traction.money

<aside> 🧠 In the context of this discussion, I want to raise the question of how do we perform retroactive funding to reward valuable ecosystem growth with minimal governance ?

</aside>

Thesis

• Governance results in centralization vectors for subject matter experts
• There is a cold start problem. Founders don’t know if they should start to build something now without getting funded, because there is no clear way to get funded for impact later.
• Traditional metrics on dappRadar, flipside can be gamed, and we need to refine what is impactful as an ecosystem constantly
• Establishing measurable metrics that even if gamed still benefit the ecosystem will align the ecosystem to grow
• Often builders & founders who are shipping aren’t the same people asking for non-dilutive grants, there is a “governance cartel” issue

🎯 Objectives

• Get a higher rate of non-proactively funded teams to start building on NEAR with traction
• Create a minimal governance retroactive funding system that cannot be gamed with an initial pilot
• Create metrics from community sentiment that are not easily gamed and also translate to growth in revenue & network effects for NEAR
• Create a streamlined way to automatically reward projects retroactively based on ecosystem-aligned metrics
• Streamline towards an autonomous agent that can update metrics and allocate capital accordingly

😖 Limitations

• This won’t proactively fund teams for clearly scoped projects that the ecosystem needs. Other funding mechanisms will exist for funding specific teams and funding initiatives. Meaning their is still a cold start issue of funding founders to build something to get traction.
• It is harder to track community-based metrics and the impact of developer tooling especially for closed-sourced projects
• Most of the people in NEAR who built something with traction have gotten grants or done a deal with the NEAR Foundation. It's hard to establish a program similar to the retroPGF program. In this case, we need to directly fund projects that haven’t been funded and move to just traction-based rewards for retro funding.