Hello there, beautiful soul!
Hope this message finds you well.
Another impact-filled week across the entire ecosystem. We had a great Cardano Community Hubs presentation, and a number of amazing project closeouts like Sign-in with Cardano, Raspberry/SPO project, or Impact Onboarding. There’s a lot more taking place that doesn’t make it to town halls. Make sure to catch these via the projectcatalyst.io/funds tab, the COMPLETED tab in this spreadsheet, or at LidoNation portal. The list keeps growing and we are excited to see all the builders, educators and innovators at large progressing towards the goals set out in their proposals.
Let’s dive into what’s the latest.
Town Hall
TH Recording: https://bit.ly/3I4YLdZ
TH Slides: Project Catalyst Townhall - Feb 15 - 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: Feb 22 at 5PM UTC. Register now via this recurring link.
Pitch Your Skills!
After Townhall on Feb 22 (Wednesday) will see a PITCH YOUR SKILLS session for anyone looking for work or looking for talent.
If you have a skill that Catalyst teams might find useful, you can get a short slot to talk about what you do. Projects that are looking for talent will see it live on the night, and also on the recording on Youtube, so they can approach you if they need your skills.
Sign up for your slot here: https://forms.gle/N8PNxcamqQvyCnL26
This is a community initiative run by Remostart in collaboration with The Facilitators’ Collective.
Caught my attention
Musthapha, a Catalyst ecosystem participant, has concluded his work on Catalyst Campus Train project. Talk to him more about opportunities in the future here.
Community Governance Workshops
Community-led initiatives are a great way to get comfortable and immersed in various topics/events across the ecosystem. Catalyst Swarm warmly welcomes you to the community workshop to discuss in depth CIP1694. This event already took place but recordings will be available on the Catalyst Swarm YouTube. I am sure there will be more opportunities to come.
The Session started with a general discussion in the main room and eventually broke off into several breakout rooms to focus on specific items and topics around CIP 1694: SPOs, Constitution, dReps to name a few.
The goal is to identify major areas of CIP 1694 which require community thoughts and perspectives and further attention to ensure an effective rollout and implementation of CIP 1694.
You can also get some additional perspectives from these videos:
On a related theme, next week, a number of SPOs and developers (including some from the Catalyst community) will attend a focused technical workshop in Colorado (run by the Cardano Foundation and IOG) to review the mechanics of CIP 1694, the first in a number of community consultations planned for this year. Full meeting minutes will be published after the event for further community engagement and feedback. If you wish to add your perspectives to CIP 1694, you can find it here. Make sure you add your voice as the era of Voltaire rolls out!
Catalyst GitHub Repo - Weekly Round-Up
One of the primary objectives this year is to make it easier for Community members to understand how Catalyst works on the technical side and to access the Catalyst technical backend to increase transparency in systems. The major side effect later this year is expected to be around the ability of the community to come along and start co-creating/helping build/suggest improvements to these foundations.
This repo is the starting point and we’re seeking improvements to it throughout the months to come. For now, feel free to bookmark the pages and lurk around as we get it ready:
- GitHub - input-output-hk/catalyst-core: ⚙️ Core Catalyst Governance Engine and utilities.
Catalyst Core Documentation - Page Redirection (draft/WIP)
Workshops for funded projects
We recently hit the 400+ completed project milestone and with more projects coming into the Catalyst ecosystem with each funding round, there is a need for education for more projects to leverage in their journeys.
In the coming weeks and months, the Catalyst team will facilitate technical and business growth workshops with players within and outside the Catalyst ecosystem. These workshops aim to provide educational resources tailored to some of the pain points faced by very early-stage blockchain startups and projects building within the Cardano ecosystem.
The first of these will happen on the 21st of February, this event is open to all Catalyst-funded projects. The workshops will take place on the bi-weekly Coordinator call at 5 PM UTC. The topic of this first workshop will be Business Models For Disruptive Tech Organizations presented by Edify Collab’s Harry Hellyer. If you are a funded project, make sure to check your emails or announcement channels for the invites.
Ultimately, a workshop calendar will be released in the coming weeks so funded projects can anticipate future sessions and bookmark the time slots in their individual calendars.
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/.
RW: What happened in CIPs last week?
- CIP-??? Add Untyped UPLC builtin functions [New CIP Proposal]:
- This proposal suggests replacing or enhancing the set of Plutus Core built-in functions with built-in functions that are untyped.
RW: Continued Recommendations:
- CIP-81 Tiered Pricing:
- This proposal offers a specification for how to introduce tiered transaction fee pricing to Cardano.
- This is a good read.
- CIP-0039? Language annotated address:
- This proposal suggests adding additional annotations to addresses containing script hashes, so that native and Plutus script addresses can be differentiated.
RW: CIP Editors Meeting #61 (Tuesday 14th)
- CPS-03 Smart Tokens:
- Should remove solution parts from the problem statement.
- Parts of the rejected CIP-70 are to be merged in as these are closely aligned.
- Draft CPS-??? Wallet UX:
- Some interesting ideas included - around shortcomings of CIP-30.
- No response from the author to comments in three weeks - this should be closed for now.
- CIP-??? Sums-of-products in Plutus Core:
- Author present to discuss.
- All comments have been responded to.
- Will move to the last check for the next meeting.
- CIP-??? Ledger evolution (meta):
- Keen to have this merged.
- Not too much discussion around this - but that is the nature of meta proposals.
- Moved to last check for the next call.
- CIP-??? NFT Metadata Update Oracles:
- No major disputes are present in this well-articulated proposal.
- Asked the author to be present for the following meeting to discuss.
- CIP-??? Maybe Datum:
- This is waiting for the author to respond to comments.
- This is ready to have a number applied in the meantime.
- Further reviews would be good.
- CIP-??? Post Quantum signatures in Plutus:
- Author was present and a long healthy discussion was had around this.
- Main question for this proposal: is it worth doing this now or in future?
- Perhaps need a domain expert to weigh in along with the Plutus team.
- Maybe a CPS could be added.
Next Meeting:
- CIP Editors Meeting #62:
- Tentatively: Feb 28th 9:30am UTC.
- Held on Discord - here.
- Agenda TBD.
Further varied governance and Catalyst community conversations can be also followed on the official Cardano forum here. Don’t be shy to be part of the conversation.
Community Events
Many community events are taking place regularly across the ecosystem. In the image above and below you can find a snippet of what is available out there. A great way to lurk around and over time participate even more directly. You can browse more via this link.
Catalyst Project Completions - 400+ and counting!
400+ projects funded by Catalyst have been completed to date by submitting their self-reported close-out reports and videos. 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!
- 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 or via projectcalyst.io website directly.
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
Note: References in this newsletter to the 3rd party projects, products, and services are provided for information purposes only and are not endorsements. Everyone should carry out their own investigations before relying on the information provided in this newsletter.