Co-participation fund: adafund.io

Problem

The current format of Project Catalyst has at least 12 week lag between submission of a proposal and potential funding. This is because there are many fail safe mechanisms in place to ensure the safety of the treasury. The disadvantage of this is that there is little ability for super fast flexible prototyping and funding of experimental ideas.

Proposed Solution

To solve this problem, we propose the creation of a side treasury to explore different funding models. The main idea is to create a faster mechanism to fund ideas/proposals than the current 12+ weeks cycle of Project Catalyst.

adafund.io is an opportunity for the community to explore alternative funding models that achieve the goal of funding either high risk or low cost proposals without the need for lengthy governance processes.

In its first iteration, adafund.io will explore the concept of co-funding as a mechanism of voting. A number of proposals will have an opportunity to present an idea to the community with the offering of either a co-contribution system.

How it would work - Co-contribution

The desired funding would be set by the proposer, associated with a delivery deadline after funding is released. In this first experiment, a maximum of 500 ADA can be chosen as a target.

Once the target is reached, the side-treasury would release half of the total funding. After the proposal is finished and results are delivered, the other half is released to the proposer. If the proposer doesn't deliver the results in the informed deadline, the remaining fund comes back to the side-treasury.

Funds will be held in a publicly viewable wallet(s). Distributions will be publicly broadcast on the adafund.io website and available by querying the blockchain.

Budget Breakdown

• $5000 to fund at least 10 x $1000 projects ($500 funded by adafund.io, $500 funded by contributors)
• $1000 x 2 project management and development costs.

Milestones

• Basic website operational
• First proposal funded
• Additional proposals funded (at least 4 others)
• All proposals funded
• Three months time frame - Any funds not distributed will be returned to the treasury or will be sent to the community landing page bounty fund.

Mapped Risks

• That someone self funds their own project simply to unlock additional funds. Implemented mitigation: to release half funds upfront and the other half on completion.

Future Ideas

• Options to include various ratios. Instead of a 1:1 ratio where the proposal needs 1 ada co-contributed for every 1 ada provided by the treasury, this could be adjusted for the creation of more or less risky proposals.
• Alternative funding models.

The Team

We are two very active community advisors, Phil with experience in business and design. Phil's personal site is philkhoo.com. Phil is the project lead on developing the community landing page https://cardanocataly.st, and he and Vic are active in the development of the CA-tool (https://cardanocataly.st/ca-tool), vCA-tool (https://cardanocataly.st/vca-tool/) and Proposer tools. We have helped out with numerous proposals, assisted with the introduction of new CAs to the process and actively participate in governance development with assistance in creating CA Guidelines, Red & Yellow Thing community documents.