Thank you for your feedback, we will forward it to the appropriate Working Group or chat for consideration.
・Community Hubs → Feedback has been sent to the Community Hub WG. Extensive redefinition of KPIs etc. is currently underway and feedback may be affected by this.
・Education programs → This will be discussed at MCC.
・Catalyst RetroPGF → Feedback has been sent to the Catalyst WG.
・Catalyst Operations and improvements → Feedback has been sent to the Catalyst WG.
Hello All,
The Innovation Budget Proposal is updated today with the latest MCC budget v.3.9.7. per approval of the MCC Committee. Change Log is added at the end of budget proposal.
Requested budget: ₳ 76,836,800
Please check it out:
These budget discussions by the working groups are taking months instead of weeks. If they had happened in a timely manner, there would have been enough time for 3 Funds. If you approve just two, we can have the same problem next year.
We cannot be discussing the budget division of the 2025 budget during 4 months of 2025. We should discuss this in advance. If someone says that the 2026 budget will be discussed from July 2025 and defined by December 2025, I think that is reasonable.
Catalyst already had a hiatus of almost a year in 2020, where many people left the ecosystem. We need more predictability here. Catalyst is the main way for the community to obtain grants. If this source dries up due to bureaucratic reasons, the ecosystem and community members pay a high price.
I would like to have access to KPIs related to how many people leave the Cardano ecosystem due to excessive bureaucracy and delays.
Are there other channels where these discussions are taking place?
I am aware that there are calls, working group meetings, but I am referring here to spaces where the community provides feedback to the working group.
I am asking this because I could not find another channel with significant community input and here there is almost no community feedback in over a month. There are clearly contributions from some community members, but I would have expected to find much more. The polls held contain an extremely low sample size and this is worrying in my opinion.
The “committees” mainly organise in the Intersect Discord server and a lot seems to be done in the gazillion Zoom calls organised there. 
Don’t think that that exists. Expectation is probably that people who want to give feedback will come either here or there.
The hiatus was over a year between Fund9 voting in August 2022 and Fund10 voting ending in September 2023.
Do you really think Catalyst, its projects and results are that valuable to Cardano on average?
What does it say about an ecosystem if things only happen when there is free money to be grabbed?
Yep, I got confused about the hiatus year.
Many promising projects started on Catalyst, as the lack of strong VC investment or alternative grant models in the Cardano ecosystem makes it the only viable option for many. Intersect Grants, in my view, is almost irrelevant at this point.
While Catalyst has funded hundreds of proposals, my experience since Fund 2 shows a recurring issue: underdelivery. This is a complex problem with no single cause. However, the introduction of milestone-based funding now provides better oversight and helps verification of the reputation of funded proposals.
Catalyst has faced problems from the start, and many persist. While some solutions are being implemented (Voices an an example), the slow pace of change has driven people away from both the project and the Cardano ecosystem.
If viable funding alternatives existed, I’d be less forgiving of Catalyst’s flaws. But private sector support for Cardano-based projects remains weak, and without Catalyst, the outlook seems bleak.
For years, some have suggested creating a competitor to Catalyst, but none have materialized.
We can complain about the network taxes being used to fund projects, of course, and it is natural that we seek to optimize the use of treasury resources. But what is the benefit for Cardano if we attack the only significant source of funding for project development?
Instead of simply blocking resources for Catalyst, I prefer the option of finding viable funding solutions and then, after there is competition, we can choose the best ones.
I do not believe that removing Catalyst from the scene would force people to find a solution, I believe that it would scare people away to other blockchains, in my view this would stagnate development on Cardano in a dangerous way.
Of course, all of this is just my personal opinion.