Everything that's wrong with Catalyst

Governance Project Catalyst
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The point is, there hasnt been and still isnt an answer on long term goal of the project wrt it’s sustainability, without a commitment of codebase not being thrown away, and addressing it on public chain - NOT going through some intermediate folks - can’t expect some sort of building from many.

That’s actually worse, instead of opening up into public chain - it is doubling down into chain being run by IO and everyone else being clients. Compare explorer.cardano.org and cexplorer/cardanoscan to see what this difference means in reality

That’s good to hear, hope it addresses the topics raised (those are pretty basic ones) - but also, wonder where’s place/phase for input on this transition process?

Most importantly, what can be done to put a halt for catalyst project, atleast address a big portion of process - before continuing to round 10 and celebrate stats?

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42

We can’t tell how each specific wallet voted. Whether YES or NO - because vote is conducted in a private mode. We know how many wallets participated (vs. just being registered) in the outcome of the vote for every proposal - but not their actual decision.

43

Is that Jormungandr-based system documented anywhere? It somehow contradicts the reason for using a blockchain if transactions cannot be tracked (even if that blockchain is running permissioned behind closed doors for now). Or are you using one of the end-to-end verifiable secret ballot systems discussed in academia? Which one? None of them seemed mature enough that I would have proposed it as a solution to @Terminada’s request for a secret ballot above.

Also: Is that supposed to change for dReps? Or will we never know how “our” dRep (if we choose one) voted?

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44

It’s not meant to be the final solution. It’s a step towards more transparency. I hope it can be appreciated and elevate conversations from ‘assumptions’ to working with ‘data’ - that’s the positive outcome in the interim imho. One of the elements may be releasing archived data from previous active instances. Mind you - Jor is not always on afaik. That may allow for more broader ‘explorer’ access to data that will be ‘dumped’ in one go to scrub over.

I am lobbying for a concept of Catalyst testnet that would enable development outside of core premise and speed up iterations/innovation. I think there’s some good movement on this front to make it happen. Let’s see, it’s early.

Putting a complete halt can have a lot of side effects as well - Catalyst is an organic constellation of thousands of people. Put it in park mode for too long - you’ll loose a lot of resource that makes the wheel run. Imagine, how long can you hold your breath without oxygen coming in? I think there needs to be some consideration to that. Bootstrapping has been the most challenging part to date and there are a lot of moving parts to date that make it happen. It is far from ‘just’ being IOG - and in that sense we need to find the right balance of sorts.

Tho - number of measures have been put in place already to slow down the pace and allow for processes/tooling to catch up. Namely, cooldown periods, longer timeframes in each stages, cap on total funding available (both in dollars but also in ada). If truly needed, more drastic measures could be introduced but again - we have to be mindful at what cost.

Having said that, I don’t think F10 will start momentarily and break may be a little longer than what we’ve seen to date. I trust that will help provide more time resource to help address varied issues. We’re actively listening and I hope next steps will meaningfully highlight that notion.

dReps final vote outcome is planned to be publicised. There will be two voting plans - direct voters and dReps. dReps will have public outcome post voting period. As usual, ongoing votes are currently private. Re implementation, let me see if documentation is already somewhere or not yet. It’s one of the things that we’re seeking to level up and host in one place - e.g. upcoming Catalyst portal.

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45

I stand corrected. My bad

Oh, I actually thought there were more people than George part of PACE. But either way, the important point is that the greater community could contribute to it even though he is the custodian etc

That was great but it was merely a pause, not long enough to properly sit down and work on changing documentation before the next round was started, hence all guides were still quite rushed. It was very much a “get the new PA guide” out last minute. Definitely no time to circulate it around the wider (i.e. not just the most engaged PAs) Cardano community

46

I hear you and 100% agreed.

47

I think the main thing being the lack of an official website/landing page where everything needed can be found. There are often so many questions like when do rewards come, how are they calculated, how do I know what my PA ID is, how good were my assessments, what did vPAs comment on my assessments, how does the onboarding process look like after winning, when are rewards distributed, how does one change parameters to catalyst, where are current problems gathered, which are the currently ongoing Catalyst “community infrastructure” projects and what’s their role (basically an overview of the Catalyst ecosystem).

Then there’s the issue of just the wider Cardano community’s understanding of Catalyst/communication towards them. I am not the best person to ask here but I think it is quite illustrative that @HeptaSean who started this used the term CA rather than PA, just as (possibly) a tip of some iceberg of misunderstandings of the process!

I think there’s very little concerted marketing and PR effort to get people to really participate. There’s a post here and there but not the repeated “spamming” and constant reminder that 14 days left to register, 7 days left, 3 days, 1 day, last chance… or “here is a video with tools you can use”/“here is a video explaining how everything works”! I am hoping that community calls should be pushed and marketed through IOGs main channels way more than it is now, through IOGs main channels.

