⚛️ Driving adoption for ATOM - AtomZone #18

Recorded: Feb. 20, 2024 Duration: 1:00:10

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Hey you sir
OK waiting everyone to join
Yeah, Rob I have a question
I'm not able to connect from
the ADO account
Is that OK if we
Yeah that works so don't worry
How are you doing?
Yeah pretty good you
Yeah everything good
All right
I think we can start
so welcome everyone
I am your host Rob Sakh
together with Cricci
and today we will dive into
the ADO Accelerator vision
and the new grant program
for everyone that hasn't been
around in the last two years
this is the second mandate
for the ADO Accelerator
so we had a first mandate
last year that has been
added into this new mandate
and also into the new grant program
because there is probably a lot of
changes compared with the first
mandate so we will dive into this
with our guest we have
Yusef, welcome
Hey Rob thanks for having me
and we have Curtis Jay
also from the ADO Accelerator
nice to be here
and we should have also
members of the ADO Accelerator
coming because I think there are
quite new members this year
so it will be great for the
community to meet them all in this space
so I think that
we can start and maybe
start with an introduction
of the ADO Accelerator now
because actually it's basically
the first DAO that was elected
by Cosmos sub-governance
I think we also have Riley here
which we can bring up to speak as well
ADO Accelerator DAO is
once again a grant focused
fully community owned DAO
voted by our governance
and our core mission
is to position ADO
and the hub accordingly in the
interchange and even
beyond it so
we have a clearer vision this
year, right?
We have basically positioned
the hub as a world class
DAO and ADO
as one of the most trusted assets in crypto
and we want to be the
main driver behind the value accrual of ADO
and the most trusted
hub aligned organization so
in an ideal world
would equal ADO
and ADO would equal the hub
so part of our goals
is really just to help secure
its financial future by
strengthening the developer ecosystem
by bringing
much needed funding to support
project developers
and holders and
act as a connector
between the hub's partners and the hub
itself as a trusted
interlocator
but I'll let
Yusef take over from here
and add anything
you've summarized it perfectly
Jonny I have
nothing much to
add on this except that we have
Riley and
Carter who just joined
and are members of
the strategic committee
so I'll let them share a quick word if they
want if so we can move to the next
Yes welcome Riley and Carter
great to see you here
Riley has been here
quite often being also
with the side team so he's
definitely a friend for a while
welcome Riley and
Yusef feel free to introduce
yourself and also what is
your role in the atom accelerator
Hey guys Riley
one of the founders of Stride here
I joined ADO strategy committee
about a month ago and
been helping out
on some of the
strategy and PD and
direction for the org
And Carter here
one of the founders over at Shade Protocol
also had the honor to join
ADO about a month ago
have helped with all things
kind of improving the grant process
internally, have been helping with
some of the hiring, business development
and high level strategies
I think 2024 is a
really big opportunity
for Adam to really
embrace ICS
and onboard kind of the next
wave of really
key app chains
and the opportunity to really turn Adam into
really effective
interchain
capital, it's such a trusted
asset, it's such a distributed asset
it's one of the most
neutral assets in Cosmos I would say
the most neutral asset
is really embracing the interchain rails
and exporting Adam
and making it the most liquid
asset throughout the IBC
ecosystem is a really
really big opportunity for
us this year
Yeah, definitely a very
strong line up here and also
great Carter to have you there and also
Jonny you mentioned earlier that
the big vision basically
for the ADO is
to kind of be the main organization
or entity to drive
value for Adam, so can you maybe
expand on some of these things and just
maybe a high level overview and ideas
that you have, like how could this
be achieved, how can the ADO being
a DAO, being decentralized, being
also community funded, community
obviously also has
a lot of feedback and input there to share
how do you manage all that and what are
some of the ideas that you guys have
right now to
realize that vision?
Yeah, so I mean
based on last year we realized that
the part time positions
that the members had wasn't enough
to kind of facilitate all the activities
that we were doing. We took
on more than we expected, so
this time part of the managing comes
to expanding.
We have a strategy committee now
that is going to be focused more
towards the RFP-based
grants. We just
onboarded a grant lead, which
we will announce soon.
We're in process of hiring a
marketing lead and of course
the oversight elections, which we're
going to talk a little bit later about.
