[Proposal #202][PASSED] {Interchain Info, Hub Funding)

[TendermintTimmy]

Overview

Built by Spark IBC, Interchain Info (ICI) is a truly multi-chain & chain-agnostic hub for information and tooling to make navigating the rapidly growing Interchain easier for both new and old users alike. At Spark IBC, we believe that, currently, “Cosmos” and the greater Interchain are extremely fragmented, as communities, educational resources, NFT collections, Dapps and tools each reside in their own remote corners of the ecosystem.

ICI aims to change this by taking the first step toward building the unified, multi-chain future that the community has been waiting for, and that we believe is paramount to Cosmos gaining mass adoption in the next market cycle. We are currently running an ICI funding campaign on the Spark IBC platform, found here, https://sparkibc.zone along with more details about ICI itself.

We are avoiding VCs and private investors in this endeavor, because ICI is only a valuable resource if it remains unbiased and beholden to no one but the community that uses it. Therefore, all ICI costs so far have come out of our own pockets, and going forwards, we’re raising funds entirely through grants and donations from users and community pools.

Request

We request 1% of community pool funds, capped at $20,000 from a number of chains, including The Cosmos Hub, to contribute to The ICI Campaign on Spark IBC. For The Hub, this makes our total ask ~$20k or 1,438 ATOM at the time of writing.

If passed,

• 50% of issued funds will be donated directly to ICI for general development, hosting and maintenance, to be used alongside other funding sources like private contributions done through the Spark platform.
• The remaining 50% will be used as incentives for community members to create and submit content about general cosmos tech. For other chains, this 50% is reserved for content about stuff built in that chains ecosystem, but since the Hub is positioned a bit differently, we think it’s match made in heaven to direct these funds towards content on things like IBC, CosmWasm, the Cosmos SDK, etc.
• For The Hub, this amounts to ~20k USD in Atom total, which is about 1,438 ATOM, which will then be split 50/50 as outlined above.

Each network that approves funding will be rewarded with Spark Points based on their full donation amount and a customized entry on our leaderboard labeled “[chain name] Community.” Spark Points are used within the Spark IBC system to recognize users for their contributions to the Interchain. In this case, there would be an entry made for “The Cosmos Hub Community” with 20k Spark Points.

One Spark Point is representative of one dollar (or USDC, or, in this case, token equivalent) donated, and is tracked through the soulbound $SPARK token on Juno Network. For these donations, Spark IBC will set up a wallet on Juno, or use the Bech32 converted version of the community pools address on Juno, label it accordingly on our leaderboard, and mint $SPARK equivalent to the USD value of the donated amount into it, measured by the price at the time of distribution. Slippage and fees for conversion will not be taken into account, as that’s beyond the communities control.

One significant benefit of multi-chain projects is the unique ability to distribute our funding requests across different sources to minimize sell pressure and the burden on any single community pool/token. This sort of effort is something that Spark IBC plans to pioneer and offer as a potential service to any who use the Spark IBC platform for fundraising in future.

Similar funding requests will also be submitted to the following Cosmos chains:

• Agoric
• Akash
• Band
• Carbon
• Cheqd
• Chihuahua
• Comdex
• Cosmos Hub
• Evmos
• Fetch AI
• Injective
• Juno
• Kava
• Kujira
• Osmosis
• Persistence
• Secret
• Sommelier
• Stargaze
• Teritori
• LUNC
• Terra

Spending Details

Base Contribution

In addition to the ICI info on SparkIBC.zone, we also have a rough breakdown of how funds will be spent given hitting certain funding tiers, found here
Link:

ICI Budget Outline for Initial Raise

Incentives Program

As stated, 50% of the requested $20k will be used exclusively to incentivize content related to general Cosmos tech & terminology on the Index and Resource hub. This allows community members and content creators the ability to earn a little income while contributing something beneficial to the entire interchain. It also ensures that a portion of the allotted funding amount returns to the community in a very direct way.

Note: the Spark & ICI Team reserve the right to deny payment, both pre/post-production, to anyone on the basis of content quality or attempts to manipulate this proposed system (i.e. needlessly long articles, videos, copy others existing work as a full new submission etc.); this is not a “trustless” incentive program. At this time, we will only accept English submissions meeting basic literary standards; however, we may expand this program to include other languages in the future and/or add a translation tier to the list of incentives below (we are open to feedback on these details):

*$0.05/word (written content) and $5.00/min. (video content) are below industry standards, but the crux of this project is to further incentivize creators who are already producing original content, while refining and updating existing material that needs to constantly be updated. In its entirety, this project will both promote new material and provide house-keeping for fresh, up-to-date information in order to attract new ecosystem investors and users.

