally.
And one of the things that, you know, I suggested really was that that allocation that was kind of minded for atom stakers should go to the atom community pool sort of as a kind of logical extension of,
Okay, well, if the individual staker couldn't claim it, at least it should be distributed to the hub and the stakers via the sort of extension of the community pool.
So, yeah, we reached out to the kind of Neutron core team.
They made the adjustments to the Genesis code, you know, pretty late in the day, I've got to admit.
So there was an element of they were concerned about this and, you know, there were a number of possibilities for how it could be technically implemented.
And one of the initial ones that we supported was effectively that, again, the money might have been sent to our multi-sig and then from there straight into the community pool.
Thankfully, we didn't need to do that. And I think that the kind of value of this to the hub's community pool stands somewhere between 40 to 50 million dollars on the current price of Neutron.
So, yeah, you know, from my point of view, that felt like a, you know, a personally a big win for the hub.
Johnny, would you want to just outline a couple of things that you think are kind of big successes from the last year?
I think Yusuf did a pretty good job of highlighting everything.
So I'm just basically reiterating just having a dedicated team that's focused on the hub itself.
And this played a huge role, for example, being a representative and funding Cosmoverse, right?
Sponsoring Cosmoverse.
Cryptocito last on the last one said that, you know, the Cosmos hub booth was basically empty.
There wasn't anybody there to represent it and just outline what future changes are coming for the hub or just near the ship, essentially.
Additionally, I think Dora Hacks was a massive success.
We recently just had a Twitter space with them and they had some, you know, major announcements there.
But yeah, like a major win is just attracting the talent to come back to the hub.
Cosmos as an ecosystem is very fragmented and very distributed.
But since Cosmos hub itself doesn't have, you know, Cosmos or smart contracts, one of our, I say, one of our greatest accomplishments is just bringing more development interest into the hub.
So we can, you know, continue to add value to it.
I would also add, Benji, you know, we try to go by vertical and address critical vertical.
So one, so we talked about the economics, obviously, the value there is can be tremendous, especially in a bull market.
We also played, I think, a decisive role in shared security.
You know, security is one of the hub's biggest moat.
So we made, we actually funded the development of mesh security with Osmosis, Grand Program, Juno, Acceler and Akash.
The development is going well.
We'll have some news in Q1, so basically in a few weeks, with regards to deployment.
We also added a core team to the, to replicated security within the testnet.
So now, like, because we added Crypto Crew to help onboarding consumer chains, Informal is not alone anymore.
So, you know, we can refer to it as further decentralizing the pool of contributors, the pool of co-contributors to ICS.
And I think that's extremely important if we want ICS and AEZ as a product and as a service to be successful.
You need multiple contributors.
So Crypto Crew is a respected validator, respected IBC realtor, and they're going to handle all things that matter, that, that, that deal with testnets for, for replicated security chains.
So we're very excited about that.
So that's shared security on, I think we, we made some big strides on events and media.
And again, to, to Johnny's point, the hub never had the representative.
So just the fact that there is someone that you can, you know, quote, unquote, call on the phone and get, get a response is a big win in itself.
And so that allowed us to be the main sponsor at Cosmoverse.
We started advertising and publishing research on, on Misari, opening up an entire new audience of sophisticated retail investor, extremely sophisticated institutional investors.
This being distributed as well on, on, on, on, on major platforms like CNBC and Bloomberg.
So that was a big win.
Johnny mentioned the Dora hack hackathon.
I think it was the, the first ever hub centric hackathon.
And then we aligned ourselves as well with another media brand.
Uh, one of the largest in crypto, which is block works with, uh, with the sponsorship of one of their podcasts, zero X research, but also by assigning, by giving them a grant, um, to work on, on, on, on, on, on the add up to economics.
Uh, so that's what, that would be some of the wins, uh, without others, but let's just move to, uh, to your next question.
Yeah.
Well, I was going to mention a couple, one other element, which was, I think that the, there are a number of grants for, um, the apps on neutron.
Um, so things like, um, show gun, um, things like calc, um, for example, and astro vault, all of which either have like revenue that would come back to the hub or token allocations that kind of, uh, kind of equivalent to the amount of the grant.
And I think that that was, from my point of view, another one of the kind of, uh, wins that we achieved was by finding additional revenue streams for the, for the hub and kind of trying to do grant making that also kind of came with long-term alignment.
Um, which I think is really helpful.
So, um, you know, I know that, that it's quite hard to reduce a year, a year down to, to that, but there are some sort of headlines and I would strongly encourage anyone here just to go to the website and check out the full end of mandate report, because there's a lot of work in there and it's well worth a read.
Um, I think that, you know, obviously no one would expect a startup to be perfect.
Um, I know from personal experience that we definitely had some challenges, but I wonder what you guys would sort of say is like, you know, one or two of the kind of biggest learnings.
And obviously with the view of you've got a proposal on chain at the moment, what have you, what have you kind of done to, to deal with those?
And I wonder if, um, Johnny, just partly because of your role, having been on oversight, whether it might be worth just kicking off with some of your thoughts.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, so, uh, first of all, our original proposal or signaling prop, uh, we made a lot of changes.
You know, there was a huge feedback from the community, uh, positive and negative, which contributed to us, uh, you know, revamping a lot of stuff.
And, uh, now we have a much stronger application, I would say.
Uh, but, uh, just start off from the beginning.
Uh, there's just been like a huge appetite for the outside world for a designated representative of the hub, as you said, said.
All right. So, uh, learning is really just that the idea of an AA DAO itself, it's great moving forward, whether, you know, same team members or not.
Um, another huge learning, since this was a pilot program year for AA DAO, uh, part-time model didn't really work for us.
Uh, we got overwhelmed with a lot of applications, a lot of people reaching out.
We didn't just process applications. Uh, we were essentially stewards of multi-state management.
We were representatives, uh, when people came to us to, you know, ask where to build on, on Cosmos, what to develop.
Right. We were essentially like representatives of a lot of things.
Um, but, uh, additionally, um, you know, being at Oversight, uh, got to engage a lot with the community members on Telegram.
And, uh, they want a voice in some of, uh, AA DAO, uh, matters, essentially.
Um, so, being more, uh, transparent, more communicative with them and listening to their concerns is definitely something that, uh, we are going to, uh, do more of.
Um, just being a community-owned DAO is very difficult for a start because we have our ideas.
The community has their ideas. Sometimes we may disagree.
So, it's difficult finding that sweet spot and middle ground, uh, to, you know, uh, do things effectively.
Um, and then, uh, additionally, I would say, uh, just collaborating further with, uh, key hub stakeholders like Informal.
Um, we had some, you know, grants that were, uh, building on the, uh, the Cosmos, uh, core modules, uh, like, for example, Dread Secure.
And, uh, the, the, the thing is we didn't factor in the governance aspect of it.
And when you are trying to implement something to the core hub itself, uh, you know, some developers may, may provide different feedback and, you know, may not.
They may not vote for it.
So, uh, right now we're working with, uh, Informal for a Cosmos hub improvement proposal where, uh, people that want to build on Cosmos SDK, um, and that have to go under governance.
Essentially just go through a pre-screening, uh, trial, um, and, and, you know, like, like a training method and to really evaluate to see if, like, if they're fit, you know, to implement changes on the hub.
