Catalyst F7 Voting Begins 1/20/22

Cardano is an open source platform with a desire to represent a decentralized, global community. This means that everyone who stakes over 500 ADA in a Cardano stakepool can vote by downloading the Catalyst App as long as they pre register. The Cardano ecosystem is growing rapidly and transitioning into an era of self governance. The events of the past several weeks suggest that while the current focus is scaling the Cardano ecosystem, the governance phase is also going to be quite a challenge. Catalyst isn't just about individual proposals. Rather its a funding mechanism that will help build the ecosystem we desire. Therefore careful thought should be put into what kind of projects are funded, the transparency of the process and the documentation of how the funds are used.

Of course there will be differences of opinion in as to the funding priorities. Developers will argue that the primary focus should be on technical development. Others will argue for a shared focus on development and outreach. Please listen to both sides and make an informed decision. This is after all, part of governance. Catalyst is still a work in progress and it needs everyone's input to reach its full potential. In short, it needs you to engage- to become informed and involved.

Catalyst provides an opportunity for the community to fund proposals that address present and future concerns. It is also responsible for helping a number of small projects get started. All of the proposals at this point have been reviewed by the community, updated by the submitter and are ready for voting. If you haven't been involved before, be warned this is an active community with a lot of proposals.

Here are the F7 Categories:

Catalyst Natives COTI: Pay with ADA Plug-in

Boosting Cardano’s DeFi

Community Events

Lobbying for Favorable Legislation

Catalyst Rapid Funding Mechanisms

DAOs

Connecting Japan

Disarm Cyber Disinformation Attacks

DApps & Integrations

Gamers On Chained

Grow Latin America, Grown Cardano

Seeding Cardano’s Grassroots DeFi

Scale Up Cardano's Community Hubs

New SPO Business Opportunities

Global Sustainable Independent SPOs

A.I. & Singularity Net

Miscellaneous

Nation Building DApps

Mini/Low Budget DApps

Open Source Developer Ecosystem

Multilingual Resources

Improve and Grow Auditability

Accelerate Decentralized Identity

Catalyst Accelerator and Mentors

Fund 8 Challenge ***** This is where you vote on proposed challenges for F8*****

This is a big, busy community which is all the more reason to get involved. We need everyone's input. If you have any trouble getting registered to vote please check out the Project Catalyst Page or their handy FAQ guide. If all else fails please reach out to community members, someone will be happy to help you.

There is some truly revolutionary stuff in here. I can't possibly cover it all in one blog post so I'm simply going to cover a few of my favorites. This is not meant to be all inclusive, but rather to demonstrate the diversity of the proposals out there. Please take the time to do your own research and go through all of the proposals.

On Chain Data Analytics doesn't sound very sexy, does it? Yet it's important. 2022 is shaping up to be the year of Cardano DeFi. We are going to have a huge number of options. And at this moment, there is no way to compare and contrast them. It would be like having to shop for car insurance by sitting down with each company, writing down their costs and so on. Who has time for that? This proposal strives to create an online analytical lab which provides dense, high quality data. So, with a few clicks of a mouse you will be able to determine where and when it is best to buy your token of choice. There is a lot of specific detail in this proposal, written by the Maladex team. I encourage you to read it for yourself.

AnetaBTC or wrapped BTC is a product that creates a bridge from Bitcoin to Cardano and Ergo. It allows users to unlock access to their BTC which, if purchased in this way, is minted and stored in a vault.

The community events category is a great place to do a lot of good with minimal investment. When you are looking at a Catalyst Category, it's important to look at the total available funding and then compare that with the funds that are being requested. Many of the proposals in this category are for great educational events, all over the world, that each cost only a few thousand dollars. It is an important category as many people still think of cryptocurrency in general as a scam. These folks are educating the outside world about Cardano and the Cardano Community about internal news and events.

