Hi Everyone,

Sam Elamin from Imbue Network. I am opening this discussion because I would like to gauge community interest in funding the Imbue team.

Imbue was started with the vision of accountability empowered by the blockchain. We as an ecosystem can do better!

Imbue at its core is milestone-based vesting powered by democracy. Proposals are submitted on the network with milestones and their respective %s. Only funders get to vote on the progress of a project since they have the most to lose, while project initiators are incentivised to continue delivering so they get more of their project’s funds unlocked.

Another integral point is to provide a platform where creatives, developers, researchers and anyone with talent can utilize their expertise to get paid securely and safely regardless of where they are in the world. To give people options that do not exist where they live.

We believe this resonates strongly with the ethos of Kusama, and will be a great outlet to bridge over other ecosystems that can leverage Imbue and hence Kusama as a vehicle to achieve their dreams or improve their lives. Thereby pushing more adoption onto Kusama and definitively answering the popular misconception that Web3 lacks utility

The underlying issue is we did not go towards a common good slot first because we did not want to risk community funds, we did not raise any funds whatsoever until we guaranteed what we build can produce demonstrable value.

The team reached out to the community and described what we wanted to do. A promise was set that - given the team's expertise to deliver on this - there will be no external funding until a usable product is produced. We decided to build it in an open-source manner with volunteers

In addition, The team also would not launch on Kusama until an MVP is ready and usable from day 1. This utility will have to be validated by the community in a running testnet before any community funds are put at risk.

Now we are in a position where we have a usable MVP which we tried to raise funds on but the liquidity in the market is not significant. We then tried going towards VCs but the overwhelming consensus was Polkadot lacks active users and "Gavin left". This was echoed by multiple projects at Sub0

As such, we now turn towards the Kusama treasury to support us make the Imbue vision a reality.

We understand that the treasury does not normally fund parachains, the vast majority have secured private funding via VCs.

But Imbue is one of the very few(GM perhaps being the only other) that remains to this day open source and not funded with the sole purpose of protecting the community. As such, the team are also exploring ways to migrate towards a common good chain

We strongly believe that Imbue can add much-needed utility and value to Kusama beyond just DeFi, as well as help us reach beyond the Polkadot ecosystem and clearly and definitively answer "Why Kusama?" or "How does this make my life better?" and bring in users and adoption

Please feel free to look at the proposal and I am happy to answer any questions if required