And if that's the case, then they can, can go ahead and apply with us and we can move forward.
Um, so those were like, uh, some of the big learnings.
Um, um, so, and, and then going back to the part-time model, um, some things that we're doing is like, um, I was part of oversight, which had to, you know, for me managed, you know, over 30 teams, uh, after batch seven.
Uh, we're switching to full-time reviewers where we process applications and, you know, the teams that win, we essentially see them through the entire, uh, process itself.
And, uh, keep up with them, uh, with their milestones and KPIs and report to oversight and report to aid out itself.
So, so it's going to be a much more efficient and scalable process.
That sounds, that sounds great.
Um, Yusef, um, have you got anything that you would like to add around some of the challenges and learnings across the year?
And I know that we've had quite a lot of it.
I mean, Johnny has done a pretty good job, uh, at describing those learnings.
I would maybe add or double down on how difficult it is to, um, to build.
I can't hear Yusef at the moment.
Okay. Can you hear me now?
I can hear you.
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Uh, Johnny, can you hear me or Bendy?
I, I, I can hear you.
So it might, it might be Bendy.
I understand.
Yeah.
It seems like it's me that can't.
Um, I'm going to, uh, Yusef, keep talking and I'll drop and come back.
Okay. Sounds good.
I would say, so going back on the challenges and the learnings, you know, I, I always say, said that, uh,
uh, building a startup is extremely hard, but building a decentralized startup on top of it being community owned is probably one of the hardest thing to do.
It's been, uh, it's been tough, um, to, especially with the model, like Johnny mentioned, where we had 65% of the workforce being part time.
Uh, so we, we, we, we, we struggled, uh, with, uh, I would say variable engagement from, from, from our, from the DAO contributors.
And so that's why we're moving to a, to a full-time model next year.
I mean, one other challenge is just the, the opportunity cost, because we, you can, you cannot structure everything you want with the grant program.
So sometimes you just see opportunities passed by, uh, opportunities to get, to make deals on, on, on behalf of the, the, the, the Cosmos hub and the, and the Atom community.
And so that's why next year we're, you know, we're, uh, up leveling our skillset when it comes to, uh, to technical matters.
So we're hiring, we're hiring, uh, uh, uh, technical product manager.
We're hiring a grant lead to, and we're hiring a full-time developer and potentially also, uh, uh, a dev rel to help with, uh, with the IBC channels, for example, within, uh, within the hub.
And so that's, I think is, is, is, is going to tremendously, uh, help us.
We were not equipped to make, uh, strategic, uh, funding allocation.
And so that's one big learning that we have and we'll, you know, get to talk about it for, uh, our plans for next year, but I can, you know, quickly share a few words where next year we want to be much more, uh, strategic and intentional.
So move, move with intention with regards to how we allocate funds.
And so that means that we're going to be much more aggressive and we're going to increase, uh, the budgets towards what we call RFPs and high priority grants.
So in year one, we only had one RFP, which was obviously the most important one, the economics RFP.
Uh, it took significant resources from a DAO and we were just not equipped to do more than that.
Uh, but in year two, we are revamping the grant program itself so that we can allocate more funding, um, to, to, to strategic RFP.
And that, that means also, uh, having a skillset, better skillset on the research side.
And so that's why, uh, uh, a resource like a technical product manager, someone who can do, uh, deep research, engage, uh, with the community, gather feedback, and then prioritize a roadmap of, uh, important.
So, uh, things to work on is going to be very important.
Fantastic. I guess that brings us really to sort of talking about plans for next year.
Um, I think, you know, as you've sort of said, um, there was a lot of kind of pent up desire from builders for support.
And we had a huge number of applications, uh, in that first year, uh, you know, over 200.
And I think it was a lot of value in having kind of open grants, but as you say, sort of, uh, you're looking to be more intentional, run more, um, requests for proposal kind of projects and sort of things.
What do you, in terms of sort of thinking about the year ahead, obviously, I think things are feeling significantly more bullish than a year ago, but, um, what are the, you know, you talked a little bit about some of the kind of key verticals for, for the hub over the last year.
What do you think those kind of, um, broad areas that you're going to be looking to, to support and grow are going to be?
Very, very good question.
So in year one, the challenge was that the hub lacked a compelling narrative.
And that was a big challenge, uh, because it's, it's very difficult to know exactly how to allocate your capital and your funding when you don't know what is the direction of the hub.
And so it's basically first thing first.
And so that's why we work on the, the, the, the economics RFP to all convene around a shared narrative and the direction.
And it seems that within the realm of this tokenomics RFP, uh, we've, the committees seems to have found its true note, north.
It's too early to tell, but it seems that the narrative, the winning narrative is going to be not easy, but at, which is at the atomic zone, but, uh, atom as the interchain money, the money of the interchain, the money of the IBC economy.
And so now that we know that it's going to be much easier to draft those, uh, highly targeted RFP.
So I'll just give you an example.
Uh, right now there is a huge issue with, uh, reliers operations.
So reliers, um, basically are the ones who are, uh, exchange, not exchanging, but transmitting value across IBC.
So anytime you want to, uh, cross a chain from going from one IBC chain to the other, uh, you need, you need, you need reliers.
So there are a core and essential piece of the IBC infrastructure.
And right now they're operating at loss.
There is no incentives for them.
And most of them are already validators.
So they cover it at last and basically address it as a public good.
But obviously this is not a sustainable model.
So right now on the, on the Cosmos hub governance, uh, you would see that there is a prop called prop 862 to basically bootstrap a very, you know, an early pilot, let's say, called the relier DAO, uh, that is made from, uh, it's a multi-sig of five validators that are also, uh, very deeply involved in relier operation.
But I think that there is here, uh, a massive opportunity for, uh, for Atom to position itself as money by basically encouraging Atom as gas token for, for those, uh, those IBC reliers.
And, you know, there are a few ways to, to explore that.
It could be that, um, the, um, the, the, the payout for reliers could be a percentage of the transaction fee itself.
That transaction fee can be paid in Atom.
So we want to explore how we can increase Atom utility as gas token at the infrastructure level.
Uh, if we reach a point where reliers preferred currency to get paid, uh, is Atom, then obviously that's a big win.
Uh, so that's, that's one vertical.
Um, I think Atom, uh, as money, uh, has, has a shot outside of Cosmos.
Uh, right now, uh, nothing is done.
So I just, like, we, we need to do more initiatives where we position Atom as the international money outside of Cosmos by basically, um, pushing for, um, Atom as preferred collateral.
And Atom as capital assets are multiple, you know, Solana DeFi application, Ethereum DeFi application, uh, that are constantly adding new collateral types.
And Atom right now is just not considered because no one is representing, uh, no one is representing it.
Uh, so we're very excited by this one.
And, um, on our strategy committee, we have Riley from Stride, uh, who's a superstar, uh, in DeFi, who has a very keen, uh, and sharpened vision.
And he's going to be decisive basically in exporting out Atom outside of, uh, of Cosmos in the DeFi space and crafting that narrative of, of Atom as money.
Uh, one other thing that we want to explore, uh, is the hub as an IBC router.
Uh, so it was, uh, I would say people talked about it and, uh, companies, contributors talked about it, but it just never happened.
But if we're trying to extrapolate Cosmos within the next five years and assuming that IBC keeps growing, the growing, the, the way it grows, uh, it's just a question of very logic, very logical that you can have multiple, uh, routers.
