Hello, this is Joe K., aka cortlandt, the creator of Bad Kids. I’m writing this to show my support for the proposal, but also to try to reach some of the undecided or no voters.
Stargaze is asking for a lot of money, yes. Is it fair? I don’t know. It’s a mature marketplace with an active community. I don’t think 1.5 million is excessive.
I’m seeing people talk about how Stargaze’s revenue is bad, and this doesn’t make financial sense. I’m sure there’s some truth there, but this sort of thing shouldn’t be looked at strictly as a business decision. A bank brings in way more money that a theater. But I wouldn’t want to live in a city with 99 banks and no theaters. Right now we’re living in a city of banks.
There’s value in having a marketplace for digital goods right on the Hub. Yeah, it’s mostly community-based NFT collections right now, but having Stargaze on the hub will expand the capabilities at the core of Cosmos. It’s future-proofing for the day when these digital goods might include game items or property deeds.
But let’s focus on what Stargaze already does in its current form: it’s a reliable platform that allows anyone to launch an NFT collection easily and cheaply. This is a powerful tool for community building, but also for digital artists to get their work in front of a global audience.
NFTs might not be the insane hype machine they once were (which is probably for the best), but in the greater crypto world, there’s still a lively community of artists creating original works and collectors engaging with them. And there’s still money. Last month, an XCOPY NFT sold for over 3 million USD (about 2 Stargaze migrations).
Attracting talent is a slow process, but it’ll be easier to court both artists and patrons with an NFT marketplace that is accessible via a single transaction from a centralized exchange, just like it is on Ethereum or Solana. If these folks stick around, they will eventually learn about the beauty of IBC. One step at a time.
Maybe you don’t care about digital art. That’s fine, but artists bring cultural cachet in a way that’s unique and hard to quantify. We could use more of that.
Finally, if you vote no, are the funds better off sitting unspent in the community pool? I’ve seen a lot of concern about the current state of Cosmos. The Stargaze team wants to stay, wants to build, wants to make Cosmos better. I get that this is not the kind of proposal we should take lightly. It’s an imperfect solution, but it deserves consideration. This is a time to take action and build something. It will pay off in the long run.
And if it doesn’t, I’ll draw a picture of the Stargaze team fleeing the country in the lambos they blew the money on. Then I’ll get some rich person to buy the drawing for 1.5 million and use the money to reimburse the community pool. Problem solved!