Like why aren’t the Catalyst Town halls announced on the IOHK main twitter? This small change would, I believe, change the narrative away from Catalyst being a “sub-culture” (as I think someone called it)

48

I wholeheartedly agree. I have high expectations to alleviate this issue with the upcoming Catalyst ‘home page’ that won’t just be ideascale page.

I hear you on this one. This used to be the case - but there was heavy pushback that people felt bothered by it - that it was spammy - so we dialled down somewhat. Hence why it resulted to weekly updates via mailing list that is distributed there and duplicated on major socials like reddit, twitter, facebook, slack channels, discord channels, telegram announcements to name key. It’s really read by many thousands of people. It has good coverage imho. But weekly mails represent point in time rather than a static place of a dedicated home-home.

Hence - I fundamentally believe lack of a unified home for all things Catalyst to create shared understanding and collate facts - that in turn eliminates assumptions - is the crux of the issue here. Also why I’m ‘bullish’ on upcoming Catalyst portal and its potential for later versions/upgrades.

At any case, I’ll give it more thought to see what other avenues could be leveraged and how. Appreciate your inputs.

49

You’re evading the core question, why is it such a big hassle to make these temporary sidechains public for community transparency and also building analytics on the results independently (I specifically pointed out the difference in level of details captured by something like explorer.cardano.org vs cardanoscan.io / cexplorer.io / pooltool.io / adastat.net - IO explorer is not remotely comparable to the level of details captured by those community ones) - a lot of tools were well-versed with viewing chain data that was used by jormungandr. The data being available to IO should be available to public in the same manner instead of private chains. By the time it reaches a centralised explorer, the data is already parsed and a lot of analytical information could be missing. Other than the usefulness, the transparency cannot be optional - and the entire process of snapshot > private chain > submission of votes should be open so that same data source consumed by IO is available independently, especially until this happens on centralised chains. It might actually reduce the load and dependency on a small team

As against making decisions on-the-go in cowboy’s playground atm where without proper assessment, quality of projects, thousands of projects are shoved down the throat of an end user, which is almost too daunting to even participate for many more-involved folks.

Instead, it has more become a cesspool of those benefiting from the treasury leak to be the ones that are being most involved (thus, the nightmar-ish results)

Huh? Sorry but that analogy makes no sense to me (for this topic) :slight_smile:

Rather than put it in “park mode”, you’d want to accelerate resurrection for various points raised (if it can be done in 2 months, that’s already within timeframes). At present, there have been 9 rounds tbh, and some of these core things are lagging from round 2-4 and has not really progressed much since - a big % of those who are active currently are also benefitting from the catalyst, rather than making that decision based on fear of losing, you might actually get more hands on deck

Fully acknowledge and agree, but other than IOG - while there are quite a few members honestly putting their sweat and tremendous amount of efforts, a lot of the process is being designed to/for/by proposers (rather than focusing on involving end-users and builder community more to core aspects).

Currently, the cost of going on with a broken system is already visible, cant be higher than that tbh (I am not sure if it’s very obvious to core team at IO) - and I wouldnt want to list out specific projects plucking stuff from irrelevant buckets , estimating 500K from treasury for week’s worth of development work across 2 proposals or getting away with high scores while genuine ones getting lower ones, etc.

Given where we’re, sorry to say - but assessors list was infiltrated (either unknowingly with quality or intentionally - we can never know, because these were anonymous, and there was absolutely no baseline for skillset to assess), and the outcome was a lot more serious. It really calls for a pause to investigate, resolve as a minimum pre-req, and if it seems too difficult to resolve - so be it, take as much time as needed rather than throwing treasury funds away.

Remember: While catalyst team is celebrating 5-11% stake (under premise of a lot of stake being locked at exchanges/custodial services/etc), that by itself is not a community stake consensus, IO have come up with accepting these as alright, and atm - these are predominantly easily achievable by active proposers themselves, rather than larger community participation.

Thanks, and sorry if I come across as a bit snobbish/rude, but you’ve known me for 3 years now - I am socially awkward and prefer talk exactly to points rather than feel-good higher level discussions :slight_smile:

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50

The real issue, regardless if Jor is public, private – whether dReps votes will be public or private – whether halting the system does have lingering side-affects is the fact that those 1000’s of people that work on the system, making it better or just grifting and working solely to accrue however much ADA that can a whatever expense necessary is that their is no formal guidance or other documentation as what the community is capable of changing by consensus, what the threshold is and so one.