Great, and I think that
the first step where we can start
is actually
mandate, this new mandate, differentiates
from the older one because
I think that we
can see the older one also like
a sort of test also with the community
with the Cosmos sub-committee because
it was also a way to start to build trust
with the community because
now within the Cosmos sub-bits of course
and you think it's nothing that we
experienced before, so how
differentiate from the previous one
did something change that
feel free anyone to reply.
Yeah, I can take this one
Robin, that's a great question.
I would say in year
one, and you mentioned it
rightfully, it was a pilot
of not even a year, it was a pilot of nine
months and
the org that we
around two-thirds of
the workforce on a part-time
model and so
our hands were
kind of a bit tight
assessing the market
it was a bear market, if you remember
so very, very different
situation from today
we had to be
extremely cautious
the funding that we were
deploying, we have to be conservative
so all of those things
made last
year very,
very different, what we
focused on mostly was
to work on the tokenomics RFP
we thought it was urgent, so
that was one of our core
missions last year
and then the
other mission was just to basically
as a liquidity
facilitator in terms of funding
the developer ecosystem and making
in the midst of one of the worst bear market
that developers
wouldn't flee to more
favorable
L1s and so
in year one
the number of, we
got a pretty high
number of acceptance rate
around grants because
we thought it was needed
now in year two
we have the trust from
the community, indeed we, I think we
passed with an even better score
than year one with 80%
and so that means that
take on a bit more
risk and so
a few ways to
address this is first to
migrate to a predominantly
full time model
so right now,
once we finish all the hiring that we want to do
so the grant lead, the
marketing lead, we will end up
with two thirds of
the workforce being full time
and I think it's critical
if we want to build
a long lasting
impact for organization
it has, it's
a minimum to be
full time, that's not a guarantee
but it's definitely going to help us
do more and cover
more grant and
establish ourselves further as a
hub organization so one
very different thing that we're
bringing this year is the strategy
committee and the way
we built it is we thought it was
important to
bring high profiles
like Riley
and Carter so
high profiles but also
very diversified skill set
so Riley is the
co-founder of Stride
who's been able to
build a successful
liquid and sticking gap
Carter is a very talented
researcher and
thinker and top leader
for shade and
in Cosmos and so
the idea behind the strategy committee was
really to bring a diverse
skill set
so that we can cover
all the blind spots and make
sure that we're thinking out of the box
and that's the reason
try to bring outsiders
from ADAL as opposed to
being a full time member of ADAL
where sometimes
we wouldn't be able to
that tunnel vision and so it was
important for us to bring
outsiders that can really
bring value and
strategize
on that so and then
major change that we're bringing
is that we
are adding so
we are revamping our
oversight committee
to have it more aligned
with the ATOM community
we think it's
important to have
proper representation
within the ATOM committee
it is the very minimum that we can do
since we're fully founded and owned
by the Cosmos Hub
and so the process
has started
a few days ago
we're likely going to extend
the deadline for applications
so that we can get more
applications
but that member who's going to be
elected and we will
go on-chain with
the three best
proposals and then the
one with the highest scores will be elected
committee
and then the last thing on the
functioning of the grant program itself is
what we want to do in
2024 which is quite different from
deploying our treasury
with much more focus
and intention so in 2023
because very quickly we
extremely how do you say
busy with inbound and we're not
necessarily equipped
to do all the scope
this year with more
headcount
strategy committee the goal is really
to rationalize how we
our treasury and to be intentional
and so that would mean
a reactive mode where
we process a lot of inbound
to a more proactive
approach where we
decide at a very high level
what are the categories that we want
to focus on so ATOM as money
for example, ATOM as
a security aggregator
as presented by
informal with
the latest project with Babylon
and so we're going to migrate
much more aggressively toward
what we call RFPs and
high priority grants and our
goal is to spend at least
our treasury on those
initiatives so RFPs and
high priority grants.
I really liked
when you said about
bringing on more outsiders
and I think especially for the
Cosmos Hub, there's this huge
gap right now where
this huge void where
a lot of outsiders,
whether it's investors, content
creators, builders, developers, creators
they don't really know
all the things that are going on on the Cosmos
Hub and I think it requires
an entity or DAO like
DAO in coordination
with other organizations
we see informal also now in the audience
and there's others contributing to it also now
with Delphi and Asteroids and these kind of things
to really be aligned and
have a strategy to
onboard these outsiders, educate them
and facilitate their entry.
