Hello there, beautiful soul!
Hope this message finds you well.
You’ve made it through the entire year with Project Catalyst. What a feat.
I’d like to extend a great appreciation to everyone who shows up every day, sporadically here and there, or anywhere in between, that together shape and support the efforts in Project Catalyst. It must be repeated - without your participation, none of this can happen nor would it matter. This year has been once again challenging but I trust we’ve learned a great deal together.
It’s been a great year of many achievements for many communities that I hope we’ll learn more about in our special January town hall - so make sure to submit the video/presentation reels before January 9th (more on that below).
Hopefully, we can continue taking good reflections based on what has been done and think ahead as to what 2023 could be like. And I am very excited to share this journey with you.
I am going to look forward to having you here with us back on January 11th - Wednesday - at 5PM UTC at zoom/youtube for the first Town Hall in 2023.
This also marks the last Catalyst Weekly edition of 2022 as I and the team will be taking a holiday break until the next time we meet. Please consider that much of the Catalyst team at IO will be also unavailable. You can expect delays in responses that may spill over to the first and second week of January. Thank you for your kind consideration.
With that - I wish everyone a very restful and joyful holiday season, as much as your circumstances allow each one of you - and we hope to see you coming next year to pick up where we’ve left off.
Till then - have a great time and I wish you happy holidays ahead. 
Town Hall
TH Recording: https://bit.ly/3HESyqG
TH Slides: Project Catalyst Townhall - Dec 14 - Google Slides- TH Playlist: link here
Break Out Rooms: https://bit.ly/33i38SB
- Want to open your own room next time? Book it via this form at least 24hrs in advance and get those conversations rolling!
Next: Jan 11 at 5PM UTC. Register now via this recurring link. This will be the first town hall in 2023.
Catalyst Circle Elections
This is the last reminder to cast your votes for version four of Catalyst Circle.
So far - at the time of writing of this newsletter - 983 total wallets have cast their votes totaling almost 60M ada in voting power.
If you are reading about Catalyst Circle for the first time, I encourage you to read this initial blog post that introduced the idea and also this forum post that outlines key requirements for candidates.
So what is the key information you need to keep in mind?
- Snapshot: Taken on 6th Dec 2022 at 21:44 PM UTC
Voting Start: 22:00 PM UTC on 6th Dec 2022
Voting End: 21:43 PM UTC on 16th Dec 2022- Vote Tracker: https://dripdropz.io/vote/3/results
Who are the Candidates?
The candidates who have stepped up as nominees each have a platform statement available from the Cardano forum. Each candidate was asked to describe their own areas of interest and responsibility.
How do I vote?
There’s also a video segment that walks you through the entire process in greater detail. Catch the TH presentation via this link. You can also get all the details above in this medium article here in great detail by Lloyd Duhon.
2022 Community Highlights Review
2022 was another amazing year.
Primarily because the wide community has taken steps to further elevate and integrate their efforts and engagement. In fact, so much has taken place that none of the combined town halls had any opportunity to capture them all.
Would be very keen to resurface the effort and work that may have been unnoticed over the course of the year to recognize and elevate these instances to what they deserve.
And here comes this call to action. Let’s run a special edition town hall in January that celebrates all of the accomplishments, and learnings.
- Open invitation to submit a max 5-minute video reel on behalf of a varied community of communities
- This doesn’t have to be in English (if subtitled in English)
- Doesn’t have a strict definition to apply - so will leave it for interpretation
- You must be either part of the said community pocket and/or have their endorsement to air the content on their behalf
- Highlight your/their proudest moments, achievements, and learning experiences, or else
- These videos should be fit for public presentation and focus on reviewing 2022 and not promoting/shilling any specific projects or similar (this will be reviewed by the Catalyst team)
- Deadline to submit - Jan 9, 2023 at noon UTC
- Submission form (placeholder): https://bit.ly/3hkv1Rb
- Participants should not include any confidential information which they do not wish to make public at this time or that of other people (you must have approvals secured by those individuals)
If you have any doubts/suggestions - reach out to me directly on any of the socials. This is meant to be a communal celebration of all of our combined efforts.
SingularityNet & Deep Funding
Our friends at Singularity Net have launched the second round of their Deep Funding program. This presents a great opportunity to engage with this initiative during the Catalyst break. In fact, this is also the first time you’ll be able to vote with AGIX-ADA tokens to choose the projects.
Snet is seeking to develop with Cardano community in light of their planned transition to Cardano. You can learn more about the announcement from Jan Horlings from Snet, in his words below:
"With great pleasure, we hereby announce the start of Deep Funding Round 2!
Deep Funding, initiated by SingularityNET, is a community-driven fund that aims to support projects that utilize or promote the Decentralized AI platform and AI marketplace.