The first of the proposals I want to highlight is Cardano4Climate Community Events. These folks are already working on this project, which is to hold informational sessions about Cardano initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change and also to create measurable goals to track our progress. They are already doing the work. The requested funds will allow them to enhance the services they can offer to the community. Another great proposal in this category is the Cardano Classroom. This is a larger request for funds than many of the others, but I see that as reasonable since it is to create an entire curriculum focused on Cardano that can be used repeatedly. This was created by a father who saw an opportunity while educating his own children about cryptocurrency. The last one I'm going to mention in this category (although there are many more good ones) is Project Catalyst Heartbeat. This is an attempt to help the community keep up with the multitude of projects that are going on at any given time. Anyone who has tried to go through these proposals knows what a struggle it is. We need more tools to help us review and find the best proposals available.

Lobbying for Favorable Legislation is a very important and necessary category. There are some strong proposals in here from some very well qualified teams - some global, many others focused on specific areas. I'm not going to highlight any individual proposals here because I think the reader will probably want to prioritize by home country. Please look over the entire category and decide for yourself.

If you have spent any time in Catalyst, you know that proposers really need a stronger support system to create. Luckily there are several proposals in Catalyst that are focused on giving them guidance. One is Proposal Factory which aims to create an entire support process for new catalyst proposers giving them access to educational workshops, building pitch decks and providing active feedback. Another great proposal is Catalyst Treasury Management. We all know that Catalyst is a great program that needs better auditability. This project does just that. It gives proposers a better understanding of Project Catalyst disbursements and also helps them create reports so that their expenditures and success can be viewed easily.

WadaDAO is focused on unlocking the potential of Africa, which is both incredibly important and incredibly complicated. Luckily this is an experienced team that already has partnerships in place with Singularity.net and Photrek. They plan to offer a wide variety of services, all specifically designed for the people of Africa.

Connecting Japan - Creating a bilingual language hub As Cardano grows there is no doubt that more tools are required to allow global communication. This proposal is an effort to create a website that hosts content in both Japanese and English.

The security of the Cardano ecosystem is of paramount concern. There are several interesting proposals in the Disarm Cyber Attacks Category. The first is the Cross Chain Cyber Security Collab which proposes reaching out to other chains and creating a central hub for threat assessment. This is logical, since all cryptocurrencies are concerned about security issues. It might have the added benefit of building some cross chain alliances and reducing tribalism in crypto which is always a good thing. The next proposal is from the Stakeboard group: Defending the Cardano Staking Ecosystem. This is one of their proposals and is related to their ability to quickly notify the community about threats, changes to pool status and retiring pools. Just a great team and a great proposal. I'm unabashedly biased in favor of the Stakeboard proposals as I believe in the team, their mission and what they are doing for the Cardano ecosystem.

DApps and Integrations - there is so much in this category. Please take the time to go look at the diversity and talent. You will probably find something that speaks to you and your interests. Supply chain tracking actually speaks to me. Now its not the flashiest idea, but the ability for manufacturers to track merchandise and fight counterfeiters is a great, immediately available use case for blockchain technology. For this reason the Safety and Traceability of Cosmetics proposal is on my personal list. Its practical and can be implemented in fairly short order. A must see in this category is the ADA Handle proposal which will help eliminate bot interference in NFT sales. This is something that affects anyone trying to mint NFTs and is therefore worthy of your consideration. Like Stakeboard, it is also backed by a stellar team with a high likelihood of success.

Growing Latin America is a wonderful category with a 500,000 war chest which is enough to fund a number of proposals. Please take the time to read through the category as I can only highlight a few of the amazing proposals here. For example, there is a proposal to fund scientific research in Latin America by tokenizing the idle computer time we all have on our PCs. If it sounds amazing it is. It is called the Noether Protocol and you can read about it here. Another wonderful proposal to boost Cardano Adoption in Latin America is Dale, which means Lets Go in Spanish. It is managed by a diverse group of community members and entrepreneurs to help overcome some of the obstacles to blockchain adoption in Latin America. Another really exciting proposal which creates a funding mechanism for solar platforms via tokenization (from our very own ADA One Stake Pool) can be found here.