So can you maybe expand a little bit
on that and what strategies
you have in mind? For example
does it mean that with the ADO you
want to also go out there more, go to
other conferences, other events, host
workshops or what are your plans there?
Who wants to take this one?
I can jump in on this one
so I think
and the whole process of
from the top of the funnel
of onboarding people all the way down to
actually integrating and getting users on those
new chains, I think there's
a huge opportunity
between informal and ADO
and Cosmos as a whole to
streamline and help that
process of
people don't know how to
onboard into ICS and
all the benefits that are
there. And so
at a high level strategy standpoint
I think one of the big goals in 2024 is
onboard the next
four or five ICS
chains in a way that
economically drives
value back to the
hub with use cases
that have long term alignment with spreading
inter-chain capital and another
emerging idea is
atom, atom as gas
within the AZ but also
outside of the AZ
is it possible to kind of
unify a lot of the
friction within IBC
around making
atom as gas and simplifying
this increasingly complex
world of a thousand different
chains with a thousand different gas tokens
and there's definitely like abstractions
that are being done to help solve
this but can we place atom
within that kind of
exponentially growing ecosystem?
So at least from my
perspective, atom as gas, onboarding
ICS chains that are economically
aligned with air dropping back
to the hub slash use cases
that help push atom. I think there's
really really big opportunities on that
front that we're looking into
and Riley if you have anything you'd like to
kind of add on this overarching
Yep, yep.
I think you put up an incredibly
thoughtful post on the
Cosmic Cell Forum a few months
ago that went into all this
in a lot of detail. I would say
the biggest thing on my mind
for atom these
using atom as collateral across DeFi
exporting it across chains
not just ICS chains,
consumer chains, but all these
top of mind chains that
are launching with the Cosmos SDK
and with Comet, BFT
and IBC and even the
roll ups on top of them.
There's just a renewed sense
of excitement and bigger
in the inner chain
and I think we have a really special
opportunity to export
atom to those chains and make it one of the
key base pairs and uses
pushing on that run.
and I also add to what
Riley and Carter just said that
I think one of the
goals of AA DAO is
also to become
somehow a one stop shop
for outsiders
that are looking to get into
the Cosmos Hub or
get into Cosmos
so that's going to
help out a bit because
it's very difficult right now for
prospective partners
there is AA DAO, there is informal
so that's a very good
I would say first step
really as a community
and I think that's something that
we have to do
this year and so
atom as money, atom
as favorite collateral, I mean it's a lot
of outreach and
I think that there is a consensus
around AA DAO that we
move outward
as much as possible and there is a
lot to be done
including in governance
so if you want to
whitelist atom as collateral
whether you're talking about
Ethereum, Avalanche, etc
sometimes you're going to need some
governance efforts and you're going to need some
resources to make sure that
properly described, atom
value is properly explained
because a lot of outsiders
right now outside of Cosmos
still don't know
the value
accrual of atom or the role of atom
within the EU chain so I think
there's a lot of work in terms of education
that is yet to be done
and we're pretty
ready to take on that challenge
the other
item that's going to be interesting for us
and that goes
that departed from
Carter, atom and game post
on the forum
was to position and
it's also been an argument that Jack from
Strangelove has been making
repeatedly that we should
position atom around
there are two IBCs with the IBC
within Cosmos and then
there is all the
IBCs that connect Cosmos to
other ecosystems like what composable
finance is doing or what
Polymer is doing, what Union is doing
and all of those are
still I would say virgin
markets and we
definitely want to position
whether we're talking about atom as
gas or just
using those
IBC bridges to export
atom and concur
those markets
that are very exciting and
we're basically going from zero so it can
only get better from here because atom
was just not represented outside
of Cosmos and
centralized exchange so that's
going to be very positive and
I think we're going to be spending
a lot of financial and
human resources on tying
the growth of IBC
to the atom token itself
and one category just to jump in that
was added this year was
the atom interchain data
category of
we really want to push on these visualizations
that show
all of the atom and where it's being
exported to within IBC
and also outside of the Cosmos
ecosystem as well as
visualizing that atom as
gas usage so we need
the data visualization
and the historical data to be able to tell
the story and we have really good things
like map of zones but a
more like focused version
of something like map of zones as it pertains
to atom as token
I think is going to be a really powerful
category this year.
