Please describe your proposed solution.
When it comes to being funded via Project Catalyst and receiving Funds from the Cardano Treasury, the funded Projects accountability heavily relies on the availability to provide a transparent and access to funding distributions & allocations. However, it is difficult and time consuming to establish transparent treasury & accounting systems and many funded projects do not have the time nor the focus on developing such systems.
This is where we come in
Together with the Catalyst Swarm & The Treasury Guild, we develop first tools & suits, platforms and services to the Cardano Community which help to build a strong and transparent auditable, Treasury and Accounting processes.
Previous Funds from Funded Proposals have been used to develop & build first tool sets.
The current system works as such:
(1) A task or Bounty is completed on Dework <https://app.dework.xyz/i/2DSwalQqTtsrGp8jsa6WRK>
(2) The task gets updated to our contributors sheet
(3) From there, the task gets included in a weekly bulk transaction. The number of bulk transactions we have to do every week is already growing. Currently we are doing bulk transactions for Swarm, Governance Services Guild, SingularityNet Ambassador program.
(4) Each monday we send out all payments & rewards in a single bulk transaction using the following tool - <https://staking.rocks/bulk-ada-sender> We will develop our own tool in the future to include metadata in these bulk transactions.
(5) We fill in the details of the transaction in our treasury system that generates a json file and a GitHub Issue with the transaction details.
(6) We copy the transaction id into the json file and GitHub issue. The json file gets committed and the issue gets submitted. (This process needs to be automated)
(6) When the Issue is closed it sends a message to Discord - Which can be viewed here - <https://discord.gg/6jk8mVuYqA>
(7) Transactions are documented in Gitbook as well.
<https://treasury-guild.gitbook.io/catalyst-swarm/>
Right now and as we still explore the whole thing, a lot of work is done manually. To run through the manual process allows us to create strong & needed insights on how the system works & should work and to identify specific problems and potential solutions.. However, our goal is to fully automate the Treasury & Accounting system and to be able to provide well matched toolsets to projects which might see a need and use for our services.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Treasury Guild & SwarmLabs build and develop products from the Community, for the community. We see ourselves as vision driven Toolmakers & Maintainers, dedicated to supporting the Cardano Ecosystem in its growth. Our Focus with this proposal and the project is to build Accountability and trust amongst Projects & Communities and we believe that “Tools, not Rules” (AIM) are important pillars of a healthy ecosystem
Increasing the number of dapps and products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases. - Our Treasury System can be used by funded proposers to add a transparency layer to their projects and also help them manage their budgets and assist with monthly reporting. A new and much needed use case indeed. It can also be used by other projects/communities that need help managing their finances and projects.
Increase the number of integrations that bring existing solutions together for a more seamless and connected experience between different products. - Our Treasury System integrates into existing products like Discord, Dework and GitHub to ease the overall user experience from the client’s side as well as the community’s side. As we grow we will most likely add more integrations to this list.
Increased quality of existing products & integrations through suggested improvements that is supported by customer feedback or increased usage by the community. - People can comment in the same channel where transaction information is sent. We also have treasury channels in all the Discord servers where people can ask us questions and make suggestions. Dework also has a suggestion space for the community where they can vote on suggestions. We are open and welcome any feedback the community has. We made improvements to our metadata based on community feedback. One example: Allison Fromm suggested we add Ideascale proposal links in the metadata and we did just that.
We see the Treasury & Accounting Project as a great Product, which provides an effective & needed solution for Project, Companies or DAOs which are building on Cardano…
Building an open source treasury and accounting system that adds transparency to any project, aligns as well with what Cardano is all about.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Biggest risk for Toolmakers is mostly to build tools, and then having noone using your tools or even having lack of feedback on developed tools for further development
Due to our Community wide Network which we are building with the Catalyst Swarm since 2021, we are able to communicate & coordinate our tools across a wide spectrum of close Community Projects like: Eastern, Latam & Africa Town Halls, the NFT, SPO & Treasury Guild, Cardano 4 Climate, Gimbalabs & WADA etc
The Treasurer Guild, AIM & Fluid7 will naturally start to use commonly created tools and with that, provide additional use cases from which we can receive feedback to further improve and develop the tools.