Ryuki Funding

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Dear Community

This Proposal represents an alliance and partnership between several groups that are highly engaged and well established in the Cardano & Catalyst Ecosystem. We came together with the ambition to explore and establish common solutions and tools for common problems.

We act as an united and aligned body of interests, ideas and visions. The focus of our actions will always be within the community and the ecosystem, as this is the environment from which we come from.

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The short Form

As we know that there are more than 1200 submitted proposals in Fund 7, we will give you a glance and very brief introduction which then will be mapped out in more details afterwards.

• We are a Network of well established Catalyst Community Projects.
• We maintain a network of Stake Pools and delegate each 3rd epoch a certain % of our staking rewards to a common Treasury.
• This Treasury is coordinated by a council, comprised of one representative from each project involved in the Ryuuki Network.
• The Treasury is distributed to those initiatives and engagements in Catalyst which currently fail to receive funding.
• With this experiment, we aim to earn crucial experience in community driven, bottom up governance.

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The Ryuuki Network

AIM - AIM the Assembly of Inspired masses is a community committed and dedicated to build tools and solutions from the community, for the community. Slogan of AIM is "Tools, not Rules". AIM is well known by the creation of the very appreciated CA & vCA tools, The voter Tool and the feedback tool

Bridge Builders - The Bridge Builders are an aligned group of highly engaged and committed Catalyst Community members coming together as a community-driven Assembly to provide value to their environment. We problem-sense challenges and identify gaps within the Cardano and Catalyst ecosystem. In collaboration with well-established community projects, we co-build and design "tailor-made" solutions in line with the Cardano & Catalyst philosophy of "from the community, with the community, for the community."

CC Admin Team - The CC Admin team was created to facilitate, track, and record interactions of the Catalyst Circle. The team is a grassroots organization and social experiment that developed out of Catalyst as a collaborative initiative. The CC Admin Team is working to set up mechanisms and processes to aid in decentralized governance in general and looks to open source and provide administrative governance capability to the greater community.

Catalyst School - Introducing the future of education. The Catalyst School was initiated by a group of highly engaged Catalyst Community Advisors and Mentors with the initial focus on educating CAs. In the further evolution the Catalyst School evolved a format to provide education and introduction to all kinds of roles and activities within the Catalyst Ecosystem.

Catalyst Swarm - Swarm is everybody who identifies with the vision to share ideas, visions and ambitions and to collaborate on building the future society of Cardano. We are representatives of the idea of an open, inclusive and diverse network of doers and visionairs, working hand in hand to add value to the Cardano Ecosystem

Eastern Town Hall - The Eastern Townhall Cardano Catalyst Community is helping to enable community members from a wide variety of countries and languages in the eastern time zones. We are building an Asian Community center of gravity to invite, encourage and empower our friends from the Asian Communities to transform their ideas into real impact.

Gimbalabs - Our mission is to mobilize everyone to develop tools and applications through a unique experience of co-creation that facilitates adoption of the Cardano protocol, reveals new possibilities, and ignites the public imagination worldwide.

Innovatio - Our mission is to encourage the exchange and creation of business value between different entrepreneurs and freelancers in the digital world.

SANADA - ​​SANADA (Salmon Nation Decentralized Alliance) seeks to act as a resource for software developers; connect with and educate the local community, creatives, and businesses; and raise awareness of blockchain technologies and the power of decentralization. We seek to solve local challenges to bring creative and sustainable solutions to the region and empower regional communities.

SecretDecks - A Distributed cooperative (DisCo) that is elevating Tarot and other tools for self-knowledge and -realisation, into a metaverse experience. Offering safe spaces for esoterics, witches and magicians, to share and collaborate creatively.

SPOCRA - A assembly and collective of independent Stake Pool Operators, united in the vision and mission to support community driven and decentralized Stake Pool Ecosystem

Quality Assurance DAO (QA-DAO) started as a Project Catalyst Fund 5 Proposal in the Developer Ecosystem challenge. Its current core activities are documenting the pathway of a funded cohort & assessment of Catalyst's reporting requirements. QA-DAO designs and maintains documentation and tracks activity in open-source GitHub repositories for the Catalyst Circle, Catalyst Swarm and The Catalyst School.

Wada - Wada gives voice and access to people of African heritage and interest by providing the tools to reimagine new socioeconomic models in a way that reflects local cultures, values and future aspirations. Although our focus is on Africa, WADA is an all inclusive organization structured to provide seekers with providers. This is done with a focus on decentralization, self-organisation and distributive governance.

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Introducing Ryuuki

Ryuuki ( Japanese for Watershed ) is an assembly of projects which are born in Project Catalyst. It's here where we grew up and where we established our formats, products and services, and it's here, in the Catalyst Community where we focus on. As we grow and mature together with the community, with a desire to create and facilitate a bottom up grassroot approach on addressing common challenges.

We believe that we are stronger together, thus we take the initiative and responsibility to create alignment and build unity between us. We communicate, coordinate and collaborate on our visions and ambitions and we support each other on our stability and sustainability.

