I think the ecosystem needs to put more financial resources to help projects to kickstart. This is particularly important as various ecosystems are competing for great projects. How about we make a DAO as a decentralized pre-seed VC to invest in early-stage Cosmos ecosystem projects (hubs or zones)? We should also invite institutions like ICF, AiB, Polychain to put some seed money ($atom) in that as well.
This DAO is like a Community Pool with the sole purpose to provide pre-seed funding.
A) Fund size of this DAO:
- 100 projects x 15,000 Atom on average (first check)
- 20 projects to receive 1st follow-on investment x 75,000 Atom on average
- 4 projects can receive 2nd follow-on investment x 250,000 Atom on average
Total: 1,500,000 + 1,500,000 + 1,000,000 = 4,000,000 Atom which is only about 1.55% of the total supply of Atom. If 2 of the final 4 project hit a home run (+700%), The fund can break-even and reinvest in new projects.
B) Basic eligibility:
The projects should be completely open-source, have native tokens and are built with Cosmos SDK and Tendermint.
C) Benefits of this idea:
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Assuming average team size is 3, this fund can help 300 builders to kickstart in Cosmos.
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Even if most of these projects will fail, their team can be merged with the existing teams/projects. They will continue to be an asset of Cosmos.
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This serves as the screening stage for ICF (or other institutions/VCs/validators) to make better and faster decision whether or not they should make a larger investment/grant or support a particular project.
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The application process can help the projects to understand better the expectation from the community so that they can build better products.
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The application process is a marketing opportunity for the projects.
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Some other concepts can be derived from this DAO such as Cosmos School, Cosmos Accelerator, Cosmos Angel List, Cosmos Recruitment… …
I understand a lot of tech and non-tech questions need to be answered. This is just a rough idea to start the conversation 