You cannot have just one router.
Uh, and those direct, uh, channels, those direct IBC channels are not the best way to, to, to scale IBC.
And so, uh, I think that there is a lot to be doing in, uh, the hub as an, as an IBC router.
And we're very excited about that.
Other verticals that can still push the, the Atom as, as money narrative are targeted initiatives with wallets.
So we already done a lot, uh, in year one with, uh, Mystic Lab, uh, bringing, um, bringing MetaMask to, to Cosmos through the, the Snap product.
We also, uh, uh, work with, uh, uh, uh, Leap Wallet to, uh, to build custom solutions that favor Atom as, as, as, as gas.
Uh, and we're very, like, we're very motivated to keep doing that in year two and, and keep nurturing and further nurturing the relationship with those wallets because their, their place within the crypto space is absolutely critical.
And so we need to make sure that we have excellent relationship on Atom side to push again for Atom as gas, but not only just like also on, on, on ramp, off ramp, all those things where Atom needs to be first front and center to reinforce that narrative of, of, uh, of Atom as the gateway asset and Atom as, uh, as, uh, as money.
And then other ideas, um, I'm, I'm, I'm personally very, I thought that, uh, Sonny's, uh, vision, uh, is very compelling for the hub.
So for those that are, you know, uh, that haven't been followed, following what, uh, Sonny has been talking about, Sonny is, and that's not the good news.
It's, it's not, uh, mutually exclusive with Atom as money.
Those, those visions complement perfectly.
Sonny is basically saying that Atom has a shot at, uh, becoming the third, uh, largest capital asset in the world after BTC and ETH.
And, uh, by playing, by doubling down on two of its, uh, uh, let's say superpowers, which is how vibrant the on-chain governance of the hub is.
I think it, it is potentially the largest and most vibrant, uh, community, uh, that deals with governance in, in the entire crypto space.
And then the other point is just how decentralized the hub is.
Uh, I mean, just think about it that for, for example, what happened with, with Prop 82 and, and, and, and, and, and Atom 2.0, that, that's something that is, uh, yes, it does have a lot of drama, but it is unique and it just showcases how decentralized the hub.
So if we can find, uh, products that we can build on top of those two primitives that are on-chain governance and decentralization and match that with Atom as money, then I think sky's the limit.
And Sonny was mentioning that Atom has the potential to be a top five or top three token.
And I fully agree with that.
And we, we need to build more around that.
And so, for example, Effort Capital, Blockworks Research, um, one of their research module is on, um, uh, establishing a voting power tax.
I'm personally in favor, not everyone, the largest validators are probably not going to like that, but I think it's extremely positive and needed if we want to further decentralize.
We, we absolutely need to preserve, uh, and double down on the decentralization of the hub.
That's how, uh, the hub is going to win long-term.
Um, so that's, those are just a few ideas.
Maybe Johnny wants to, uh, bring, uh, yeah, share his view.
I would just, uh, include anything that utilizes Atom, really.
So even, you know, for example, more Atom-backed stable points, deploying Atom across, uh, you know, outside of the IBC ecosystem.
Um, all of, all of those, uh, couple along with what you said, you know, tie up together for, like, Atom as a money narrative, not just interchange money.
Um, I, I, I think what Sonny called it is, like, uh, the most decentralized, uh, governance, uh, chain in, in crypto.
And I've been doing, decentralizing further on, on the, the validator stakes, um, voting, um, preserving that and strengthening it, um, and working on any type of application that fully utilizes Atom as, as money is, is, is the right direction, uh, personally.
Uh, and then additionally, like, like, uh, you said, mentioned with, uh, Atom as a gas token, like, you know, this is such a huge, uh, problem that is solved.
In, in the IBC ecosystem, because people that come to, you know, I have a lot of people from Ethereum, Solana, that message me privately and say, hey, how do I get onto this chain or what token do I need, right?
If we had one, one central token for, for this, and I know central, it's kind of like the opposite of what we're talking about, but in terms of the, uh, user interface, you know, having just Atom as, as your gateway token to the Cosmos ecosystem where you can pay for gas or you can swap for anything,
it, it, it just makes so much sense, um, and makes everything more composable.
One thing that I would like to add, Benji, um, just a quick, um, someone has raised his hand to, uh, to, uh, to talk.
We will give you, uh, uh, an opportunity to talk as soon as we finish, you know, as Benji finishes his question, we'll open up the floor to, to community questions.
So thank you.
Thank you for your patience.
Yeah, we'll try and keep things moving.
Um, I, you know, difficult because we're trying to talk about a whole year's worth of work and future vision for the future, but I, you know, and appreciate people will want to chime in and we'll definitely make sure there's time at the end for questions.
Um, so in terms of, obviously one of the things you said, Yusuf, was looking to kind of, um, almost sort of, you know, spend more in terms of these kind of targeted initiatives.
But I just wondered, obviously, as soon as you say, spend more, people will be thinking, oh no, the price of atoms going to go down.
It's sort of roughly, and I appreciate this may be a difficult question.
What kind of scale in terms of return on investment would you say year one had?
Because I think that may provide some comfort for people when they're thinking about there's going to be more spending in, in year two.
Yeah, very good question.
So I would say, and I mentioned it at the beginning of, uh, of the space is I think the, uh, the most underrated, um, return on investment that we brought is just ourselves, basically.
Just having a fully functional, uh, grant program, uh, that is fully owned, community driven, uh, I think that in itself and having a representative, having a representative for the hub.
I think that in itself is a massive win because we, there were so much low hanging fruits that were not processed because we, people didn't know who to talk to within, in the hub.
And that was a big problem.
Uh, I'll just give you an example.
Like when, uh, that, that first, uh, protocol on liquidity that, that we deployed on behalf of the hub and stride on Astropor, uh, I mean, it could have happened without us, but it would have been more, more difficult.
And the fact that we were there, uh, an elected representative of the hub.
So a team that has legitimacy, uh, is something that was very important to achieve.
And then, so for, so those people talking about what is the return on investment, well, the most obvious one, and again, people will debate whether, uh, we were fully, uh, in control or if it would have happened without us.
But again, I'm repeating the, the, the neutral airdrop, right?
Which is right now, uh, worth close to $50 million.
So I, I think that right now, if you go on mean scan and you look at the atom community pool, the neutron shares are higher than the amount of atom that we had.
So we have like $45 million of neutron and maybe $42 million of atom.
So that, that was a big one, a big win for us.
And then just basically we were able to lay the foundation in year one for something, uh, even more successful in year two, where, you know, we can build on our achievements in year one and become much more targeted, much more focused, much more, much more granular.
Um, so, and, you know, in terms of revenue shares, like one thing that we've been exploring, uh, that we've seen in year one, and I think Benji, you were as well heavily involved in that.
And that's, I think, underrated.
It's, it's, it's difficult to know those deals that we made in year one.
So Shogun, uh, Astrovert and, uh, MetaMask Snaps, it's difficult to know if they can yield results.
But, uh, what is certain is that it gave, it gave us a lot of, uh, we learned a lot in structuring those deals.
We learned a lot about our gaps and one thing that we want to do, and it's actually on chain, uh, within the proposal is for, for, for, uh, for a DAO to become, uh, a revenue generator for, uh, the hub.