We aim to Fund and support

(1) Well established and committed community projects and initiatives which did not receive funds from Catalyst (even though they were voted)

(2) Individuals which struggle to map their community contributions into proposals and therefore not fitting into the Catalyst Funding model

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The Community Treasury

In the beginning of November, we started to communicate about the Ryuuki project and helped each other to set up a Stake Pool for each of the projects represented in this alliance. The Ryuuki Community Treasury is defined as a network of independent and autonomous communities and their Stake Pools.

The function of our funding mechanism is based on a very simple, but effective vision:

Each Project operates their own Stake Pool, but defines itself as a part of the network.

Each Project will delegate regularly a certain % of their Stake Pool rewards to a common Treasury.

The Treasury is designed as a socio financial funding and support mechanism to reward community engagement there, where project Catalyst or the entities lack to reward crucial and important contributions

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The Pool Architecture

As we can observe, the SPO Ecosystem and community is lacking communication, coordination and collaboration. Stake Pools have to operate in a highly competitive environment and it is hard to build alignment and networks in this space.

As Catalyst veterans, which actively co-creates an environment in Catalyst where collaboration is an established standard, we aim to bring a new wind into the SPO ecosystem by acting as an aligned and united network of Stake Pools.

Representing ourselves as a Network will help us as well to build and maintain a delegators community for our Pool Network. A common driven marketing campaign decrease costs but increase its impact for all included projects and communities

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The Treasury Council

When there is a treasury, there also needs to be someone who controls it right ?

Well, in our case we took the simple approach and agreed that each project chose one representative to represent their project in the Treasury Council.

The Representatives are as long elected as their own group wishes to.

All groups have the same voting or decision making right, regardless of the strength of size of the representing groups/project or community

Each Group has one representative

Each representative has one vote

Each Vote has equal weight

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Proof of Soul

For sure we know Proof of Stake, Proof of Work and whatnot.. While exploring our project we stumbled over the hard question of how we want to define ourselves as community, mission and vision driven Stake Pools or Projects… Well, then we saw that all of us had the same struggle when emerging in the early days.

We all started to build our projects together with the community in a bottom up approach, all projects are examples for inclusivity and diversity and all of us.. all of us struggled hard to establish our projects without funds over a certain time frame.

This first hard to swallow pill becomes a superpower now, as the projects have proven on their own to be committed and dedicated by adding value to their environment and community. We created and work in an environment of social incentives which we value more than financial incentives only. Even when no resources are available, we always move on to build our networks and projects, to teach ourselves to be humble and to have all focus on the community and environment we are working with. The environment usually provides.

Our Projects have a soul which helps us move through hard times and on which we can rely when facing our challenges.

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Why it is important

Well, good question.

We would say that what we do is important, what we do together is even more important, and what we can do in this project might be a revolutionary step into self governance and Treasury control experience.

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What we aim to achieve

By creating, coordinating and controlling a own and 100% community made treasury we aim to experiment some very first experiences on how such a scenario might look like. We are well aware of all the challenges we will face on this journey, but we agreed on simply starting and learning together along the road.

(J) We aim to earn experience in hands on governance from bottom up

(1) Creating a Community Treasury

(2) Coordinating a Community Treasury

(3) Exploring different ways on decision making processes

(4) Creating & defining effective Stake Pool Networks

(K) Generating Playbooks

As we strictly stick to our mission to be fully transparent on our activities and operations it only makes sense to document our progress and to identify best in practice models and concepts. Those will be publicly available and other initiatives which aims to imitate or duplicate our models can count on our support, guidance and mentorship.

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Impact.

As a human relation based Funding Mechanism which aims to distribute funds on a fast and transparent way, we fulfill the Challenge Brief and criteria

Feasibility.

As our first approach does not require any tools, dApps or DiDs and fully relies on human agreement and relations, the execution of the proposal is very feasible.

Auditability.

Our goal is to distribute funds in a fast and transparent manner. All operations and activities will be documented, recorded and publicly accessible on our github.

We will provide a monthly report on our achievements, discoveries and failures via the Catalyst Town Halls

Adjustability.

As our design is based on a very flexible and dynamic structure, we are always able to react and to adjust to unexpected happenings and events.

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KPIs / OKRs

Attracted delegators for the Ryuuki Pool Network

Amount of distributed Funds

Amound of Projects receiving Funds

Amount of Individual Community Contributors receiving Funds

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Roadmap

January 2022

• Launching the Marketing & Outreach Campaign
• Scheduling weekly Ryuuki calls to coordinate our actions
• Setting up the Ryuuki website and Github

February 2022

• Defining clear criteria for Fund distributions
• Starting to distribute first Funds 

March 2022

• Generating first and best in practice Playbooks and Blueprints

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Budget breakdown

Marketing Campaign - 3000 USD

Setting up Website - 1000 USD

Setting up & Maintaining Community - Communication Hub - 1500 USD

Accountant costs - 3000 USD

Distributing Funds - 25.000 USD ( Budget we will use to support Community engagements and efforts which requires it )

Post for unexpected costs - 1500 USD

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Disclaimer:

We do not aim to replace Project Catalyst and its funding by our model. We simply aim to explore an human based Treasury distribution and to reward community efforts and engagements when Catalyst Funds are not available to those

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