Oxford crypto valley: Cardano house

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The establishment and integration of a Cardano hacker house part of the Oxford Crypto Village. The house will be filled with the most promising Web3 talent from the University of Oxford to incubate and enable them to pursue a entrepenrurial career in Web3. The Oxford Crypto Village launches in September 2022, and will be the first real-world Web3 community of its kind. 

The house will be filled by the most promising Web3 talent to work on and contribute to the Global Cardano ecosystem and to build the future unicorn protocols on the Cardano blockchain. They will contribute 25% of their time to the blockchain protocol itself - solving the hardest problems faced by the Cardano community and protocol. This could be anything from governance, protocol code auditing, community governance, coordination, organisation of local hubs, Cardano public relations, marketing and CIP reviewing and research. The other 75% will be dedicated for entrepreneurs to develop their own projects, built on the Cardano blockchain. By setting up the house as a part of the first HomeDAO hub, the network and agglomeration effects can accelerate the success of these students. 

The Oxford Crypto Valley is part of HomeDAO - a decentralised autonomous organisation seeking to enable the world’s most promising Web3 talent to launch their entrepreneurial careers with support from industry leaders. We form an integrated physical community, providing a meeting point for the leading Web3 organizations & protocols and the highest potential Web3 talent. Residency in a HomeDAO crypto village will be the best place to launch an entrepreneurial career in Web3.

“I’m really excited about HomeDAO, I’m happy to personally help HomeDAO launch at Princeton (my alma mater) when HomeDAO comes to the US”

• Joe Lubin CEO of Consensys 

The HomeDAO is a unique integrated physical community of entrepreneurs and builders with deep links with Oxford University (founders & members are Oxford students & alumni). It has so far signed contracts to establish 

MODEL

1. Sponsors - leading protocols, companies and investors in Web3 sponsor the creation of a hacker house. 
2. HomeDAO finds and proposers find entrepreneurship scholars (ES) - the most ambitious and accomplished young builders and entrepreneurs in Web3 - who become tenants for the Cardano house to be approved by the Cardano community (see below)
3. ES spend 25% of their time working with the Cardano community to solve the hardest problems facing the ecosystem
4. ES spend 75% of their time on entrepreneurial projects on the sponsor protocol.

Our value to sponsors

• Knowledge layer: direct access to a house of highly curated entrepreneurs in residence who act as consultants/interns to help you with challenges and problem-solving
• Talent layer: tangential access to a rapidly growing community (seeding village in NYC, plans to see villages in Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard & MIT)
• Seed layer: Investment and incubation opportunities in potential unicorns both from the house and second and third-order network effects that the sponsorship activates.

Our value to talent

• Free accommodation
• Hugely talented cohort → peer effects 
• Connections with leaders of Web3 ecosystem
• World-class mentors
• Unique social experience

The current HomeDAO Oxford Crypto Valley 

The growing community of 40+ future Web3 leaders include presidents of Oxford University crypto, coding, entrepreneurship, hackathon and finance societies, 2 VC backed Web3 founders, Forbes 30u30 Africa. 

Currently confirmed HomeDAO Oxford Crypto Valley house sponsors include: Consensys (Ethereum), NEAR protocol, Algorand, "Web n" (DeFi incubator attached to Brevan Howard), Nickel (digital asset manager).

Members build projects on sponsor protocol. Some examples from the current Oxford Crypto Village:

• Retrox, ETH Amsterdam prize winner https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethamsterdam/retr0x-2p73o 
• Omnii, ETH Amsterdam prize winner https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethamsterdam/omnii-urkyn 
• Hacklens, ETH Amsterdam prize winner https://showcase.ethglobal.com/ethamsterdam/hacklens-rx3gy  
• Footium, Web3 football management game, $20m valuation https://footium.club/ 

Sample of current Oxford Crypto Village members 

Eito Miyamura. Tech lead - systems. President of OxHack and Google developer student. 3rd year computer science student and founder of advanced ML startup.

Keivan Samani. President of Oxford Blockchain Society. Entrepreneurship fellow at the Oxford Foundry. Aided BitDAO in the delivery of a £33m proposal to form EduDAO - a global initiative focussed on the growth of university blockchain ecosystems. PhD in Computational Plasma physics. 

Kyle Duffy. Tech lead - blockchain. Researching scaling using Cairo and Stark Net & building NFT infrastructure. Oxford Masters in advanced computer science. 

Prince Ekeh. Commercial lead. Forbes Africa 30 under 30. Founder and Co-CEO Konga Online Shopping, exploring DeFi projects in emerging markets. Oxford MBA. 