So making deals on behalf of the hub, sending them to the Atom Committee pool and, um, have a take fee for us so that we can start becoming self-sustainable financially.
And so I think that in year two, what we want to do in addition to those targeted RFPs that are more intentional in terms of allocating capital is to, uh, strike more deals with high quality, uh, players in the space to generate revenue for, for, for, uh, uh, and so I, I would say year two is going to be very different from year one because we have that experience now.
And we learned a bit about, uh, what traps we should avoid when we make this on behalf of the hub, what kind of resources do we need?
So I, I would say that the Atom Committee, the Atom Committee should expect more of those deals, uh, in the future.
And we hope that they will, uh, they will be, uh, successful, but, you know, it's, it's a difficult question.
And you've been mentioning it multiple times, Benji, which is that right now, 50%, 40 to 50% of the grants that we gave during the first mandate have not gone through completion.
So it, it is very difficult to, to, to, to measure, uh, a specific return on investment because they're not finished.
But I think that the, the, uh, there is like a soft effect, which is that there is now a, a, a, a grant program that is, that is there, that is, uh, that is getting recognition, uh, outside contributors from Cosmos and other Cosmos chains know that they now have, uh, uh, a team to, to talk to.
So that's, I think, severely, uh, uh, and the rated, uh, and then obviously when we talk about the return on investments on, on tokenomics where, uh, on, on, on the hub, uh, on our own program, sorry.
Well, the tokenomics RFP, uh, uh, we're entering, like I mentioned, the governance phase and, you know, for example, the, the, the reduction in the max inflation, you know, we, it, that was somehow involved because one of the co-sponsor, uh, was effort capital, uh, from block.
Who is the, the, the, the, the lead researcher on the tokenomics grant.
So, you know, we're already starting to see those effects and if we're able to, uh, fix, you know, tokenomics and improve the tokenomics of, of, of, of the hub and atom, uh, we're talking billions of values of added values.
It's not, we're not talking dozens of millions.
We're talking billions and this is only the beginning and we made everything possible.
It was our very first RFP.
We did it in March or in April of, of, of 2023.
We saw that as a priority because we wanted to be ready.
We wanted atom to be ready when the bull market starts.
And I don't know if we're going to be a hundred percent ready, but we're getting there.
And those, uh, those governance proposals from block works and, and binary and RMIT are hitting the floor now.
And it's going to accelerate within the next three to six months.
And if we can have everything completely locked within the next six months, then, you know, we're up for a great bull market for atom, which is exactly what we want.
So we're just basically laying the ground to make sure that atom is in a, is in a better spot.
Uh, and so it's not just about in the short term pumping the atom price, but it's also, again, about laying the foundation for successful, uh, for successful hub, uh, in a sustainable way.
I think sustainability here is very, uh, is very important.
So, um, I know that one of the, um, so, you know, the ROI was a question that the community had asked.
Definitely. Um, uh, a couple of other ones and we'll be quick because then we can open the floor up to others.
Um, one was just around sort of what's the, there's obviously a proposed bonus structure in the new proposal.
Um, so kind of almost like what are the criteria for that being paid out?
And then the other one, um, really is, was around how can, you know, how is AADAO going to open the doors more for community?
You've talked about recruiting some roles.
How, how are you going, you know, obviously I think the community would, would like to be able to kind of, you know, see roles and apply for them.
And certainly my own personal experience is that, you know, I think there are people out there like myself who were involved in the community who would actually hopefully be able to provide value and we should find routes to that happening.
So I just wondered if you could very briefly answer those two points around the bonus and around recruitment, and then we can move to hopefully, um, taking questions from the floor.
A hundred percent.
A hundred percent.
So let's start with the second question, which is, uh, community involvement.
I think from what I've seen on the forum, this was the main critic around the AADAO.
So not, uh, we're not criticized on the quality of our grants or the way we were signing grants, but mostly criticized on the fact that, uh, we didn't involve enough the, the ATOM community in what we were doing.
Uh, and that's a comment that is extremely fair.
Uh, I mean, if we are owned, if we, if we say publicly, right, that we're owned by the hub, uh, then obviously we need to be more inclusive of, of, of the community members.
So this comment is very, very well taken and one, uh, decisive step that we're taking, uh, you know, our oversight was criticized because it was self-appointed.
Uh, and so in year two, what we intend to do, and we will honor this commitment, it's already on chain and everything that is on chain and passive imported is, has a, uh, uh, extreme, uh, value.
And we, and we have to commit to, to, to, to, to, to, to doing it is opening up the oversight committee to one elected.
Atom community member.
And that's going to be, I think a huge positive for the hub and also for AADAO because frankly, what, uh, what we want is to have as much legitimacy as possible.
And so if having an oversight member elected directly by the atom community helps with that regard, that's a, that's a huge plus for, for, for us.
us. And so as soon as we get back from the holidays, our oversight is going to start the
process. We don't know exactly how the process is going to look like, but it's likely that we're
going to follow what Osmosis did when they selected their canonical bridge. So they basically had
four different bridges, so gravity, axler, wormhole, etc. And they all went on chain. And the bridge
with the highest turnout and the highest vote outcome just won the contract. And so we would
likely do the same and make sure that we're ready to spearhead the process from A to Z,
from start to completion, just to make sure that everything runs smoothly. And we're
potentially create a topic on the forum, on the Cosmos Hub forum, having candidates on the
oversight, candidates for the oversight, talk about their program and how they intend to represent
the highest interest of the hub within a DAO. It's going to be a great, I think, democratic exercise
that shows, again, the strength of the atom on chain governance. So that's one thing that we're doing
on giving a voice to the community, a direct voice. Other thing that we're doing, because we're migrating
to DAODAO, the oversight power is not just going to be a social power because of the oversight. It's also
going to be encoded on chain with a veto power and a power to discontinue any grant or to cancel any expense.
Because in DAODAO, you have the possibility to build an approval flow. The oversight will be represented in all transactions of AADAO, having the possibility to veto any transaction.
And so it's not just about a social contract within AADAO, like it was in year one, where the oversight, and Johnny can talk about it, where a grant was discontinued by the oversight.
Now it's also moving on chain with on chain powers. So that's the second question.
On the first question, which is the bonuses, you know, obviously, like anytime you talk about bonus, you will see people raising questions and concerns.
And that's perfectly fine. They have a right to get answers to their questions. So the way we're structuring that is roughly 80% of the bonus
will be going to performance based metrics. And then 20% will be going to retention.
So why performance and why retention? So let's start with retention. Again, what we've noticed in year one is that part-time contributors have a variable level of engagement.
And look, we are in a competitive market, and the bull market is about to start. And we want to make sure that we retain our best elements.
And so that retention bonus, basically, only people who were in the DAO, in AADAO for 12 months will be eligible.
So that means that the bonus is not going to be paid until at least February, which is 12 months since we started AADAO.
That's a way to retain our best talents. And then the other part is the performance part.
So the performance part is split in two parts. There is the collective performance, so the team performance, which is 50% of the 75% performance.
And then there is the individual part, which is another 50%. So those numbers can change.
It could be 40, 60, or 60, 40. Like, that's something that we're going to be discussing with our oversight.
But basically, we want to make sure that a big chunk of the performance is at the team level.