Endorsing the Marginalized is an initiative to help communities with microloans and has an experienced team behind it. Support Small Farmers is an initiative to help small farmers increase their harvest and learn sustainable agricultural techniques from each other. Agua Stake pool is already providing free water to people who need it through the stake pool rewards. Jorge has a catalyst proposal that will expand his ability to install solar powered water filtration units to small towns in desperate need. That proposal is here. Again this is a region where a relatively small amount of funding can go a long way. The funding for this category is sufficient to support a number of these proposals.

Another interesting initiative is a Plutus Training Program designed for women in Africa. The funding request here is small and the long term impact could be huge if successfully implemented.

Of course, the technical side of the ecosystem is still under construction as well. The great thing about Catalyst is that the technical proposals are presented in non technical terms to help the non developers among us. There are many interesting proposals listed under the Open Source Developer Ecosystem. UTXO Management aims to help with wallet integration, which impacts all of us. Glow is designed to help Dapps integrate more easily with the PAB. The Ledger Live proposal is an interesting one. There is no doubt that it's a good proposal and it will add value. The concerns about it are related to what Catalyst is for and what types of projects it will fund. Should we be funding large projects that have other ways of obtaining funding? Also this project is in the open source category. The argument is that the Catalyst funding will only be used to create open source code while the other components of the project will be funded privately. Is that a reasonable compromise? As a voter these are valid questions which only you can answer.

Scale Up Cardano’s Community Hubs is a project with an experienced team that is already well underway. Basically they are constructing a digital platform to enhance access to all things Cardano in multiple languages.

As you are aware by now, everyone at Cardano Army is focused and supportive of the stake pools, both to support decentralization and to make sure diverse groups are able to find communities within the larger Cardano ecosystem. Please take the opportunity to review all of the proposals listed under New SPO Business Opportunities and Global Sustainable SPOs, Particularly Stakeboard, Stakepad and StakingDAO. Stakepad aims to help smaller projects that might currently struggle to get funding and attention in our busy landscape. Stakeboard will help small pools by providing better data and searchability for delegators. StakingDAO will fairly distribute funds to pools that meet minimum criteria but still need some extra support.

Sometimes it seems that there should be more promotion of all the good things that the stake pools and the larger Cardano ecosystem are doing around the world. Sustainable SPOs Impact and Stories is a project that will tell the story of 100 SPOs - their connection to Cardano and how they are contributing.

NuNet offers stake pool operators an alternative to big tech cloud servers. Right now four big infrastructure providers support the lion's share of our stake pools. This catalyst proposal would help build a viable alternative. This proposal has a great amount of detail for you to review about what has already been built and the future potential of this project.

Don't skip the miscellaneous category. There are several really interesting projects in here. The first is Art at the Edge of the Universe which is an exploration of the everchanging technological world we live in and the ability of art to explore the interaction between art, self awareness and technology. We move from the ethereal to the practical in Train 100 Math Teachers proposal. You can't learn programming without functional math. This project is asking for a small amount that will make a big difference in Africa by training math teachers the skills they need to prepare students for functional mathematics.

Why do we all use smartphones? Because they are convenient. I think at this point we all also understand that ease of use is critical to mass adoption of Cardano. The next proposal, Paperless Cross Border Trade, offers a plug and play solution for governments that combines Cardano, Atala PRISM and, potentially, a Cardano implementation of the TradeTrust platform which currently runs on Ethereum. Community pharmacy system is another attempt to create opportunity in the developing world. Pharmacies there do not have tools to track or manage their inventory. This proposal offers a blockchain solution that would help these pharmacies grow and improve efficiency.

As you can see there are many great ideas and projects up for Catalyst funding and only a tiny fraction can be covered here. Also do not miss the Fund 8 Challenge as it will prioritize the next round. Please take the opportunity to review and vote on your favorites.

By Traveler Jo | CardanoArmy.io

You can find Traveler Jo somewhere close to the sea. She loves Cardano, kayaking and food - not necessarily in that order. She's busy exploring the world, always in the company of her husband, tired dog and indignant felines.