Please describe your proposed solution.
Treasury systems
The Web 3 Association was established to help with the ongoing support and improvement of treasury systems across web 3 ecosystems. Our focus is to continuously identify how any part of managing and distributing a treasury system can be improved.
Relevant focus areas
There are a number of different parts involved in a funding process which is used to distribute treasury funding. Our approach to supporting and improving treasury systems consists of selecting a focus area at a time and conducting deep research and analysis to identify suggestions for improvements and opportunities for existing treasury systems to consider. We have outlined a range of different relevant focus areas for treasury systems in our contribution roadmap. For the funding process these potential focus areas include funding sources, community prioritisation, funding initiative types, proposal assessment, community decision making, voting mechanisms & approaches, funding distribution mechanisms, tracking progress & completion and finally measuring impact. In terms of the funding system itself these areas include the funding categorisations & weightings, processes & scheduling, roles & incentives, system & process changes and constitutions, policies & values. We expect this list of focus areas to expand in the future as we identify other important areas for consideration when managing and distributing a treasury.
Knowledge resources
The core contribution outcomes from the Web 3 Association are the creation of knowledge resources. Knowledge resources are created through deep research and analysis on different focus areas and their purpose is to provide insightful and actionable information about how treasury systems can be approached. The following list covers what type of information can be included:
Research
- Data, facts & statistics - Aggregating the data, facts and statistics that exist about treasury systems and breaking them down into the relevant focus areas of concern.
- Solution research - Identifying the different treasury system solutions that exist and how those solutions approach solving each problem for the different topic areas.
- Aggregated resources - Bringing together the relevant existing information about different focus areas which will include any relevant research literature and reports, articles, blogs and any other insightful informational resource.
Analysis
- Insights & trends - Analysing all of the data, facts and statistics that exists to identify trends and insights which could provide useful learnings on the current state of different solutions and how they have been changing over time for different metrics.
- Case studies - Conducting studies to look into treasury systems either at a high level to do overview comparisons or more deep dives that look in detail at certain focus areas and what is happening across the industry.
- Product analysis - Exploring how different problems could be solved with different technical, product or design choices and what ramifications those approaches may have on improving treasury systems. Analysis can help with identifying what existing approaches are effective and easy to use and where further experimentation could be made.
- Literature review - Reviewing the existing literature available against the up to date insights and trends to evaluate how current research could be better applied to existing treasury systems. Alternatively this could also result in identifying when more research could be conducted that could be beneficial to treasury systems due to new learnings from recent insights or real world usage.
Suggestions
- Experimentation suggestions - Applying the results of the analysis to help identify what new approaches could be explored and trialled in treasury systems that look promising as potentially effective solutions. Any results of these experiments would feed back into the iterative loop of conducting further research and analysis to better understand what the more effective solutions are to different problems for treasury systems.
- Implementation suggestions - As certain solutions have a growing amount of evidence of their effectiveness suggestions can be made towards how other existing teams could implement those solutions. These suggestions could be data structures, processes, algorithms, open source software or any other technical factor or product consideration.
Shared learning
The Web 3 Association is adopting an approach focussed on shared learnings. This focus aims to help improve the amount of collaboration and the speed in which learnings are identified and shared across ecosystems. Instead of competing with existing teams by creating duplicated treasury system solutions the intentions of adopting an approach focussed on shared learnings is to instead provide a supportive structure that helps existing teams building treasury systems do so more efficiently and effectively. The Web 3 Association can be seen as a supportive organisation for the Catalyst team by helping identify and present any new learnings discovered in the industry. These can then be used by the Catalyst team and other Cardano communities with treasuries when iterating and improving their own treasury systems.
There are a number of benefits for adopting an approach that prioritises shared learnings. These include helping with creating faster learning outcomes, being more cost effective, increasing the amount of collaboration, reducing duplicated & wasted effort and helping to inspire new solution approaches. The benefits of the shared learning approach are covered in more detail in our shared learning approach documentation.
Web 3 Association background
The Web 3 Association has been created from the same contributor who started PACE. An example piece of work that matches this solution approach of creating knowledge resources would be the funding categorisation analysis and funding categories work. This research and analysis work was completed through the PACE organisation. Instead of PACE spending more significant effort trying to compete and create new solutions that same effort was directed towards doing deep research and analysis around a single topic area and then turning that into knowledge resources with insightful and actionable information. This analysis has led to the Catalyst process being changed in fund 11 due to the suggestions made from this work. It is from this experience that we identified the larger opportunity to improve and change existing treasury solutions through the approach being adopted by the Web 3 Association.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Addressing the challenge brief
The challenge brief has the following relevant aspects which are relevant to this proposal:
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- proposals that help with systemic improvements (technical or procedural) to the Project Catalyst processes.
- For this proposal this is relevant and achieved through the knowledge resources created which will provide insightful and actionable information on how a funding process could be improved and also can include suggestions about where further experimentation could be explored.
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- Proposals that are academic research that clearly defines a known Catalyst specific problem space to identify facts and/or clearly stated opinions that will likely assist in solving Catalyst specific problems.
- This proposal would be completing deep research and analysis which would help bring together academic research when this is relevant for whichever focus area is prioritised at the time. These efforts can help in bringing light to suggestions and opportunities for Catalyst and other treasury systems based on the academic literature that is identified and reviewed. In the future the Web 3 Association may participate in academic research but this is outside the scope of this proposal.