Misc. Details

When do you plan for this to go on chain?
We will give a week or so’s time for discussion after posting this thread, and then move to put the prop on chain as early as next week, on the 21st.

How will payment be distributed and handled?

• We will be asking for the requested amount as a single lump sum payment. The amount granted will then be split into two chunks, each comprising 50% of the total.
  • 50% will be DCA’d out into stables over the following 15 days. Meaning a maximum daily sell pressure of no more than ~$666 per day for chains granting the full 20k, such as the Hub, and far less for others. This will be the base contribution.
  • The other 50% will be set aside for the content incentives program outlined above, and we will be gauging community sentiment on doing one of the three following options
    • Keep in the native currency
    • DCA out to stables along with the rest. Sell pressure will be kept to the above figure or less.
    • DCA out half (of the 50%, or 25% of the total) along with the base contribution.

Will the incentives program be transparent?

• Of course! We will keep records of payouts and the work done to receive them for the community to review. This also serves to provide a metric for results, and should help communities gauge whether a continuation of this program later down the road would be something of interest to them or not.

How long do you intend the incentive programs to last?

• Due to the drastically different ask amounts amongst various chains, as well as the amount of content relevant to them, some chains’ incentives may dry up much quicker than others. We believe that with the program we’ve outlined above, regardless of the duration, the general amount of work achieved per dollar spent should be similar.

What happens if a chain does not pass the proposal, are they to be treated any differently?

• Absolutely not. All chains and projects in the Cosmos are equal in our eyes, and no community will be penalized for failing to support our effort, except by missing out on the incentives program and, of course, contributing to something crucially important for the entire Interchain.

[JD-Lorax]

Seems odd for this initial post to be flagged as a last call when you’d specified in your last post that it wasn’t a formal discussion for a Hub spend proposal:

REMINDER: This is NOT to discuss this prop as it specifically related to the Cosmos Hub & it’s community pool, that will be a separate post. For now we want to focus on and get feedback for the general, ecosystem wide ask.

Have you approached the ATOM Accelerator DAO about applying for a grant for this from them? Education and information seems suitable for a grants request rather than a spend from the Hub.

[TendermintTimmy]

Fair, the naming conventions arent super clear as to how they should be used, we figured a last call, but with a weeks time till going on-chain seemed a happy medium. There has been tons of time for people to give feedback on my last post as it related to the hub (or anywhere else), regardless of if it was specific to the hub or not.

As for funding source, I don’t see why it should make a ton of difference. In fact, just to keep things uniform, we feel a community pool prop is more fair as thats what we’ll be doing for every other chain. As noted, in ADDITION to community pool funds, we are considering applying to certain grants, such as possibly, the ATOM accelerator DAO , but these would be different in scope, ask, and other details.

I do also want to just point out that they aren’t taking the entirety of the community pool funds for a reason, while im NOT saying this is what you’re doing here, not at all, let’s keep a mind out for not letting every funding request get turned into a “just use the grants program!” situation.

I appreciate your fast feedback here

[Chauncey_St_John]

I strongly support this prop. I think it’s a highly reasonable ask that shouldn’t materially impact any token prices. This is a much needed resource, and this method of funding and executing is aligned with Cosmos’ decentralized interchain ethos (reposting comment from the prior time this was posted for feedback)

[Chill_Validation]

TendermintTimmy, great to see you moving forward to manage/gather content for the Cosmos.

1. We suggest making content quality regulation an official part of your project. This means not paying for poor content and optionally guiding creators to improve content before award/publication.

2. We suggest setting monthly limits on spends to ensure the funding gives you enough runway, perhaps even to be fully independent. This will also avoid a rush to submit content on the first month, empty the funding, and have nothing left for future months. Content over the limit can be published the following month to keep content fresh.

[hollywood_regal]

Great to see a proposal that will actually result to something positive for the the community. It is easy to get lost out there or spend a lot of time looking for info about a specific dapp in ibc…
The usecase and amount of ask is absolutely justified. This a big YES for me.

[TendermintTimmy]

Thank you so much for the questions, Chill.