What about consumer
chain onboarding right I mean you mentioned
earlier the whole concept around
security aggregation also with
Babylon there was also spaces here
last week when it was
announced which basically enables
Bitcoin staking for the Cosmos
app so to basically
secure the Cosmos app through
restaked BTC
I personally would also love to see
Eigenlayer to extend
into the Cosmos app I think that will also be cool
but then I think
the question is okay what if we have all the
security but
there's not
10, 20, 100 chains to be
secured do you think that
only a handful of chains
but high quality chains like Neutron and Stride
are enough
or do you think
like what in your kind of
mind is the ideal
endgame or evolution for
for the AZ
or I guess it would then evolve into the
Cosmos economic zone I guess
what is kind of the endgame for that
how you envision that and how do you collaborate
also with informal that are
building that on a technical side of things
how does that work?
I can take this one so
and that's just my
personal opinion I'm not talking
in as the
voice of ADAL but
I've always advocated for
tighter integration
with consumer chain but
more focusing more on quality than
quantity and
if we can build
what I call
agglomeration of consumer
chains that rally around the hub
6, 7, 8, max 10
high quality chains
where we have
basically where each
consumer chain plays a very
specific role in advancing
the narrative of ADOM as money
and as a security provider
or as a security aggregator
so you have
stride that is
the most important
ticket-taking provider in Cosmos
you have Neutron which
acts as the execution layer
of the Cosmos hub
what else do you need
if you want to position ADOM as money
you would need potentially
lending, borrowing,
and so I think that's how we should
go about adding
consumer chain is not just about
first come
first serve but it needs to be
extremely
selective
in how we approach
those consumer chains
go with the one that
really bring value to the
narrative and then once you have that
you can start doing cross-chain governance
like we've seen with for example
Neutron or the hub or Stride and the hub
the ADOM alignment
surgery that is going to be built by
binary builders is also
going to allow the hub
to vote with the asset
it has on the community pool on the other chain
that it owns
so that's, so I mean
it starts with security, security is an entry point
but then obviously you need
you need to
have a long-term vision of what you want to do
because security is
becoming a commodity more and more
and so if you're only offering
security then I don't think you have a product
so security is an entry point and on top of that
and I think Stride did an excellent job
with their proposal
to join ICS where
they made it de facto
also a liquidity partner
by requesting that
the first ever protocol on
liquidity that is hosted
currently on
as reports so I think
being creative and finding
a way to have a very tight
integration while also serving
the core narrative that is ADOMA's money
is going to be
key and then there is PSS
obviously partial security
moving to a more permissionless
model and I think that should
be considered
I don't know about the others
if you have ideas
I guess I would jump in and say that
ADOMA's as a concept
is like this kind of
open market mechanism
for kind of pushing out
ADOM liquidity and I think if we can combine
kind of liquidity mechanisms
onboarding consumer chains
while also being
part of that funding process there is
just like a bunch of value ads that
the hub can bring and we can
pull in really really quality projects. I also think that
the institutional
side of things is very
unexplored in Cosmos.
There are definitely institutions that
are looking into the Cosmos SDK that
want to launch their own
chain, want to be a permission chain
that also has
access to IBC and kind of the broader
permissionless world and
don't necessarily
have the ability to bootstrap that security out of the gate
so I think landing a very large institutional
player in Cosmos would also be
kind of a paradigm shift
that we haven't seen yet. We see other
ecosystems like Avalanche for
instance that are very focused on that type of
play so lots of
unexplored territory on the
institutional side of things as well.
basically if I should make a summary
I think that there are
three main points of focus which
is one is interchain money
and I think that
that would also position Atomas
like the center of the interchain
because it's like an engine in the
power all these applications
but on the other side you also have
Atomas gas
so that would imply actually literally
putting Atomas at the
center of the UX of the interchain
and lastly is this idea
of having Atom
actually becoming
some sort of launch pad
probably if you mentioned
that Cosmos SDK basically
new player joining
and using Cosmos SDK
can they have a support
from the Cosmos sub community to launch their
blockchain and I'm not sure if that's what
you meant with this last statement
really puts Atom
into boosting
its adoption
it's more a matter of how
this will place out for example
I assume that for Atomas gas
token it will be the focus
mainly towards the relayer
and wallets
is this a correct assumption
or if someone wants
to add anything about how
actually enables Atomas
gas token?