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- Proposals that are detailed studies of a Catalyst specific subject to discover new information or improved understanding.
- This will be achieved through doing deep research on existing treasury solutions. This research will help with the creation of case studies with evidence concerning what is and isn’t working for the different approaches being taken and where any new learnings have been identified in these ecosystems.
Benefits to the Cardano ecosystem
The main benefit of our solution approach is the ongoing creation of insightful and actionable information about improving treasury systems through knowledge resources. If our resources can achieve that outcome then the suggestions and information provided will help with making meaningful improvements to treasuries like Catalyst and some of the community treasuries growing across the Cardano ecosystem.
Our proposal scope focuses on helping the Cardano ecosystem better understand the ways in which community prioritisation, funding initiative types and proposal assessment can be approached. Our resources will include research around identifying trends, suggestions and areas worth exploration for these different treasury systems in the Cardano ecosystem. Even small improvements to any treasury systems in Cardano would represent large opportunity for increasing the rate of growth of these ecosystems.
A focus on shared learning across ecosystems can also help with generating faster learning outcomes, creating a more cost effective approach for improving treasuries, increasing the amount of collaboration between teams building treasuries, reducing duplicated & wasted effort when trying to learn more about approaches to treasury systems and finally can help with inspiring new solution approaches. Achieving these outcomes would be beneficial for the Catalyst funding process and other treasury systems in the ecosystem.
Opportunity to improve ecosystem treasuries
This proposal has the opportunity to make very meaningful returns on investment if the resources we create help lead to any percentage improvement of how funding is distributed in Catalyst and other ecosystems. The example above looks at the Cardano treasury which currently has well over 1 billion ADA under management. If the community distributes 10% of that treasury a year then even a 1% improvement would represent over a 1,000,000 ADA gain for the funding process. These values help to highlight the scale of the opportunity for our proposal to provide benefit to both the Catalyst funding process and the wider ecosystem for communities building their own treasury solutions. Treasury systems are a flywheel growth lever for blockchain ecosystems when those ecosystems are able to manage and operate their treasury effectively. Over the long term the effectiveness of these treasuries will increasingly determine which ecosystems will become sustainable and which ones fail.
Historical example of benefits provided
The funding categorisation analysis work is a good example of detailed research and analysis around a specific focus area relevant to the Catalyst process. This work identified issues with the challenge setting process which was currently being used and then helped with providing sufficient evidence that something needed to be changed. This knowledge resource we created lead to this outcomes. This same approach of executing deep work on different parts of the Catalyst process can be continued to create even further resources that will help with identifying ways in which the Catalyst treasury system can be improved.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Examples of our approach previously
Previous completed work around funding categorisation analysis and funding categories required a sufficient amount evidence and rationale to justify why the challenge process needed to be replaced with an improved funding categories approach. To produce this evidence we created a number of resources that highlighted the scale of the problem and how a new approach would provide improvements:
- Categorisation Overall Cost Comparison - We identified the costs involved of using one approach over another by looking at the time taken for each stakeholder and any resource costs
- Funding Access For Each Focus Area - We looked at how the existing approach compared to another one in terms of providing access to funding for different focus areas and some of the issues in the current approach.
- Categorisation Setting Observations - We looked at what funding categorisations emerged and their different groupings to help with identifying trends
- Challenge Setting Issues - We listed out all of the issues that were present in the challenge setting process so the current situation was well understood and then more easily compared with different approaches.
Knowledge resource deliverables
The knowledge resources are the core output from our contribution efforts towards supporting and improving treasury systems in this proposal. The creation and delivery of these resources each month along with a monthly summary of our progress will be the main way that completion of this proposal can be measured.
Approach comparison analysis
For the upcoming contribution roadmap for the Web 3 Association we will be following a similar approach of measuring the potential impact and success of our contribution outcomes by comparing different approaches. After analysis is completed and suggestions are made we will spend time making any useful comparisons about existing approaches to highlight the scale of impact for any improvements that could be made. This analysis will look to identify where time or cost savings could be made or where there are situations where the overall quality of the process can be improved due to the opportunity to adopt new or improved approach.
Record of feedback provided
Success for the Web 3 Association itself will come down to how often we are able to help treasury systems like Project Catalyst to identify and embrace new learnings that lead to improvements in the overall effectiveness of the funding process. We will invite all participants and readers of our resources to provide feedback and about their experience of using any learnings from our resources. This will help to highlight whether these participants are finding the resources valuable and how they could be improved in the future.
Record of treasury changes made due to our contribution efforts
Recording how treasury systems like Catalyst make changes to their funding process due to our contribution outcomes will provide the evidence to show how our resources are being used and what impact those changes are having. Having a public log of changes made will demonstrate whether our shared learning approach is actually providing an effective way to support a range of different ecosystems building treasury systems.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
All contribution outcomes created by the Web 3 Association will be open source and freely available immediately upon completion. This includes the knowledge based resources and anything hosted in code repositories.
The outputs for deliverables will be located at:
- Knowledge resources - treasuries.web3association.co
- GitHub - github.com/web3association
In terms of the regularity of reporting any new resources and information created we will provide a summary at the end of each month of what work has been completed followed by a brief plan of the focus areas for the upcoming month. We will invite feedback on any of the outputs from our work to help with guiding future iteration and improvement.