1. Yeah, Ill elaborate a bit on on the quality filter here. Though we already mentioned in the OP that we will reserve the right to withhold payment on the basis of quality, I should expand on that. The only work that will be paid for will be quality, hands down. However, the goal here is to grow a repository of information, so anyone driven to contribute to that will have our support in doing so. By this i mean that if someone submits something that is obviously a genuine, well intentioned effort, but doesnt meet our standard, we would work with them to bring that quality up, just as you mentioned! And if they are receptive and willing to improve and learn, they can resubmit things and earn payment at that point!

2. While i agree with your core thoughts here, we think the answer is pretty similar to the above. We will use best judgment to try and make these funds last as long as possible, while also ensuring that we get as much quality, core content in as possible in the short term. But we are hesitant to put any hard caps on this number as there are so many variables. If $10,000 worth of work is submitted in the first couple months, and we mean works that was really worth that much, just solid, important stuff of the whole cosmos stack, we would be a fool to hold off on publishing it and letting people have access to it ASAP. That all being said, your point is very much taken, and we will work to ensure that a balance is found here.

Thank you for the input!

[TendermintTimmy]

@hollywood_regal & @Chauncey_St_John we really appreciate the support
We can’t wait to show everyone what we can do with just a little runway

[Wil]

It seems that the proposition might be rejected, but i’m wondering if it’s not due to the fact it’s unclear what is the goal of the proposal ? As someone that didn’t know about you before, It took me time to understand what it is exactly about

I’m saying that because in my opinion there is some problem with the proposals

• Lately too many un-serious proposals and (in my opinion) now the de facto reaction to a new proposals is that it’s more or less scammy to get money
• Proposal formatting is not very good. Often unclear, jargoneous, not structured

I’m talking in general, because this proposal is mostly good and structured. And I’m not saying I would do better

I’m thinking it may be nice to create guidelines for writing a proposal, maybe it’s already existing ?

Edit : Finally the proposal seems to be about to pass, nice

[crittico]

If you plan to raise 271k$ and then you ONLY have the permission to distribute them back to the community, after you have built a working web platform & gained traction, I want AT LEAST to know if you are reputable and have the necessary skills to build and manage all of this. In short, who are you?
Then I would like a more detailed plan to actually make all of this working.
NO for me until we have some reassurances.

[TendermintTimmy]

Hey thank you for chiming in crittico. And accurate name! haha

I’m not super clear on what your asking in your first sentence, my apologies. But as for who I am, I’m Timmy, obviously, and im most active on Twitter, though ive recently started engaging with the reddit cosmos community too. I guess ill give a little resume? You’re both totally within reason to ask, but this also feels a bit weird Haha, here’s my quick pitch:

• Been “in” crypto for ~5 years now, but been interested and involved since BTC was double digits
• ATOM holder since it was listed on binance
• I’ve been doing weekly wednesday night Twitter spaces called Cosmonaut bootcamp for over a year now.
• I’ve talked with almost every team in cosmos at some point, and am good friends with many of them
• My background is in media production and marketing, but I’ve always been a builder at heart, just no talent for actual coding
• Co founded Spark IBC about a year ago w the goal to support chain-agnostic and truly multi-chain projects

Ill cover a few basic points that will hopefully cover what you were asking in the first sentence too. ~250k is the MAXIMUM we could possibly get, we don’t necessarily expect it, and nothing changes due to us not meeting that target, aside from the spending plans outlined here and of course, our timeline for putting out great products.

Completely separate from one another, each chain that passes this prop will have 50% of their issued amount set aside for the content incentives program to ultimately go back to the community, which we do have centralized control and final say over when it comes to quality and payout.

Hope that helps!

[TendermintTimmy]

There are certainly guidelines out there, and we’re certainly still new at this! But this is also a first of its kind as far as im aware, in so far as the cross/multi-chain funding aspect of it, so we’re feeling things out, and we appreciate the feedback.

That being said, I guess a super quick TL;DR to cut to the core of our goals here.

We want to build social infrastructure for the Cosmos and beyond. This means things like thurough and organized information, content aggregation, and improved and unified UX for existing popular Apps, both on chain and off. We like to say we’re building the google and wikipedia of the interchain!

As for the funding, we are asking for relatively small funding amounts, but this is partly because we are spreading the ask out among ~20 or so different cosmos chains, since we feel that what we’re building is equally beneficial to all; we’re very chain agnostic.

From each chain, the amount being asked is 1% of their community pool or ~$20k worth, whichever is worth less. Of those asks, separate from one another, 50% of the funded amounts will be set aside to incentivize content on ICI related to the chain that granted the funds.

Always helpful to have a TL;DR, should’ve included this to begin with!