Because what Atom committee members care about, they don't care about individual performance, whether I perform or if John is performing or whether there's another AADAO member.
What they want is the team to perform. And so that's why the bonus allocation is going to be more biased toward team performance rather than individual performance.
One other thing that is very important to mention, those bonus, they're not automatic. They're not guaranteed.
We're thinking about most of the bonus will be paid if you exceed expectation.
So you will have some kind of bonus if you meet. Obviously, if you don't meet expectation, if you're below expectations, obviously, you're not getting anything.
If you're meeting expectation, you're getting some of it. And if you're exceeding expectation, that's where you are in position to receive the maximum allocation.
But I would be very surprised that we distribute the entire pool of bonus, which is 100,000 Atom, just because there are so many conditions.
So I would just give you a condition. Maybe the team is not going to be rated above expectation.
Maybe the team is going to be rated at meet expectation. And then individual members are going to exceed expectation.
And there are so many ways to see that, so many variables, that it's almost impossible to distribute the entire bonus pool.
The goal is not to distribute the entire bonus pool.
And then also, it's also a question of fairness, seeing people complaining about that.
But, like, if AADAO is performing and delivering value, like, don't you think that it may be deserved, that bonus?
It's representing the interest of the hub. It's working. Members are working extremely hard.
And you need a way to align AADAO with the future of the hub.
And the best way to do that is through a token allocation.
I mean, we're not reinventing the wheel here, like other ecosystems, other L1s, other DABs, protocols, DeFi, etc.
They're all doing that with the contributors.
So I don't see why it would be different with the Cosmos Hub, which is, you know, a $4 billion economy today, a $4.5 billion economy.
And we are the only core team.
So if you're not giving a token allocation to the core team, then what are you doing?
I think it's just common sense.
Thank you for that, Yousef.
Sort of at this stage, I think it would be great to just, you know, I can't unfortunately say, I think, if anyone does put their hands up.
But if people do, then we can obviously get them up on stage.
Certainly just looping back on the kind of community engagement point of view, as someone who's no longer involved with the DAO,
you know, I would strongly urge anyone, you know, if you've had the inclination to turn up and listen to this space,
you're probably someone who could put a useful contribution towards the Atom Accelerator DAO.
And certainly, you know, my personal view is that if you don't, you know, if you care about Atom and you care about the hub,
what the hub really needs is it needs people that care to contribute, because unlike a lot of ecosystems,
whether our foundations and whether our core teams, there basically isn't, you know, that entity to do that on behalf of the hub.
Yes, there is informal systems. Yes, I suppose the ICF exists and yes, all in bits exists, but you might as well not count them.
You do have crypto crew that have been onboarded by a DAO. You have a DAO that is elected.
You had Confio that got some funding from the hub and you have Notional that have been funded by the hub.
But ultimately, that isn't enough for an ecosystem of the hub size.
And I do think the more that people put up their hands and kind of get involved, the absolute better for the for the whole space.
And I can also sort of, you know, the last the nine months that I spent working for Atom Accelerator DAO were an absolute pleasure and a real honour to do.
So I would absolutely advocate anyone who is at all interested to do it and obviously reach out to the team and speak to them.
They'll be able to give you insight. But equally, if you want to speak to me about my experiences and, you know, it must sound odd that someone who's not involved anymore would say, go and do it.
But I strongly would. So if anyone wants to ask me any questions about that, feel free to do that.
You know, slide into my DMs. That's fine. Have we got anyone with their hands up?
We do. We have Alpha Omega, I think. I'm not seeing the full name. Please take the stage, Alpha. You're most welcome to ask a question.
Yeah, thank you. It's Thomas of Alpha Omega Energy. Alpha Omega Energy is my startup.
I have a breakthrough clean energy technology startup. So it's a hardware. I manufacture generators. Fuel cell is what we're commercializing first.
We make electricity and then sell the electricity. And we got our early funding, which we got some funding. We did not get a VC round.
It was just some Bitcoiners that we met and they funded us. And then they asked us to build an Ethereum mining data center. And we did that.
And so now I'm interested to mine Bitcoin with my electricity. And I want to put my startup on the blockchain.
So I'm looking at these different platforms, Pulsechain and these others. I've now heard of the AVAX system. And I just ran across this, this Atom accelerator. Sounds interesting.
I'm not really looking for a grant, though, of course, probably everybody would say, wow, wouldn't that be nice?
Because I'm much more looking for investment. I came from Silicon Valley, left. I'm building in Southeast Asia, where it's much cheaper and very light regulation over here.
So I'm very interested to hear more about your guys' program and was about to apply for the Binance program.
They have a founder's track and then an accelerator also.
So I'm looking to learn more about these and hoping to launch a token and maybe do an airdrop, this kind of thing.
I don't come from a coding background. I'm an engineer, electrical, mechanical and physicist, etc.
So I'm from this space, highly awarded, won 13 international awards, won Techstars events in Asia, won the Cambodia National Startup Fair and a few big other startup fairs.
Slush Tokyo, Slush Singapore and another big one we're awarded at.
So very soon we're going to have our generator out on video and be showing that everywhere as much as we can.
So we'd really like to maybe have a Zoom call with you guys and see what we might be able to do.
I'm interested to take a look at all options and see what can be done.
Yeah, well, thank you for the comment and your question.
I guess if you're looking to build, because AEDAW is mostly about the hub and beyond the overall interchain that we call Cosmos.
So if this is your intent to explore more, super happy to get either me or one of the other AEDAW team members to be on the call with you.
That would be a pleasure, 100%.
Yeah, I think it would be best for us to do it on one of these platforms into an existing community like this.
I think that would be best.
And that's what I'm used to as well, coming from Silicon Valley.
You know, most of it's done in some kind of community or ecosystem.
That's really ideal where there can be, I mean, as many people, there's a lot more connections together and collectively in this kind of environment than just 100% going in on your own.
And, of course, many business people do that on their own, and that's fine, too.
But in this blockchain world, especially if you're not coding, and with these massive communities that there are, it makes a lot of sense if there is some support network there to plug into that.
And then everybody work together for mutual benefit.
I think that has a lot of strategic advantages.
Sorry for cutting across.
As this is probably sort of slightly off topic, I'm sure you guys can pick this up.
I think this is an interesting thing in general, though, in the sense that it is the kind of slightly tangential thing that happens for what Johnny and Youssef were talking about earlier on, where, you know, someone is interested in Cosmos in general.
How do they get onboarded?
Well, Atom Accelerator Dow starts to become something where that can happen, even if it's not directly related.
And so I think that, you know, this is a good example of it in practice.
I see that Luis is up with a question.
So we'll move to Luis, if that's okay.
Yeah.
Let me.
Yeah, go ahead, Luis.
Hello, everyone.
Luis Cahir from Interbox.
I just wanted to share my thoughts that I share on the forum, and I think it's been mostly addressed, and I wanted to thank you guys for it.
In the end, I think everyone kind of agrees that Ada was not a successful first term, but there were some gaps.
And I think you guys are aware of them, so it's good to see that the feedback has been well received and taken into account.
And I think, in the end, with DAOs, the most important part is to be communicative, transparent with the community as much as possible, even erring on the side of our communication, just to make sure that everyone's on the same page, you know?
