Merchants of NEAR October Funding Report

Near Community and nodes Guilds
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October Objectives

The primary goal for October was to continue expanding growth of the group as well as branch out into more educational content while maintaining consistent quality.

Analytics

  1. Twitter

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  1. Merchants Contest

September Contest saw a total of 74 submissions across the 4 weeks with average accuracy of 63pts (37% off of actual ending price)

October Contest saw a total of 214 submissions across 4 weeks with an average accuracy of 83pts (17% off actual ending price)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NwM-qTD2tNGt1PHL4gNsIQvR3F2LBm6EpEIzWkUKHD0/edit?usp=sharing

  1. YouTube

We just started our YouTube channel which will feature some educational content and breakdowns in video form. We have had produced two breakdowns featuring Yuppie and Bollinger Bands in Oct. Will be clipping and uploading MansaKeita’s bit on Rise and Grind podcast as well. Currently are at 17 subscribers and have brought on an editor, 9ce, for our channel.

  1. TradingView

We just started posting on TradingView as well as another form of outreach. For October we had 8 trading posts with 12 followers.

  1. Telegram

Merchants ended last month at 154 members and finished October with 432 followers. We have seen good traction and influx of active members. Previous ratio was 154 members with roughly 20-25 entries into trading contest, while current ratio is 432 members with roughly 50-55 members into trading contest. Chat has been more active as well with members asking and answering questions. Will have to hire moderator eventually.

Challenges
Telegram chat has grown significantly and with it the activity. Gotten some spam messages from shillers advertising their site, group, or coin. To combat this I have disabled gifs from the group and installed combot along with the help of Sanket moderating.

Aim was for the contest to maintain payouts of roughly 200-250N a month but in an attempt to grow the guild and contest I upped the monthly participation from 2N to 5N. Was successful but way overshot the budget for the contest, will take out the difference in management budget.

Merchants Guild OCT Budget

Merchants Contest:

Monthly Participation: 32*5 = 160N
Monthly Rewards: 40+20+10+7+5 = 82N
Weekly Rewards: 4 * (7+5+3+2+1) = 72N
Weekly Highlights: 3 * 2 (only did two weeks) = 6N
Total: 320N

Sanket: TG moderator, NEAR community liaison, roughly 2hrs/day

  • Engaged with merchants community, discussed their charts or their views on NEAR and overall market
  • Kept chat engaged by bringing in new topics to discuss
  • Posted All Latest Yield Opportunities whether be it farming or staking within the ecosystem.
  • Shared Airdrop posts too which helped community to stay engaged n be rewarded at the same time.
    60N to Sanket

9ce: Video editor, 5hrs/vid for 2 videos
30N to 9ce

MansaKeita: Merchants analyst, 3-4hrs/day
-Weekly podcast on 4NTS Rise and Grind segment
-Daily analysis on NEAR
-Answering and engaging questions in TG chat
-Educational content on NEAR, blogs
$2,500/NEAR price of $9.18 = 272N to MansaKeita

Yuppie: Merchants analyst, 3-4hrs/day
-Weekly Videos for Merchants YouTube channel and other educational content
-Daily analysis on NEAR
-Answering and engaging questions in TG chat
$2,500/NEAR price of $9.18 = 272N to Yuppie

Zucchini: Guild Lead
-Administrative duties, managing socials, running Merchants contest, interacting and engaging with the community as the face of the guild, moderating discord
250N to Zucchini (350N - 100N overbudget for Merchants contest)

Total: 1204N * $9.18 = $11,052.72

We are proud and excited to see so much enthusiasm in the NEAR ecosystem, especially with the announcement of the 800M DeFi grants on NEAR. We will do our best to continue answering questions and keeping the community updated on yield opportunities and price actions. We aim to provide quality unbiased analysis, in bull or in bear markets. Last month we made a real push to cater to people new to TA with our YouTube and TradingView, and will continue to do so this month.

As always, happy hodling!

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Firstly, I wanna say thanks to the guild leadership for great progress in work with community :

  1. Many new members joined the guild,
  2. Interesting professional conversations,
  3. New opportunities for community, like a special badge and best predictors.
  4. New ways of communicating: YouTube, training view

Absolutely agree, hi/she is hardworking moderator and content manager. I see Sanket 24/7 in the guild.

Ok, but could you please in the next do this opportunities open for everyone in Near Community? Just one two posts in our main TG channel.

Unfortunately, this podcast still not popular, 4-20 views per video, 1-2 comments. I think MansaKeita can focused on own podcast on your YouTube channel. May be request some additional money in Marketing DAO for promotion.

Could you please share links of “ Educational content on NEAR, blogs”?

And about salary, $5000 for part time work?
Just for information: OWS guild pays $400 for their content manager; degen’s (elite social media team) $3000 for 80+ hrs; 85% guilds managers have $4000 a month.

I propose reduce to 150N

The same, 150N ( he is also got 300N in Degen’s army)

300N for you .

Total is 1010N , $10100

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Thank you Dacha​:heart:, Will keep doing my best.

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Dear @Dacha , thank you for your time and comments on our performance.

I would like to clarify different things on what you said on our funding report.