Yeah, on the Atomas gas
side we saw Terra do something
very interesting recently
which is essentially enabling
as gas on the chain
the only thing is that you have to pay a premium
when you're using USDC
as gas on that chain
I think Atom actually has
a lot of crossover in terms
of validator sets and community members
across a lot of chains
and we've never really explored what the
appetite is for adding
in something like Atomas gas on some of
the non-Atom economic
zone chains
and I think if you combine
that type of
kind of business development effort
with a liquidity initiative like
Atomwars, I think the doors
start to open up and
yeah, truth be told this is still
a new concept
and it is a bold concept to
try to export Atom and
have it be more of an intimate
experience outside of the Atom economic
zone and I call it
the Atom gas zone which I think will be kind
of a superset and even broader
set than just the EZ and
we'll see where that leads.
Yeah, I think that
historically speaking there
is an history where projects
align with the Cosmos sub and are
successful and projects that firstly
align with Cosmos sub and then
are not that successful
there are a couple of examples so I think
there is a real advantage
is to have this kind of network
effect with the Cosmos sub
which probably shows
also from
if we see stride and neutron success
which of course they have wonderful
teams, we all know this,
we are very lucky to have these great teams
building around this Atom economic zone
but they're also a
strong network effect created by
the Cosmos sub so this is definitely
an interesting concept
and let's say
we have right now
the audience people interested to apply
like what kind
you're looking for
to basically
releasing the grants like is it on many
levels like community members,
builders, developers
or there is a specific
target that you're looking more
also maybe differentiating
probably the different funding
teams that we haven't
expanded yet but
maybe I can give a brief
intro because I have a note here
that basically explains
what are the new funding teams
so basically the new funding teams are
Atom as the interface money, partial
security, cross chain, industry
collaboration, security audit and risk
framework, enhancing developer
experience and harnessing Atom as
interchain data so if
you could add like who are
your main targets and who should apply
to these categories that would be great
I think some of the people in the
audience are probably interested right now
I can take
the first part of the question and then I'll
maybe leave the floor to Carter
for the second part so
on the first part like who are
we targeting
so last year
the funding that we
around what we call inbound grants so what
do we mean by inbound it means
grants that where
we basically just
process them right we didn't
we didn't court them we didn't prepare them
they just came to us and
those are those are extremely important as well
right because they are spontaneous grants
from pretty
much everyone mostly from
smaller builders
two, three people
but this year we
have to do different we have to
act differently because
we just need to
how can I say improve
improve our game by again
being more intentional
in the capital so what we agreed
on what we are suggesting it's not
set in stone but what we suggested
with prop 865
was to allocate roughly
50% to open grants
and then migrate the rest
the other 50% to
RFPs and high priority grants
and those are likely
going to be
bigger players so
for example if you want to
be serious about
we're going to need to
do research
and then publish an RFP
very likely and
work with the
most credible
players and so those are two
very different targets
open grants is more about
smaller players and
RFP is more about
players that we know
have the bandwidth
and the skill set to ship
the ideas that we have such as
shared security
atomized gas, atomized
money and so on and so
forth and I'll let Carter talk about
the categories themselves
and what's going to be our focus
Yeah so I think the
RFPs are an opportunity
an asymmetric
focused bets that have
asymmetric upside for
the hub whereas kind of
the open grants kind of empower
the community to
creatively come up with ways to kind of
push atom forward so if you have
let's say you had all funding with just RFPs
you'd be missing out on kind of the general
creativity, you'd be
overly prescriptive
versus if you only have open
grants and you didn't have any RFPs
then you're kind
of a little bit rudderless
you maybe are lacking some of the ability to be
prescriptive so I think
Yusef's kind of leadership
and ideas this year on trying to kind of find a balance
between the two I think is extremely
smart in this
scenario and I think it's a really good
set of changes from last
year. In terms of the different
categories, the ones I think
I'm super excited about
as I mentioned earlier that atomized interchange data
if you're a builder interested
in telling the story
of atom and its usage
within Cosmos and outside of Cosmos
I think there's going to be a really big opportunity
for a project like that over
the course of the next decade
that's a massive
data visualization project that someone
is going to have to tackle
and then on the atom as
the interchange capital there's really like two
RFPs that are kind of
under development right now
one is the AGZ
which is like the atom gas zone
the initiative around pushing atom
to as many changes as possible as gas
and then another one is tied to
the relayer side of
things which is can
we have atom
within the relayer community simplify
the user experience
for users where all they need is atom