Thank you very much, Luis, for your comment, and this is Yusef speaking, and I've seen your comments multiple times on the forum, and look, we get better when we get challenged.
And one thing that I want to ensure that everyone understands is that in year one, our lack of communication or involvement of the Atom community was not coming from a bad intention.
It was mostly coming from the fact that we completely lacked the resources, and we were overwhelmed extremely fast.
And that gave the outcome that you saw, and we're trying to learn and iterate, and again, there is one constant for us, which is crucial to abide for, which is that we are owned, and a community-owned DAO grant program,
and that the voice of the community is the most crucial element to take into consideration.
And so, like you said, Luis, like, we're taking steps to involve more of the community.
One other thing that I didn't mention during the call is that for the RFP and high priority grant process going forward,
we will start discussing them publicly on the forum.
So, Luis, I think that you're part of Prop 862 about relayer operation.
You know, I just posted on the forum from my personal account how a DAO can help with relayer's operation around IDC.
I think this is a critical part, and so we're very happy to engage with you and the relayer DAO that you've been setting up.
I think it's a great initiative, and so you can expect much more, not transparency.
I think we've always been transparent, at least on the, you know, on pretty much everything, including the financials.
I think financials are what matters.
People want to know where their money is, and, you know, our wallets are public.
We publish them on our every transparency report.
We put payment memos on transactions, et cetera.
But we can always do more, and so that I personally took that feedback of us not including the Atom Committee enough.
I really took it at heart in a positive way, not in a negative way, and we're going to do much more of that.
And so we want to make sure that everyone can talk and give his opinion, and the best way to do that is basically to signal, you know,
our, how we intend to allocate capital, and that's the best place to do that is the Cosmos Forum.
So expect from us much more involvement with the Atom Committee in the 12 months ahead, and thank you very much for your comment, which is much appreciated.
Awesome.
Thank you all for this space.
Of course.
Yeah, and I want to thank Luis and every community member that, you know, provides, like, meaningful feedback and criticism.
Even if it's criticism that's, you know, parts of negative, like, I think that's really important to, for many of the team members, you know,
because for me, I'm always in, you know, Telegram and socials and try to voice, you know, the community's criticisms and questions to the team members.
And if it's something that, you know, requires, you know, more additional conversations, I happily reach out to anyone that has any major concerns.
So feel free to reach out to me, you know, even on to the next year.
I think we're going to, what's obvious is that more members from AEDOW are going to become much more communicative with socials,
like Telegram and Twitter spaces and answering, you know, questions.
So expect more on that from us.
Next question, is it, who's, I have, we have Techno and we have, where's Sean?
Yusuf, I think you need to knock Techno down, actually.
Sorry, I was struggling to get a word in.
I did message.
They're just spamming in the Nest, so we can remove them, please.
And then we'll come to Sean as the speaker, please.
Yeah, sure.
Sean, please go ahead.
So I was just wondering if you guys thought about, like, as for, like, communication and for, like, governance and for, like, you know, the diversity of, like, the Cosmos, like, community.
Like, why not have, like, a representative or, like, reach out to a chain, you know, like, have a line of communication with, like, an individual, like, I don't know, like a delegate or, like, a UN type of deal.
So, you know, we're, like, there's someone that has, like, direct access from each chain or, like, something like that, you know, or some group, some direct way to connect with you guys.
That's, it's an interesting point.
We did, so one of the things that I was responsible for last year was sort of I was kind of primary point of contact with, for example, the Osmosis Grants Program.
There is now a Neutron Grants Program, and there definitely were areas in which there were kind of collaboration between different projects.
So, for example, with OGP, we co-funded the work on MetaMess Snaps, and we also contributed to the Mesh Security project that they led research on.
So, and we discussed a few others, some of which were only of interest to one party or the other.
I think there definitely is a space needed in the ecosystem for inter-chain collaboration.
You know, personal view here is that the ICF is not doing enough in this area.
It needs to step up, and it needs to kind of actually give more authority to the chains within it about what they want to do.
So, personally, and I don't mean to speak for Yusuf and Johnny here, but just because it was something I worked closely on, I don't think it's directly useful for that to be AADAO.
There probably is some merit to such a thing existing and there being collaboration, but I also think kind of that diversity really matters.
And one of the real challenges for AADAO is how to fulfill everything that's asked of it without growing into some sort of overly large and directionless kind of central entity.
And I think that's a really challenging thing, but it's definitely a model that we talked about and I think does have some merits.
I just don't know what the correct execution on it would be unless, Johnny or Yusuf, you have any thoughts?
I mean, I can share something.
You know, what is the, how can I say, what is the massive transformative purpose of AADAO?
So, as one of the founders, I can say that my goal when we started AADAO with Better Future was always for AADAO to become the most crucial public good for the hub.
Because we are a public good, right?
The grant program is a public good.
And I mean, obviously, yes, there are challenges.
And as we scale, it's going to be very important that we also scale our public communications, our involvement of the community, and make sure also that we don't grow too large and too big and become a centralizing force.
And, you know, I think one way to address this is for the hub to progressively take ownership of our oversight committee.
And that's, I think, going to be critical.
So, that would be my, I'm not sure if I'm addressing exactly the question, but, yeah, it's going to be challenging.
You know, as AADAO grows, so will scrutiny around us.
And that's normal.
Anything that grows, there will be more scrutiny.
And, you know, I think that scrutiny is a great way to improve and progress.
We get challenged.
And, you know, like, just like we, based on the feedback from the committee, we did many changes on the forum for, on our proposal for the second year.
And that would not have been possible without the committee feedback.
So, we are constantly evolving, you know, looking at the market conditions, looking at the hub situation, looking at our own situation, and trying to take the best steps to move forward.
Like, I would add on to this.
So, we, on the first year, we funded three teams, I would say, that kind of helped with this.
And one of them is CosmWasm by example, for teams that want to build on CosmWasm smart contract.
Cosmod, this is for the SDK module registry.
And then, we recently funded Interchain Info to publish, you know, many resources on, you know, what's happening in Cosmos, essentially.
You know, maybe an idea would be some kind of, like, Interchain Council of representatives, like people from, let's say, Confio for CosmWasm, Binary for Cosmos SDK.
You know, this is just my personal idea on it, like a representative team where builders that want to come to Cosmos, you know, want to develop something.
They can reach out to them, and then they can guide them to the next steps.
But, essentially, we, you know, recognize that problem, and, you know, if there are applications that, you know, apply that we see value, and, you know, we fund it towards this route.
Any more questions in the audience?
I think Stake and Relax requested earlier, I'm not sure if you want to jump in, you know?
Yeah, I don't see any requests here.
Oh, give me one sec.
Let me do it right now.
Here you go, Stake and Relax.
Flo is yours.
Hello, hello.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Awesome.
Yeah, thanks for putting me up here.
From the recap that you just mentioned here in the space, it becomes clear that the Atom Accelerator DAO essentially is pursuing three topics, three main topics.
One is, of course, the recent tokenomics upgrade, where you work together with, what is it, Capital Effort and the other teams.
The second one that you mentioned is, obviously, you also care about the performance of the token price.
And thirdly, which is the majority of your task, I would say, are the grants.
And especially regarding the grants, I would have questions like, how do you essentially value these applications?
Which KPIs are you using?
Do you have different segments, like different volumes for different grants?
And then there also, the KPIs are changing.