Anyone can submit their proposal to Deep Funding! Our community will give valuable feedback and ultimately decide which projects are awarded a grant in AGIX. We are looking forward to seeing your new or existing (!) AI service on the platform, or a frontend solution that uses the AI services on our platform.
We believe that this new round of Deep Funding offers opportunities to a wide range of people and professions. Whether you are an AI developer, a software engineer, a DevOps engineer, a marketing professional, or an enthusiastic all-round community member, there is a pool where you can submit your own proposal, or be equally valuable by giving constructive feedback to other people’s proposals.
We are looking forward very much to seeing what this new round will bring, and hope to welcome you soon on proposals.deepfunding.ai."
Continue Reading HERE.
Last week in CIPs
Here’s the recap from my colleague Ryan Williams that writes these fantastic CIP round-ups. I figured you’d like them, too. So here’s the latest to get up to speed. You can catch past and future summaries via this Cardano forum thread here as well. If are unsure what CIPs are about - please check out this link to dive deeper: https://cips.cardano.org/.
What happened in CIPs last week?
- CIP-??? Encrypted Transaction message/comment metadata (Addendum to CIP-0020) [New CIP Proposal]:
- This proposal offers a privacy-focused update to the CIP-20 transaction message metadata standard.
- Widely adopted already with many wallets and tools using this standard.
- CIP-??? Extended Local Chain Sync Protocol [Continued Discussions]:
- The proposal suggests modifying cardano-node to allow ledger state data to be transferred over local domain sockets.
- CIP-??? Merkelised Plutus Scripts [Continued Discussions]:
- The proposal suggests changing how scripts are hashed, from the hash of its serialization to a hash of its immediate children’s hashes, forming a Merkle Tree from the AST.
Continued Recommendations:
- CIP-??? Implement Ouroboros Leios to increase Cardano throughput:
- This proposes the next evolution of Ouroboros being implemented in Cardano.
- CIP-0001 Cardano Improvement Proposals:
- In case you missed it the revised CIP-01 was merged a little while ago, it has seen some small adjustments since - might be worth a browse.
Next scheduled meeting:
- CIP Editors Meeting #60
- January 10th, 2023 at 9:30AM UTC
- Held on Discord - here.
Vox Populi - The voice of the people!
The Facilitators’ Collective trainees (community initiative), is facilitating a new-to-Catalyst way of collecting opinions:
Vox Populi - the voice of the people!
During Friday - Dec 16 - your chance to be in a vox-pop video about the Catalyst Circle elections. Drop into Zoom for 10 mins, any time tomorrow between 9AM UTC and 9PM UTC, to record your thoughts.
You are not asked who you voted for - the goal is to know what the main issues were for you, that decided on who to support. Or, if you didn’t vote, help them understand/hear why not.
Were your perspectives not represented? Did you disagree with the voting process? Did you not know how to vote? Or did you just not get around to it? The Facilitator’s Collective wants to hear from you!
Here’s the Zoom link.
Cardano Summit 2022 - Lido Musings
"Two weeks ago, about 50 people gathered in a room to discuss the values that should underpin Project Catalyst. The setting was the SwissTech Convention Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the 2022 Cardano Summit. Many participants have worked side by side in the Project Catalyst ecosystem for many months and were meeting in “In Real Life” for the first time!
As introductions and greetings were made, there were exclamations about how unexpectedly tall or short someone was, jokes about how good it was to see each other’s legs and feet, and hugs between close pals, finally meeting in the flesh."
Continue reading from talented Stephanie King’s write-up here.
Catalyst Project Completions - 330+ and counting!
330+ projects funded by Catalyst have been completed to date by submitting their self-reported close-out reports and videos. There is so much goodness taking place in this ecosystem. Navigate to the COMPLETED tab to keep track of all their work. Not seeing your favorite project completed yet? You can check their progress on other tabs and also the monthly reporting output documents. Save the links below:
- Monthly Reporting: Catalyst Public Reporting Tracker - Google Sheets
- Monthly Report Output Data: Public Catalyst Monthly Reporting - Google Sheets
- Proposal Journey: Proposal Journey in Catalyst (public) - Google Docs
- Want to do more? Check this call to action about accountability and participation!
- The first meeting already took place with the next one eyeing January 2023.
- You can also reference this town hall slide for the first meeting outcome.
Are spreadsheets a little too much? Leverage community tools like Lido Nation which you can find here.
Get in touch
And that’s a wrap. Let’s talk Catalyst & governance via twitter, or telegram, or reddit, or wherever is your home online and keep conversations engaging on these very important topics.
Enjoy your weekend ahead!
Danny & the Project Catalyst team
Daniel Ribar
Community at Project Catalyst