to traverse and get onto a
chain as opposed to needing multiple
gas tokens so that's kind of
like an atom entertain
relayer module type
of thing that's kind of being scoped right now so
very excited about both of those RFPs
and then on the cross chain collaboration
category and the cross industry collaboration
those are
both opportunities I think on
the DeFi side of things to
at least on the cross chain
collaboration is like we should be
exporting atom beyond just cosmos
there are other massive
ecosystems out there that
would be willing to collaborate with
the hub on establishing liquidity
and establishing these DeFi cross chain
partnerships and I think with
IBC starting to connect
to things like avalanche
to things like Solana probably
things like Cardano
the hub has this really big opportunity to act on
that in an organized and efficient manner
to push atom beyond just cosmos
so that's something that I think
there's a lot of grant opportunities
around cross industry
collaboration I think I mentioned this one
earlier it's really
easy to get in our own little
crypto cosmos
bubble in terms of use cases
but there's a whole
other set of
web 2 builders that
are starting to creep into web 3
and realistically anyone
who can help facilitate
onboard those more creative
non web 3 blockchains
and use cases I think there's
really big opportunities there so be sure to check those
categories out
then we have the security audits and
risk framework
developer experience
there's quite a few so be sure to check out
the atom accelerator website and
check out the categories there's a lot
of things to check out this year
I would also say that hey if you
have an idea or no
you know a team that can
build on this idea just shoot them my way
because I'm actively reaching out to
teams like for example when
Carter mentioned the interchain data
I've been you know hitting up
DeFi llama guys or
wherever I find some talented
teams just to try to recruit
and you know kind of you know visualize
like the importance of atom and the interchain
but it's beyond that right so if
you have any ideas and you have any
teams feel free to
you know hit my DMs I'm always active
scouting around looping around so
happy to help you know take your
considerations
Very cool and I think that
we can also chat a little bit
about what's coming in the near
future because last year
there was a lot of
a lot of upcoming
FPS so maybe
there is something that you are
excited about that is coming soon
I remember there was for example
discussion in the past about
the proposal for capital
that are still yet to come
so is there any upcoming
initiative by Adam Axler
that you are excited about?
I would say
so something that we haven't
talked about yet today is that
we want to explore
further what we
call venture grants so
traditional grants
in crypto you
would basically
give funding
and expect
that in exchange for that funding
some piece of
infrastructure would be built
some that would be built and that it would
benefit the entire
ecosystem at large
Venture grants are different in the sense
that in addition to
what I just said
the EDA would also get
of the for example
as an airdrop
of the funded project or potentially
a revenue share
and that opens up
new opportunities for the hub
to generate revenue so
under Prop 865
we agreed with the
atom community that we would
start making
sourcing and executing
deals on behalf of the Cosmos Hub
and that we would direct 80%
airdrops and revenue shares
to the atom community pool and we would retain
so that we can move
progressively toward
self sustained
and so I'm personally very excited about that because
it's an entire different framework
and it's also more
somehow motivating
when you know that the hub is
going to get something
in return and so one area
for example that is exciting
at least to me is
working with projects
that right now
want to align with
atom but don't have an org
that they can talk to to get advice
and so those projects
for example sometimes are very interesting
for the hub
and if we
found them we find a way to
align them further with the hub
and also making EDAO
more self-sustainable
and so I think that's going to be
very interesting now obviously
we need to bring some
changes to how
we operate and so we're
as we speak working on that
to see how different
venture grants are from grants
how do we prepare on
the legal compliance side
on the funding side
on the staffing side
because we're not likely going to need
more specialized
resources to make venture
grants happening
so I'm personally very excited
about that and we already
have a few projects
in the pipeline obviously
we can't share because it's too premature
yeah and obviously
try to go more this year
for the moonshot last year was about
and assessing
the general appetite of the
atom community but
this year it's going to be
going after
the moonshot that Carter
and Riley and
Christian were mentioning
so wallets, atomized gas,
atomized money, G5
shared security
to add a little note to that
and I think this is part of the
raising the bar
for what it takes to be accepted as
a grant, it's like
the days of
any sort of unambiguous
value accrual back to the hub I think those
days are coming to a close
and I would say that
it's at this point
unapologetically driving value
directly back to the hub as direct
as possible and I think
venture grants are an extremely
powerful mechanism for doing
that and I think the bar being
raised on open grants also helps with that
Yeah, I think there was a
community member in the Cosmos
community that has been speaking about this
for a while which is WCAGS because
I remember some of his tweets about
