Proof of Chaos Funding
Dear Community,
The Proof of Chaos project is running full steam again. For the past 9 months we worked hard to bring our vision to life. It has been a period of constant learning and pivoting in this fast paced environment. We are very proud of where the project is going and what we have built: anyone can now mint governance participation rewards and receive royalties whenever they are traded.
We demoed this with a sendout for all voters of Referendum 0 on Kusama.
Most of the work done to date has been covered through our last funding round in November of last year. As the future around NFTs was very uncertain at the start of this year we took the strategic decision to run our engine on minimum steam until there was more clarity on the horizon. Through this decision we have been able to stretch our last funding pretty far.
We did run a bit overboard though (19.2k USD) as we decided to completely revamp our code base. We now have a new site and the new code allows for much quicker and cheaper implementation of new features in the future. For example with the new codebase adding multi-chain support is now very easy. This proposal seeks retroactive funding for those hours and outlines our future roadmap.
As we now have a solid codebase we will also start focusing on marketing our tool. Reward creators currently have to lock up approximately 7KSM per sendout for a referendum of 500 votes. So while they do earn royalties on the trades, in the current market climate it is tough to earn back that amount through trades. In this regard we want to launch a program that reimburses the first 10 reward creators with the amount paid/locked up through their send-outs. We have included a budget of 7KSM*10 to fund the first 10 creators and get things going.
Your feedback is much appreciated!
The full proposal can be found here.
Comments (1)
I was a big fan of this project about a year ago but then it stopped issuing rewards (when kusama fees went up) which its fine while trying to find a solution. But the team went radio silence in discord and socials for months. Of course people lost interest and stopped caring about the project. You might have been working hard for the past 9 months but you completely neglected your community during that time. Now you plan to request funds and ask your community to vote for you... Regarding the proposal, I get that you are trying to revive the project with a focus on decentralization by letting anyone issue the rewards for each ref. But, in my opinion, the value of the project was that people were working towards a cool side goal (complete the shelf, build a puzzle...). With the new approach there is no cohesion between send-outs. Additionally, the come back is done with ugly AI images...
@jackwithsnack
Hey Jack,
appreciate the feedback. Thanks for taking the time!
We did get more quiet on socials with only occasional updates. The project was in a very uncertain stage at that time with so many things shifting around NFTs in Kusama. RMRK was looking to migrate and not maintain RMRK2 anymore, a new nfts pallet was being added to Assethub (nfts pallet) and an old one seemed to be getting deprecated (unique pallet). So there was uncertainty and no clear path forward for nfts at the time yet.
Then also as you mentioned fees on Kusama went up 10x. That made our sendout costs go up to levels that were not sustainable.
If that was all not enough... there was also the switch to OpenGov. That changed everything again for our project. The old centralized sendout system did not work anymore since there were simply too many referenda for us to process. It was clear that we needed to decentralize the project to let ANYONE mint the rewards.
We took the strategic decision to shut down our engines as much as possible while being all ears to any changes in the eco. Only once the dust settled and there was a clear view of the future of NFTs did we start to rev up our engines again. You can view our Github activity of this whole period to cross reference what I am saying. We were in constant communication with so many teams out there.
So yes, it will be a bit of an uphill battle for our project to get people excited again at first but we think with this new stuff we built and a clear strategy on how to go about it, it can be done. Had we not shut down our engines and preserved our funding we would have probably not made it this far. We would have built following wrong directions and run out of funding very quickly. Then we would have had to go back to the treasury to ask for more funding without anything concrete to show for it. That is a terrible position to be in and makes funding very unlikely. Now we have something to show for what we have done over the last 9 months and we think that gives the project much better prospects.
Nothing is for free in this world and everything has a trade off. When you see AI generated images, I see more funding being available for development of new features. With that sendout the goal was to demo the new system. There is a time and a place to invest in building and a time and a place for investing in getting word out and getting people excited again. Until now we were in the building phase. With limited resources available we have to make decisions with trade-offs. Now we are getting more into the spreading the word phase again. We are looking to launch our own collection using the new UI again as well but the beauty is that anyone else can also compete with us. This competition will drastically drive creativity and innovation of the governance nfts and as a result drive the biggest positive impact on governance participation. This competition will also constantly push things to the limit and help guide the development of new features.
At the end of the day it is up to token holders to decide this: do you think this project adds value to the ecosystem and would you like to see it being continued. We have amazing things in the pipe line and this proposal is a prerequisite to us building it. It can either die here or it can make an incredible come back and rise to new heights. Governance participation is lacking and whales are controlling the networks. We think we have a very good solution to help with those problems. We have proven that it works in the past and we now have an improved system to prove it once more! The question is just: are you with us?
We are releasing a completely new UI with an entirely new codebase on Tuesday. You or anyone else can use the tools we built now to help drive governance participation in a fun and engaging way. We provide the tools so that you can drive participation in governance and be the change that we all want to see. You as the creator will receive trading royalties on the NFTs you created. Furthermore as you have seen in this proposal we are looking to fund some creative people in the community to get the ball rolling. If you have a cool idea for a governance sendout then we can (hopefully) cover your costs to make sure that you only have upside (royalties).
I (Gabriel) whole heartedly believe that we made the best decisions for token holders. Thanks to those painful decisions, we are now in pretty good shape and can offer an amazing value-add at a low cost to the token holders.