Tom Taylor. Data lead. UK head of good data institute, interning at Goldman Sachs, president @ Capitox - Oxford’s premier consulting society. Oxford Mathematics and Statistics undergraduate (department of statistics award for best performance). 

James O’Leary. Founder and CEO of Footium, a P2E game backed by Animoca Brands and others at £20m valuation. Former VP of Oxford Blockchain Society. 2x Gold medallist in UK Maths Olympiad. Oxford Economics and Management undergraduate. 

Dickson Wu. Founded DeusExSecuritas, a platform that uses ML for smart contract audits - winners of Vitalik’s Choice at ETH Denver. Corea team at PadawanDAO, a community of u25 Web3 entrepreneur.

Dasha Nikolaeva. Moscow Hacker House Fellowship winner (Solana foundation). Graduated in top 10% of Y combinator startup school. Founder of IzzyNFTs. 

Jan Ole Ernst. Blockchain developer at SAP, winner of FastTrack programme for PoC-application and research for the use of blockchain for micropayment processing. Built NFTography, image rights management platform. Oxford PhD in Quantum Physics.

Kristof Lommers. Founder of Future Fellowship (invite-only community for exceptional entrepreneurial talents under 30 to overcome world’s sustainability challenges with their startup). Gitcoin KERNEL fellowship. DeFi Venture Capital Intern. Oxford PhD quantitative Finance and visiting scholar at NYU Stern conducting DeFi research. 

Our values 

• Building an inclusve community: we welcome members of all backgrounds, races, creeds and nationalities
• Concern for the whole person: cultivating a person-centric environment where individuality and well being are prioritised 
• Striving for excellence: supporting members to reach their highest potential and achieve the higest possible development of their skills.
• Blockchain for social good 

Cardano house proposed tenants

Simon Sällström. Co-founder and CEO of DirectEd Development Foundation, OX1 incubator fellow, Creative Destruction Lab Blockchain stream member, and co-founder of Cardano student hub. Veteran Proposal Assessor, a contributor to the Catalyst CA sub-circle. Oxford MPhil in Economics. 

Rohan Mitta. Co-founder and CTO of DirectEd Development foundation. Creative Destruction Lab Blockchain stream. Cambridge MAst in Mathematics (final part of the maths tripos), Trinity College and Oxford MSc in foundations of computer science and mathematics. 

[TO BE DECIDED] 

[TO BE DECIDED]

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

This proposal is an "Integration" type proposal in that it integrates Cardano into the newly forming HomeDAO ecosystem described previously.

This proposal brings a positive impact to the wider Cardano ecosystem in two ways. First, through the employment of entrepreneurship scholars as direct contributors to the Cardano ecosystem. Second, by enabling them to build projects on the Cardano blockchain whilst synergising with the broader HomeDAO ecosystem. 

• The Cardano ecosystem receives 5 main benefits that are positive externalities from a Cardano house within HomeDAO
• House productivity synergies - 4 ES more productive together
• HomeDAO community productivity synergies - Cardano house learns from the wider HomeDAO community (20+ other ES) who have expertise in DAOs, infrastructure, NFTs, DeFi, gaming and general entrepreneurship. 
• Ecosystem activation benefits - Talent and marketing achieved by plugging into the powerful HomeDAO network (presidents of multiple student societies on campus) and frequent upskilling workshops and focus groups around specialisms.
• Incubation benefits - incubation layer (investors, mentors & serviceDAOs) benefits all houses within HomeDAO
• Talent premium - we have the smartest and most accomplished talent in the world. We can attract talent that Cardano alone would struggle to attract

By sponsoring Cardano house; Cardano, its residents and HomeDAO will help Cardano attract the best talent for Cardano ecosystem projects. Cardano will also be connected to HomeDAOs entrepreneurial talent and our blockchain partners, who are some of the world’s leading blockchain companies & ecosystems.

