Infrastructure Contributor Treasury
A contributor treasury represents a rapid funding mechanism that is governed by full time contributors along with the wider community
The Infrastructure contributor treasury is a way to govern a portion of the overall Cardano treasury with the aim to help with more rapidly deploying funding to where it is needed most in the Cardano ecosystem.
Usage of funds from the contributor treasury have the same overall goal as the main treasury - producing the most impact possible for the ecosystem and community.
Importance of rapid funding
The proposal process takes 3 months and includes time consuming proposal writing with information needed around planning, auditability, budget, timeline, team and delivery. Proposals that need funds more rapidly that miss this funding window would need to wait another 3 months. Funding as a result can be slow and laborious for many people in the community.
For places where the community agrees there is value and impact being provided the issue of slow fund distribution delays potential support and innovation.
Solving issues around the speed of funding can help make projects more sustainable and help to strengthen the ecosystem.
Treasury use cases
The following examples are a starting point to consider and not exhaustive to all the possibilities. Initially the Infrastructure contributor treasury could delegate funding to any of the following:
Contributors within the ecosystem for performing high impact roles and tasks.
Local and online events that help drive awareness, education or help bring the community together over given topics and concerns.
New or existing frameworks, libraries or SDKs that would benefit from a small amount of extra funding to support the ecosystem.
Governance using contributors
Full time contributors are the perfect candidates for governing and managing a treasury focussed on faster funding distribution that will help support and grow the ecosystem. Some reasons contributors are suitable include:
High involvement - Being full time maximises the chance that contributors are the most well informed on what is happening in the ecosystem which will help lead to better informed decisions.
Accountability - Full time contributors would be public faces in the community and as such would have accountability towards their involvement of any votes and the information provided that helps govern the decisions made.
High participation - A high number of full time contributors can be supported to work full time in the ecosystem. This high participation helps ensure there is a diverse amount of people involved in supporting the management of the treasury.
Community participation - Full time contributors can help involve the community for every governance decisions where it is needed and in cases where more feedback would improve the decision making.
Treasury sources of income
For the treasury to have capital to allocate it will need some forms of income. The main initial approaches for this would include:
Funded proposals - Proposals can be created to request funds to fund the treasury.
Stake pools - Mission driven stake pools can be operated by stake pool contributors where the profit of those stake pools is allocated to the treasury.
Contributor project support - If full time Infrastructure contributors support other funded projects whilst being a contributor any payment for that work could be sent to the contributor treasury. This model works because the full time contributor is already being being paid a full time salary. An example could be a developer supporting another projects implementation for a short period as they have the technical expertise and it would provide a high impact to the ecosystem to support them.
Governance process
A suitable process for each type of decision will need to be determined in the near future. For now, a simple approach for the governance process could follow these steps:
Request is made for treasury funding either by the community, projects or contributors
Contributors check request has valid information and reach consensus on what added information or data needs to be added to the request to make a fully informed decision.
Once the request is finalised contributors determine who should be involved in the governance decision. For example if the decision impacts the recommended standards for native assets then the contributors would be responsible for involving the relevant community participants.
Feedback is collected from the participants for any changes that may need to be made.
Voter participants are invited to cast their vote.
Funds get distributed based off a positive voting outcome.
Last updated