the Cosmos sub should do venture
and fund project within the ecosystem
so it's interesting to see these
dynamics come to realization through
the atom accelerator now
and I think that Yusef also
mentioned in one of his latest tweets
that this could imply also the
Cosmos sub community pool to have
an allocation or something
which could be a direct
value accrual in this case for the Cosmos
sub which would be pretty evident because
I think that one of the most
evident value accrual that we saw in
Cosmos sub is the
42 million neutrons in the community
pool because that
is a value that is undeniable
that is in the end of the
Cosmos sub governance
so it's something that you can track
and see the value and
it's probably not yet
corresponding in creating
any amplification
mostly because it
probably requires some more marketing
or anything to amplify what
actually is happening in the Cosmos sub because
there is so much happening right now that
probably is difficult to track
and I think this goes back
to the idea of having this
harnessing interchain data
so probably to show everything
that is happening in the ecosystem so that is
a category that actually
I think it's quite interesting because
I also suggest something about
having all this data especially
for all the addresses we have
been receiving in the Cosmos sub because it's
a lot of value but there is really no one
tracking it so very
interesting
I would like to come back
election of a community
elected oversight
member because
this applies basically
for anyone that is listening
run out of the space because it's for
Cosmos out so
what kind of
person are you looking for the role
like who should apply, what is
principle that this person should have
any experience feel free to add anything
for anyone listening be sure to check
the latest suite from Cosmos sub
because actually direct to the forum post
so you can read the entire post
about this opportunity
can take this one so
I was oversight last
year so I transitioned to
grant review
and what I noticed is
there is no
one directly representing
or in touch with the community
so I kind of took on that role myself
was one part that I felt like we were
backing last year and
in this year we were looking for that
member, that third oversight member
since he is going to be community
elected be the one that
is in communication largely with the
community and providing feedback to us
so this will be
a part time role so
it's not going to be a full time position
I know there's a lot of
bright cosmonauts out there that
express interest but some
of them have their own full time
jobs that they can't really commit so
it's going to be about 35% of full time
and the role is really
just to oversee the community sentiment
alongside the
coordinator and address any
community concerns
they'll also attend the meetings
and be up to date
with everything AIDOW is doing
providing feedback
whether it's on protocols, whether
it's community members signing off on
grantee payments
and helping
summarize the activities
in the transparency reports
so we can have more
I would say more
engagement with the community, more feedback
more communication
is primarily the role of it
and of course this is
the first time we're doing this so
we're looking at all the
applications and once we
look through them and we'll put
three of the top members on chain
and like Yusef said earlier
once with the most votes
we'll be elected
we want someone that's
knowledgeable in the Hub
not just the Hub but Cosmos
but also neutral
in the sense where
they are for the Hub but they see
things objectively and
not one way or another that can be
that balance between AIDOW and the community
Great, and I think
there will be a lot of
interesting candidates and
I'm also curious to see how it
will evolve the first
basically election on Cosmos
sub-governance because that's an interesting
experiment
As a last
as a last question I probably
would say if you guys
are in the process of hiring
new people feel free to share
any kind of introduction
to the role if you're interesting
to share what kind of role
are you looking for
please feel free to share it
on the hiring
so we had
two positions open
the grant lead
and the marketing lead, so the grant lead
we filled the position
announce it in the next
two to three days just finalizing
the paperwork
we're very happy with
the recruitment itself from the grant lead
the marketing lead we also
closed the application because
we felt we were
in a good spot with
multiple credible
candidates in the pipeline
we are right now in the last phase
of the recruitment for that position
we're also
thinking about
thinking about
either hiring
what we call a venture grant specialist
or having someone
from ADOW an existing contributor to ADOW
take on that role, so that is
yet to be defined
very likely we'll also end up
hiring what we call
a technical product leader or technical product manager
to help out
Carter and the strategy committee
with those RFPs
take on a lot of work
it's a lot of research
it's writing specs
it's going on interviews
it's monitoring the progress of the teams
once they've been awarded the
RFP or the grant
since we're moving in the direction
of RFPs and high priority grants
we think it's important to have
that technical product lead
join the team
in the short term
and that's pretty much it
I don't think we have
another position, no we don't
Thanks a lot
for the introduction
and I think this phase has been very valuable
for the committee to know better
the ATOM accelerator, especially this year
Mandate and the new funding categories
Cryptosy, do you have any
last question to add?