Below we elaborate on the 5 benefits for Cardano mentioned above 

• HomeDAO productivity synergies
• HomeDAO is forming a mentor layer of specialists in Web3 and entrepreneurship to support members of HomeDAO that all members will receive benefits fro
• HomeDAO will run frequent upskilling workshops and focus groups around specialisms
• Cardano House ecosystem activation benefits
• Activate developers
• HomeDAO members are presidents of the coding and hackathon society at Oxford and can promote Cardano to student developers
• HomeDAO members are presidents of the entrepreneurship society and can activate interest in Cardano from student entrepreneurs (including MBAs and PhDs)
• HomeDAO members are leaders within global and UK-based talent networks
• PadawanDAO - leading community for blockchain builders u25: https://twitter.com/PadawanDAO
• TuesDAO - London’s largest Blockchain community https://twitter.com/TuesDAOeth
• Oxford Blockchain society - part of EduDAO project. Society is run as a DAO https://twitter.com/blockchainox
• Activate users
• HomeDAO members are presidents coding society, blockchain society, crypto society, entrepreneurship society & finance society and can use these channels to raise awareness for Cardano projects
• Incubation benefits
• HomeDAO will maintain a network of investors, entrepreneurs & ServiceDAOs to help projects achieve scaling and PMF
• Building on themes highlighted in this article
• https://medium.com/1kxnetwork/unbundling-the-unit-economics-of-venture-capital-via-daos-9fbda3e8113b
• Cardano will receive many benefits for its projects from the incubation layer
• HomeDAO talent premium
• HomeDAO is a first-of-its-kind experiment, some of the highest quality talent in the world are passing on options to participate in this experiment
• Cardano house will be able to attract better talent than otherwise through association with HomeDAO.
• We have some of the smartest, most talented people in the world.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Risk 1: inability to fill the 4 rooms in the house. Solution: Although the primary source of recruitment to the house will be Oxford students who are willing or currently seeking to build on Cardano, we will open up to recruit people globally to ensure that the Cardano ecosystem receives value for its investment. 

Risk 2: house members do not contribute to the Cardano ecosystem. Solution: Funds are being released sequentially (month by month) and house members are required by our proposal to contribute to the ecosystem with 25% of their time. The latter is something that is verifiable in the form of weekly reports to the community. 

Risk 3: the house members are not able to find impactful tasks needed by the Cardano community. Solution: This should not be a great problem as there are many challenges and much need for coordination and people working for the protocol itself (as highlighted in Charles Hoskinsons Consensus community speech for example). We mitigate this risk by engaging regularly with all ecosystem actors including projects that build on Cardano, and the various funding entities. We will also report to Catalyst Circle which has a problems board from which our ES can draw problems and solve them.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The HomeDAO project is fully underway in terms of general ecosystem development. Given the open-ended nature of this proposal, it will be difficult to provide a detailed plan and timeline similar to that of other projects. However, the lack of a detailed plan is a result of the flexibility and multi-faceted talent that the entrepreneurship scholars will exhibit - they will be able to work on and solve all types of needs that the Cardano protocol faces.

Below you will find a rough sketch of the timeline for the establishment of the Cardano house in the Oxford Crypto Valley and some suggestive milestones/objectives. However, it should be noted that the milestones and objectives will in practice be set in collaboration with the Catalyst Circle representatives and possibly the Cardano Foundation and their ambassadors.

September 2022:

• After Vote results announcement: final selection of last two house tenants and procurement of a house.

October - January 2022: move-in to the Cardano house. Suggested Milestones/objectives

• 5 problems from the Catalyst Circle Problem Sensing board solved.
• 30 Cardano Stack exchange questions answered
• 10 meetings to promote Cardano with academics, TradFi or investors.
• Coordination and mapping of all existing global Cardano community hubs

February - May 2023: continued contribution to the Cardano community. Preliminary milestones/objective

• 5 problems from the Catalyst Circle Problem Sensing board solved.
• 30 Cardano Stack exchange questions answered
• 10 meetings to promote Cardano with top academics, TradFi or investors.
• Review and feedback on all CIPs

June - September 2023: continued contribution with the Cardano community. Preliminary milestones/objectives

• 5 problems from the Catalyst Circle Problem Sensing board solved.
• 30 Cardano Stack exchange questions answered
• 10 meetings to promote Cardano with academics, TradFi or investors.
• Review and feedback on all CIPs

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

All HomeDAO houses are financed using the same model and amount. This is a prerequisite for becoming part of the ecosystem. The entrepreneurship scholars who join the HomeDAO have all given up lucrative careers in traditional industries to pursue careers in Web3 and the compensation for the 25%

The total sum is £80,000 and is divided into two parts.

1. £60,000 is dedicated to accommodation for four tenants
2. £20,000 is the contribution to the HomeDAO treasury. These funds will be used for local events (e.g. speakers & workshops in oxford), global events, software costs, and team-building.

Accounting for currency fluctuation, this amounts to the following breakdown.