Do you also have different KPIs for different topics?
Like, we have probably also, like, some grant applications for infrastructure, some other grant applications for other niches.
I want to ask regarding this.
And secondly, as you also mentioned here in the space, you mentioned that probably, like, the majority of your work didn't really materialize as the grants are given out and, like, they're, like, still developing.
And I want to ask, like, how are you following up with the grant applicants and receivers?
And do you have thought maybe about, like, a process splitting up this grant in different niches or, like, branches?
Where you say, like, hey, if you don't reach these KPIs for this grant, your grant gets withdrawn or you don't get the second one?
Very good question.
That's a large question.
Yeah.
I'll try and do a really succinct answer on this.
Yeah.
Basically, all of that's already happened and been done.
But I think the biggest problem actually is that Yusuf and Better Future only asked for nine months.
And I think that was a huge mistake because by the time you've actually processed any applications, you've almost got no time for anyone to deliver.
So, but then I don't think there have been any appetite for voting in something on a longer timescale.
And I think that that's one of the tensions.
So, in terms of the way that the process worked historically, which may not be how it works in the future, because the Yusuf spoke already about transitioning from open applications to RFPs.
But the way it worked in the past was that there were open applications and every application was rated on the same categories.
And they were rated around how much they kind of aligned with the sort of areas that we were interested in, the strength of the team, the value to Atom and the detail of their project plan, essentially.
And if that did enough, then it went to interview and we kind of did a lot of our due diligence and kind of dug deeper into the projects.
And then it would go to vote within the DAO.
And then if a grant was awarded, most of them were milestone.
There were a few that it would be, you know, it's relatively small.
So, you know, if it's $10,000, you're probably not going to milestone it.
But they were milestone.
And then there's follow up.
And a lot of those grants that have not come to completion yet are still in their milestone processes.
Now, I think there are some really interesting decisions to be made for whoever is sort of, you know, the grant lead that's yet to be appointed by a DAO in terms of, let's say, a project misses a deadline on its grant funding.
Does that mean it's terminated?
Does that mean it's just extended?
You know, we're working at the forefront of tech here.
You know, someone missing deadline by a month.
Should that mean that the plug is pulled on that?
And I think that one of the real challenges is that the community rightly will want the procedures to be robust.
But the more robust it becomes and the more onerous it is to apply, the less applications you get and the more things that you discount before they even start.
And I think one of the upsides of AI DAO that we didn't really talk about is the fact that there were over 200 applications.
And in terms of actual spend proposals on the hub, you know, in the last year, I think there may have been five or six.
So the bar that governance is, is too onerous for people that want to be funded by the hub.
And I think there's a sweet spot that needs to be found in terms of how people run a process.
So that is kind of where we try to be in year one.
I suspect that once AI DAO has appointed its grant lead, they will publish, like we did, the kind of categories that we were interested in and the way that assessments were done.
So really complex area, and I think it is probably slightly more art than science in terms of the appropriate way to do it.
And I know that's not a hard and fast answer to it, and it doesn't really talk about what's going to happen in the future.
But I don't think that AI DAO will be in a position to say that yet because they're in the process of recruiting a grant lead.
So until that person is in post, I think the detail of it probably will be slightly up in the air.
But does that sort of, is that helpful, Stake and Relax?
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
And, like, there's also, like, a following up question which, like, straight up connects here.
The reason why I ask regarding KPIs is, like, I think also for new applicants, like, they also wonder, like, hey, do I get a grant?
Like, what's the size of the grant?
And if these KPIs are, like, in a sheet or something and they can see, like, oh, okay, maybe, like, I would be eligible, but I should work on this KPI, like, to improve it or to get, like, this grant, I think that would be insightful.
And secondly, as you mentioned, like, with the milestones, I know, like, it's a lot of work that you have to do, 200 applications.
You have to go through them.
You have to discuss it internally.
I know, especially as, like, some of you just work, like, not full-time, which is going to change now.
I know it's a lot of work, but I think also what the community is saying from my feeling regarding transparency is, like, they would like to follow up, like, on a metric, like, hey, what's going on?
I know you have a web page, but some people complained, like, hey, like, you have put the information there, but it's not, like, like, it's not giving the full picture that you maybe discuss internally.
And I wanted to ask, like, regarding that.
I was just going to say, like, so a lot of that probably was my choice, you know, it was a team decision in the end, but one of the things, because I was responsible for the website and a lot of the comms, you can't give the community as much information as the community want, and nor should you.
And that's the reality that Yusuf will not be allowed, can't say, really.
It's not, it's the bit that we shouldn't say, but it's absolutely true.
And the reason for it is loads of people here are literally pitching for their business.
And if I come out and say this was a terrible application and the team are a load of scammers, well, maybe if there are a load of scammers, we should say that publicly, actually.
But if we just say they're not very competent, they've put together a bad proposal, and we publicly say that, that's very damaging.
And it's really hard for teams to come back from it.
And then again, it lowers the likelihood of application.
And the trust required in this process is quite high.
And trust, again, is a funny word in blockchain, because we're meant to, you know, we're not meant to trust, right?
But these are not, we're working, you know, the meat space and not just tech.
And I think that's really difficult.
And I completely respect why the community wants to know more.
They want to know why did X application get rejected, but why not?
And I just don't think it's appropriate for AADAO to give that answer, because I think it does a disservice to the grantees.
And I know that that will be a really disappointing answer, but that's one that I very much believed during my time on it.
And I think it would have been very detrimental to give the community the level of detail that they're asking for, because I don't think it enables, there's so much context that goes into these grants that it isn't very useful.
And I think what's the most important way to judge whether you think AADAO is assessing the grants correctly is to look at the outputs that are coming from the grants it does approve.
Now, you can like them or you can disagree with them, but that ultimately is where it gets to.
And I think it's just, it's a very difficult process to get right.
And that's why I say it's a bit more art than science.
And certainly someone else may take a different view from what I did.
But I think that the kind of idea that the community needs to have radical transparency is probably detrimental to the overall process.
And, you know, that's challenging.
And I'm not sure that there is a perfect balance and maybe it was not transparent enough.
But certainly some of the requests that I personally received were transparent to a level that would have been unhelpful.
I would like to just add that, you know, I've noticed that there's a lot of great developers that applied, but just didn't have strong applications.
So, and just following up on Bro and Bro's question about smaller teams that didn't get any grants.
So, and I would just encourage you to just reapply with a stronger application next term if you, you know, you believe you have a good product.
And what we do, at least what we did on the first year, is that projects that came close to, you know, winning a grant, we essentially get on interviews with them.
And, you know, explain to them, like, what part they lack or, like, where something needs to be improved.
And we send emails to say, hey, you know, unfortunately you didn't get accepted, but we encourage you to strongly reapply with a better application with, you know, these points addressed.
So, and like Vendi said, it would really, it's really difficult and time consuming to kind of deal with every rejected applicant and say, this is where you went wrong.
If you have 200 applications, then we would spend, you know, 90% of our time criticizing and following up with the rejected applications and not moving forward with the accepting ones.
So, so we have to prioritize there.
And then one, I would add one last thing for Stake and Relax question.
So, I agree with Vendi that we can, like, radical transparency in a grant program is not necessarily the best approach.