  1. The podcast just started within the ecosystem so it will need time to grow and gain the traction it deserves. There is a lot of quality content and it shows everyday with each episode. Focusing on our own podcast is something that will come in the future but there are a few steps that we want to make before that. On of our milestone goals that will be up before the end of the year is to start the ‘Merchants of NEAR Academy’ this will focus on quality education on how to get started in crypto with the NEAR ecosystem as core place. This will result in a course on Technical Analysis as well as a course on the Fundamental Analysis of NEAR. To make this happen we need to recruit new people so that they can take over the analysing aspect and the posting everyday of the market. I have already started this phase by reaching out to different guilds within NEAR such as NEAR Legal Guild & Sankore 2.0… On top of that I will be launching a Tokenomics DAO soon that will partner up with the Merchants because Tokenomics is a crucial part in the ecosystem. All these efforts will lead to the ‘Merchants of NEAR Academy’. These efforts aren’t in the daily breakdown but they are being done behind the scenes and will result to additional ways of growing the Merchants. This payout is only for the month of September since after that we are planning to hire new ‘ambassadors’ (10) that will at their turn make sure that new people (50 people) come in the Merchants and we create additional wallets with an incentive of 1N per wallet.

  2. About the Educational content on NEAR, blogs; here you can find an example of a blog that is part of series of blogs that will launch soon. The research takes a decent considerable time and the writing as well. It’s important to deliver high quality content and not quick low quality. As you can see these are not out yet but are been written and will be posted soon.

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  1. Concerning the salary: it’s not part time work since a lot haven’t been in the countdown. We went from posting twice a day to posting everyday and also are pursuing much more behind the scenes to have more relevance and grow as one of the biggest channels to teach people on how to get into crypto and especially how to get into NEAR.

For @Yuppiefab making these video’s take a lot of time considering the research that comes into it and filming as well. These are all things that need development and we will use the next resources as explained above.

As you can see there are a lot of costs not included in the breakdown and a lot will be moving soon since the different collaboration within the ecosystem will help us grow and be more significant over time.

I propose to keep everything as it is for now since there are a lot of things in the pipeline that will show the value of what we are doing.

We will definitely let everyone know how we will go forward and involve even more people from the NEAR community.

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Ok, probably you need a license for that ?

Make sure it will be open transparent process and everyone have a chance to be one of ambassador.

The guild leadership requested $5000 for blogs and content which are already done.

Guild leader said

4x7 , 28 a week, 112 a month.

$5000/112, $44 per/hr.

Professional licensed analyst has $33.92 per/hr.

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And Yuppie can’t spends in Merchants guild a lot of time, because does (did) dedicated work for Degens Army.

I see many great guys in your guild. May be you can give a chance to them ? Probably, Yuppie is already overwhelmed with work in Degens Army.

Yes, I see huge progress here.

May be create non-English Merchants groups, because when I started share the link on your guild in Ru-Ua groups , members told me: “Interesting, but we wanna do it in native language.”

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We will do everything to make sure that we comply to all the rules and regulations for that and have a partnership going on with the NEAR Academy.

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This will be done in an honest and transparant way. At some point we will also apply to become a DAO, this way everything will be voted and the community within the Merchants will be able to say what they think.

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It’s important to note that this was not the case when I started. NEAR was around $3 in June and I there was no one coming to use at that moment. Now that the price increased then people start to say that it’s something but more work has been delivered since then. So making this comparison of what NEAR is worth now and back in the day is not really the way to compare. As said earlier it’s for this month and after that more will be allocated to community so more will get done with the same allocation so I can focus more on expanding the Guild and making a DAO out of it.

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For information: @Grace @David_NEAR James:
The guild has 999N unspent money in treasure wallet: https://explorer.mainnet.near.org/accounts/merchantsofnear.near

Salary @Yuppiefab was N350 ($3500) a month ago, now requested increase to N500 ($5000)

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This is very interesting news that I didn’t know about and I will definitely look into this and make sure we use more languages. For example I can also write content in French and in Dutch so there are a lot of opportunities to bring this further then an English only speaking environment.

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At some point this will become my main activity on top of teaching others (in the Academy) how to get involved in crypto so this will be justified.

Let me do a quick math as well. Assuming that I would take 1 day off (practically no days off in crypto):

8x6, 48 a week, 192 a month.

$5000/192, $26/hr.

That is $7.92 per/hr less than the average Trade Analyst.

I think that this example shows that it’s not that crazy to have these levels of compensation.

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I can’t say that your salary was unfair. It has been growing up since July.

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At the same time expenses on community still very poor (only 19%)

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I think he’s no longer in degens army and he’s super active helping when he’s needed. On this photo you can see @Yuppiefab replied to @KriptoRaptor in less than an hour and he also replies to dm quick he’s a great guy I’ll rate him 9.9/10

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Correct and more work has been done as well.

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150N $1500 is a great payment for that. He does 1 post (100 worlds) in 2 days, probably he spends 1 hr for that.
The guild still spends a lot of money for leadership.

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As I said earlier this will change as of the next Merchants Funding Update for all the reasons and efforts listed above. So this graph will show differently.

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I love going through your comments on the forum, is clear you want everything to be transparent and fair. But with the merchants current request I think the works they offer deserves a $20k. @zuchinni did a great job sir

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You need democratic DAO where all members of your guild can vote and create proposals. Not only 3 councils.

As we see now the guild budget focused on leadership expenses only.

By the way, could you please pin the post on Merchants TG group? I think it will be interesting for all members. Thanks

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As I said earlier in a comment we will be looking to make a DAO. The other members we will recruit will also be part of the DAO (10 ambassadors) so that’s already more then 14 people voting and agreeing on decisions. Making a DAO takes time and we need to figure out the legal implications with the Legal Guild as well. We are working on that and that will be done soon. Goal is by the end of the year.

What post do you mean ?

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Done, just pin it. I think will be interesting for your guild members read it.

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The other members we will recruit will also be part of the DAO (10 ambassadors) so that’s already more then 14 people voting and agreeing on decisions.

Just make sure it will be transparent process .
Looking forward to get more information about it.

Thanks