1. £60,000 -> $73,500
2. £20,000 -> $24,500

This translates to an overall cost of around $8200/month (ignoring the fact that the community treasury funds will partially be used to finance things that benefit the Cardano community as a whole, e.g. global hackathons and marketing reach), for roughly 160 hours of work done by the entrepreneurship scholars, which in turn translates into an hourly rate of $51 - which broadly is in line with entry-level salaries that these entrepreneurs expect for their outside options at top US venture capital, or TradFi firms (~USD 100k per annum) and much lower than developer salaries at tech companies. It is a bit higher than European or UK wages, but can be justified on the basis of talent premium and the second-order benefits that the larger Cardano ecosystem will get by being part of HomeDAO and being able to partake in the HomeDAO global events.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

HomeDAO core team

Alex Groves. CEO. C-suite at 3 tech startups raising $50m+ in aggregate. Founder of startup community which incubated 2 series A startups. Qualified chartered accountant at Deloitte.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergroves/

Josh Lavorini. COO. Founder and President of Oxford University Cryptox Society, former OP Crypto VC (backed by Alan Howard and Bill Ackman). Crypto angel investor. https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-lavorini-41a8281a9/

Jack Chong. CMO. Founder of the first Oxford hacker house. Entrepreneurship thought leader. President of OX1 incubator. Algorithmic stablecoin startup entrepreneur. Kwok scholar. Oxford Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) undergraduate. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-chong/

Cardano house proposed tenants

Simon Sällström. House lead. Co-founder and CEO of DirectEd Development Foundation, OX1 incubator fellow, Creative Destruction Lab Blockchain stream member, and co-founder of Cardano student hub. Oxford MPhil in Economics. https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-s%C3%A4llstr%C3%B6m-3659b616b/

Rohan Mitta. Co-founder and CTO of DirectEd Development foundation. Creative Destruction Lab Blockchain stream. Cambridge MAst in mathematics and Oxford MSc in foundations of computer science and mathematics. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohan-mitta-239029173/

[Student entrepreneur 3 to be recruited]

[Student entrepreneurs 4 to be recruited]

Other projects undertaken by team

Simon and Rohan are both working on DirectEd Development Foundation. This work will still continue at the planned relatively slow pace that is outlined in the proposal. As one of the key bottlenecks of that proposal is the involvement and coordination of multiple actors, the project inevitably takes a lot of time but is spread out over a longer period as opposed to intensive bursts of time investment. Committing 75% of their time to DirectEd Development Foundation will suffice given the large (11 people) team that has been gathered to work on the project, along with a strong team of advisors and infrastructure providers from the ecosystem. https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400019

Simon is alsoa co-founder and contributor to the Oxford Student hub. However, this project is now mainly led by a growing community of 4 current students and is largely running independently of Simon's active leadership. The time investment into the student hub is roughly 1 hour per week.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/405477

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

If this is funded, we will first see and evaluate the value of the Cardano house and gather community feedback on the value-added of this before returning to Catalyst.

If it is not funded, then Simon and Rohan will still contribute to the ecosystem and encourage other Oxford Cardano Student Hub members to do so but only on a volunteering basis, which of course that it will only be done when we have time to spare.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

The Student Entrepeneurs will report weekly to the Catalyst Circle and put up the weekly reports on their Notion page that will be publicly accessible.

They will also engage with the various Cardano community groups to find out in what ways they can contribute, these groups include but are not limited to Catalyst Town Halls, Cardano Foundation, IOG, Emurgo and stake pool operators. However, the main way progress will be tracked is through solving problems identified by the catalyst circle.

Some other progress measures that may be used include

• Number of messages in Cardano Discord, Telegram, Cardano forum and Reddit forum
• Answers in Cardano stack exchange
• Reviews and feedback on CIPs
• Meetings to promote Cardano with leading figures from TradFi, academia, media and politics.
• Testnet participation and pieces of feedback given to IOG
• Global community hub coordination: the number of successful collaboration partnerships initiated by Cardano house members.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Cardano is perceived to be the go-to protocol for TradFi institutions, tech companies and, governments for their products.

Cardano becomes well-integrated and respected in the broader crypto space. This leads to new cross-chain collaborations and leading protocols migrating to Cardano.

The Cardano house facilitates bridges between current leading Cardano projects and VC firms, leading to one or several unicorns being created on Cardano.

The Cardano protocol is perceived as the leading protocol when it comes to decentralised governance, with Cardano house members playing leading roles in coordinating the global ecosystem efforts, solving the key pain-points identified by the community.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is not a continuation of a previous proposal.