[Proposal] NDC Infrastructure Funding Round from HOM

NDC Community and nodes
1

This is a revision of Odin’s original proposal (currently posting as he is OOO), on behalf of the HOM.

TLDR based on revisions & feedback

  • Instead of incumbents have a more open round for Infra for new projects since there are already projects

Pot has been deployed at potlock.org/infra-pot

Also currently working on Article for announcement

Overview

The following is a proposal for a NDC Infrastructure quadratic funding round to support NEAR public goods projects that build critical infrastructure with the application period starting 2 weeks after the Trust payouts out the amount to the Pot contracts with $75,000 USD worth of NEAR.

Objectives

Changes the overarching objective

  • Support builders & help teams survive for a few months through impactful payouts
  • Pilot new funding system and build narrative that there is more immediate funding for projects
  • Help track past and current funding of projects as they scale
  • Drive external capital and network affects around support NDC infrastructure

Why?

NDC Infrastructure round is needed as a way to support key projects that have been underfunded and that continue to build open tools on NEAR. Whether it is infrastructure costs, and latency, onboarding consumers into the ecosystem. Additionally if we don’t set a culture that builders will get compensated for continuing to build, we are going to have a hard time (without liquidity) to naturally attract new builders, and result in proactive mini grants that do not lead to project retention (Evidence from State of Web3 Grants report)

Who

NDC House of Merit will be facilitating the round. NDC is the best fit as they review all incoming proposals. Additional there should be context from other groups like Infrastructure Work Group to provide clarity on request

  • Dav
  • Chloe
  • Kiskesis
  • Odin
  • Plug

While the Potlock team and Plug will be helping facilitate and train Chefs.

About Potlock & Quadratic Funding

Potlock is a composable and decentralized funding stack focused on public goods, that utilizes things like Web3 social, donations,and quadratic funding to build network effects around public goods

Round Details

Owner (who deploys pot) ndcround.near
Admin(s) (optional) HOM dao address Chloe, Hilb, Panda, Odin
Chef odins_eyehole.near
Application Period 2 weeks (currently live)
Matching Period 3 weeks (2 weeks after $is in the pot)
Cooldown / Challenge Amount 1 week
Max Number of Applications 20
Fees (Optional) 5% Sponsor Referrals, 5% donor referrals, 0% chef

Application Requirements

Project has

  • Provide a free service or open source to the NEAR ecosystem
  • Other applications depend on this to function or will cause snowball affect of damage OR their is interest for other applications to use once built
  • Can immediately use resources; due to runway, expand staffing capacity

Short list / Examples

Examples of projects that we would love to see in the round.

  • RPC Infrastructure (example RPC Selector, dRPC service)
  • Chain Abstraction: Chain Signatures, DA toolkits
  • Developer Tools: BOS Development, SDKs, GaaS (Gateway as a Service)
  • Privacy: Zk Tooling, Mixers, Encryption Projects
  • Validator Tooling
  • Incentivizes & Coordination Tooling & Contracts: Contracts

Funding Ask

  • $75,000 worth of NEAR directly in ndc.v1.potfactory.potlock.near

KPIs

The following are key performance indicators aligned with sponsorship.

  • 500 unique donations

  • $7,000 amount in donations

  • 100,000 impressions regarding the round

  • Satisfaction of process for projects and whether it significantly helped their runway?

A successful rounds is when

  • Projects get funded outside of this
  • Better sentiment for builders in ecosystem
  • A project can attribute to this for increased features or launching MVP, or streamlining its first “customer”
  • Faster process for getting funding outside of ndc and near foundation and ifnra work group

Resources

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