No, for me it's all good
yeah, very excited to see
I think you guys definitely
had a lot of
learnings in the bear market
in the previous mandates that are
now being executed
also switching to the full time model
I think that's very important
to have people full
time in this because I also
know how much you guys are doing
and coordinating behind the scenes that maybe
the community doesn't see in the first place
coordination efforts
all the thinking, the talking
behind the scenes, just strategizing
how you're
appearing
to the outside
and facilitating the onboarding
for outsiders, I think that's a big thing
that I'm very excited about also
for the Cosmos Hub and also have more
closer communication
and coordination with
the informal systems out there
Delphi would love to see
more stuff with them as well, I'm also
very excited about inscriptions, we did
spaces with them also recently here
so, yeah, very
do you have any final words
Yousuf, Joni, Riley
I really like
the part that you said about
behind the scenes because there's really a lot going on
I mean we're in talks
with teams every single day, maybe
5 to 10 every single
day and we're talking to Delphi, we're talking
to informal, we're talking to many
teams in Cosmos
and outside of Cosmos, so
it takes time for something to
solidify and
a lot of it comes down to
just strategizing, negotiating
and filtering out what makes sense
and what doesn't, and that's something
that it's really hard to portray
on chain or on social media
to the community, but
yeah, what you
mentioned is, I just wanted to
reiterate
and then maybe one last point is
core focus this year
is really to step up our game
and professionalize the DAO
if I might say
and that, so we mentioned
full-time model
we also recently
onboarded into DAO DAO
which is an amazing
advancement for us, it was
pretty challenging last year
to coordinate multisig payments and to
make payments
on time to grantees etc, so
we're very happy that we're able to
onboard into DAO DAO that also give us
treasury management
capabilities that we will
be leveraging, so
we're DAO, it is
critical for us to
position ourselves in
the long term and that starts with
doing proper, having sound treasury
management practices and
basically
preparing
the bear market when it arrives
making sure we have enough stable
coins in our reserves to
honor our commitments
with grantees, our commitments
with our own contributors
and so yeah, I think that this year
I'm personally super
excited and very hopeful about
what we have in
store, last year
we did pretty good I would say
but I think this
year is going to be a whole different game
with all the changes and
Carter and
Riley joining the team, we're super
hopeful on DAO
this year and
the bull market
is around the corner and
we have to work
with a sense of urgency to build as
fast as possible
to be ready, it's a long term process
to be honest, like Johnny said
it takes time, building
a start-up is hard but I
would say building a decentralized start-up
is even harder
but I think we've done
70% of the job, 80% of the job
in year one and now it's
about consolidating and expanding
and we've built
a team to reach those
objectives, so very happy about
that and thank you Carter and
Riley for
all the excellent
hard work and dedication
commitment to DAO
Last year
was testnet, this year's mainnet
and also I want to say one last thing
I really appreciate you guys
also stepping up
going out there, doing
all the behind the scenes stuff, talking to
everyone because the Cosmos Hub
I think is in this special
kind of position, there is not
one core, there is no Cosmos
Hub foundation, there is no core team that does
the whole job, there is
no leader in that sense
I think that's also why the Cosmos Hub
and Atum is so resilient and so
strong and it's coming out of the
bear market as a top 30 asset, I think yes
we'd all love
to see Atum in the top 5 but I think
being in the top 30, without
having that what other chains have
a $500 million war chest
I think the Cosmos Hub is in that very
specific and unique position and I think
now coming out of this
with all the things we talked about
shared security, security aggregation
inscriptions, Atum wars
Babylon partnership
I think that's all cool stuff that
eventually will
also come out
with nice products
and eventually also have strong product
market fit for certain things
but I just want to also say
to all of you guys in Carter Riley
Joni Youssef that you guys
are stepping up and I really want to encourage
also listeners and everybody
that has ideas or
I'm going to step up, I'm going to apply
I want to be part of that, I want to contribute
I think that AIDOW is a good
address to get started
right, so
yeah, good times ahead
Thanks everyone
for joining us today
I think it's been a super
valuable space and
now there is a good understanding
of what is the Atum Accelerator
RODAO mission and
DCR funding teams
so if you are interested
be sure to apply and
if you have any questions feel free
to get in touch with the people around here
and I'm sure that they will
be able to help you. Thanks everyone
and see you to the next one
Thank you everyone, bye