But one thing that I agree with you, Stake and Relax, is that I would say that grantees, especially rejected grantees, have a right to know why they were rejected.
And not only why they were rejected, but also offer the pass on how they can revamp their application and increase their chances of getting accepted the second time they apply.
And that's something that we couldn't do once again.
Like, I would say 75%, and Vendi can confirm, 75% of the problems that we had in year one were mostly because we had a part-time model.
And so, my strong intuition is that we're going to be able to resolve most of those problems, at least problems in year one.
I'm very sure that we'll see new problems arise in year two that we didn't encounter in year one.
But one thing that we want to do is try to address, to the best of our knowledge and our capacities, the problems that rose in year one.
And so, one way to do it is once we have a grant lead that we're in the process of hiring, we have full-time reviewers.
So, Johnny is going to be a full-time reviewer next year.
That adds a lot of brainpower and capacity.
And so, we will likely be in a good position next year to have a customized feedback for rejected applicants.
Now, maybe not someone, like someone who's filling an application with, you know, one line of text for each question.
Obviously, like, I don't think you need to respond to that person and give it a customized feedback.
But someone who's put enough time on the application, you can tell that, you know, he just, like, made the work or she made the work and spent, like, two hours preparing the application, etc.
I think that person completely deserves a customized feedback on how to improve.
And so, that's something that we're absolutely exploring in year two.
And, you know, by having more resources, more dedicated resources, those things are going to be possible.
Yeah, super, super appreciate the clarification and, like, the standpoint from you guys.
And there was also the reason why I said, like, maybe metrics.
One of them is the application, like, from one to five, like, stars, and then maybe the impact from one to five, like, different categories.
And then, like, the applicant can see, like, okay, hey, I have to work on my application.
I have to work on the impact that I do.
I have to work on this and that.
But, yeah, super, super appreciate and kudos to you guys.
I think the Atom Accelerator DAO is a great starting point for a point of contact in the topic of grants.
And I think if we, after that, figure out also how to do business development in that sense with, like, maybe a similar structure or something like that, where, like, because, like, BD, for example, is also, like, a different topic, right?
Like, it splits up in so many things, like, BD with universities, BD with institutions, BD with other protocols, BD with wallets.
But I think Atom Accelerator DAO is a great, great beginning.
And I think it's net positive for the ecosystem.
So, kudos to your work and your time and your effort that you put in.
And, yeah, thank you very much.
Yeah, and thank you, Stik and Relax.
One last thing that I can add on what you just said about BD is, I mean, we cannot be accused of not listening to the community.
When we saw the feedback from multiple members, whether it's private feedback or public feedback on the forum on our BD and growth effort, you know, the feedback was not great.
And we just listened and said, you know, like, we have to reconsider this thing.
And we just removed it altogether from your proposal.
But one potential good news, I don't know if we can share it as an alpha or, but, like, we haven't been announced to the idea of doing BD.
And obviously, like, doing BD with grants is clearly not the way to go just because, you know, the grant process is extremely slow.
And so, in BD, sometimes you see an opportunity and you just need to double down on it and act fast.
And so, grants are not great for that.
And so, that's why we thought about having a specialized sub-DAO around growth, BD, partnerships, marketing, all those crucial things.
But one way, I think we haven't renounced the idea, but the way we want to do it going forward, if we end up doing it, is to be more – the team needs to be more representative of the community.
That's one.
So, that's the feedback that we heard loud and clear that people were concerned about some members of that team.
And so, we expected that feedback.
And that's also one thing that we didn't mention during this call, during this space, is the recruitment process itself.
And so, what we want to do for next year – again, go back to lack of resources.
We just didn't have – Bendy, who was in charge of the website, was also a reviewer in addition to being a dad and a husband and a full-time job.
So, it was just, like, not possible.
In year two, what we promised is that the full-time jobs, the full-time openings will be displayed on our website, potentially on the forum.
That remains to be seen if the forum is a good place to post to the job openings.
But we will make sure that the community is informed in advance as soon as we publish something for job opening because it is in our best interest to hire Atom community members and not members from other ecosystems.
Because you know that if you hire Atom community members who are extremely motivated and has the competence, the chances that he outperforms someone from our side are very high.
And we should always, you know, be – have a positive bias around hiring direct members from the Atom community.
And so – and then on BD, again, just to finish on BD.
So, what we want to do is – what I said at the beginning of the call is you need to do – we need to know what kind of BD we want to do, right?
And so – and that depends on the narrative itself.
What is the narrative?
If the narrative is Atom as money, then the recruitment that you need is going to be extremely different than another narrative.
Like, if you're positioning Atom as money, then your recruitment around BD needs to be people who understand DeFi.
You need to understand – you need to have DeFi natives that can – that understand what is protocol on liquidity, that know how to talk with other protocols to push for Atom in the government side, to whitelist Atom as a preferred collateral, et cetera.
So, what we want to do, to – long story short, in – I don't know when we'll do it because our top priority right now is to revamp the grant program and make it as sustainable as possible.
So, we need to make sure that we have our priorities in place.
So, the first priority is clearly the grant program.
Once we are in good shape with the grant program, that we've revamped it the way we want, then it would be time to open up a discussion with the Atom community on the forum, on the Agora, and say, okay, what kind of BD do you have in mind?
What kind of narrative do we need to push?
And have that discussion in the open, in the wild, and design.
I think what we want to do is co-create this BD unit.
Maybe the community is not going to be, you know, pleased and say, no, we don't want the BD unit.
But I think that if we co-create it with the Atom community on the forum, on Twitter space, et cetera, the likelihood of it being approved by their community is going to be drastically improved.
And then, once we have that, we do the correct hiring around the correct narrative.
So, it's not an idea that we completely abandoned.
It's just that we're retracting and reconsidering to come back stronger because BD is absolutely needed, and we just cannot not do it.
And so, if someone else does it, if you see a DAO appearing like us, like a DAO, and do it with competence, we'll be super happy and supportive, et cetera.
But if no one shows up, I mean, someone has to take care of it, and we'll be very happy to do it.
Yeah, thank you very much.
That was all my questions.
I wish you happy holidays with your family and friends.
Take care of you guys, and thank you very much.
Do we have more questions?
I think we are good with questions.
Just responding to Bro and Bro here, he said, because we didn't get any structured response like a template.
And, again, this is something that we're going to change in the next year.
So, if you guys put in your work in the application, I think likely the reason why you didn't get a structured response is it was below a certain point threshold.
But, like Yusef said, if you took the time to put in your applications, you should get proper feedback and responses.
So, if you do apply, and, you know, if I'm the one that's, you know, selected for the review, I'm happy to, you know, communicate with you guys along with other applications as well for any feedback and response and structure.
So, we're hoping to change that next year.
So, apologies on that on our first year.
All right, everyone.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you for your support for EDAO.
So, it was a crazy ride in year one.
And, you know, we hope to come back stronger in year two with the revamped grant program, more resources toward the EDAO community and making sure that the EDAO communities feel that they are heard because this is ultimately what we want to do.
And happy holidays to everyone.
And we'll see you in 2024.
Thanks for all the questions, the thoughtful questions from the committee members.
Thank you, Bendy, for motivating.
Thank you, Krius Jay, for co-hosting the event with myself, Yusef.
And we'll see you in 2024.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you, guys.
Have happy holidays.
And thanks for joining.