Adding dReps is just the same a adding gas to a wildfire, it just amplifies the current problem. There are so many good ideas to improve Catalyst yet nothing moves forward, or minimal improvements are implemented.

This system is highly broken and has been that way since joining in Fund 6 yet it is only getting worse, iterative improvements or not.

There is so little community involvement or possibly knowledge that they can be involved. I’ve personally dedicated much of the last year to Catalyst attempting to fix the glaring issues to no avail because the community has very little say and Circle only senses where there is self-interest 90% of the time.

You are worried about losing people if Catalyst was stopped…the real concern should be losing people that are (were) actively working to make Catalyst and Circle a community focused, equality driven, in as much as they can be, systems that are difficult to manipulate for strictly personal gain and power – those people who work for the community, with the community and by the community; those who are honest, transparent and generally good individuals. Yet by continuing this charade called Catalyst you enrich the very same bad actors that manipulate IOG, the community, grift, collude, coerce and have generally lost any form of an ethical compass.

This community is now down more member. Good luck Cardano and Catalyst, you will need every bit of it.

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51

That’s the goal as far as I understand and something always to be - but falling as a priority in light of day to day I suspect (making assumption about bigger picture here). However, I expect material improvement in this areas going forward as it’s been on the table for a while. It may not be prettiest first - but should serve good purpose and moving needle, I hope, in right direction.

If it wasn’t for you, I’d be still running in circles trying to make sense of all the inner workings of Cardano ecosystem - for which I am very grateful! I always learn from our convos.

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52

I don’t have all the answers. But I know/suspect it will take a village to make it work long term. Thank you for having tried in your way and thank you for sharing your experience.

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53

Thanks for posting.
Now is a great time to take an inventory, reassess, and engage with the first real on-chain vote that isn’t mandated by the parameters set by IOG. Catalyst provides polenty of areas to improve and starting this journey begins with voting for the catalyst circle and also nominating members that can communicate and serve the community.
Hewre’s the form,

Here’s a post with some additional information as well

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54

This time around, we’ll have more time and, I hope, enough people frustrated enough to join in on the effort to define the solutions properly (and build support for it amongst the community)

A community organised “Catalyst f10 improvement strategy Outreach/presentation” is moved to Thursday. The purpose is to present our (just some driven Catalyst convinced to make things work this time around, mostly VPAs) suggestions to the community, get input and get more people involved in the work!

Location = Catalyst United Discord

Time = Thursday Oct 20th, 19:00-20:00 UTC

Slides = Catalyst United - Google Slides

Link to join Discord = Catalyst United

Link to discord event = Discord

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55

I was just reminded by @HeptaSean that this item has been outstanding for a while. I’d like to highlight that all Assess QA stage is public documentation and can be found via this link for anyone else reading and interested: vPA Aggregate File - Fund9 - Google Sheets

Thank you for letting me know and apologies for missing it in the first read.

D.

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56

I more or less echoed your sentiments, over 2 years ago. But Dor Garbash insisted on centralization as an introduction to decentralization.

There have been promises of decentralization from the beginning but the catalyst clique never seemed and still don’t seem to understand that a group or clique “receiving feedback from surveys, social media & more”, is not decentralised.

And since then they seem to have pushed the centralised power further with catalyst circle and reps.

Back in fund3 I made enough noise In Catalyst telegram that my voice was heard, but I was disliked and ostracized for being negative about the clique at that time, and i didn’t feel represented, so i left. Seems like you’ve done the same and I’m sure many others too.

Catalyst has a lot of parallels with Cardano foundation in that regard. Both claim to be doing good but I believe neither have been successful in their fundamental role: representing who they are meant to represent.

I hope cip1694 is the beginnings of decentralized governance, so fixing both catalyst & CF becomes a possibility, because as things stand for years - multiple people complaining isn’t enough to enact change on them.

I can accept losing a decentralised vote, but I can’t accept a group making decisions for me.

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57

Thank you for sharing your perspective on the Catalyst system and its challenges. I think you’ve hit on a really important point—the paradox of community engagement and the need for dedicated effort. Your experience in Fund 7 and your active participation in the Catalyst PA Telegram group bring valuable context to this discussion.

Your one-sentence answer hits hard: “too few people are willing to put in the effort to fix things.” It’s a poignant reflection of the current state of affairs. But as you mentioned, it’s a catch-22. While there’s a need for more hands-on-deck, there’s also the issue of making it viable for community members to work on this full-time.

The Telegram groups, like the Catalyst PA one you mentioned, serve as a good low-barrier entry point for those who want to engage but are pressed for time. These platforms provide a more mobile-friendly and real-time way to keep up with developments, which is excellent for people with hectic professional lives.

I also appreciate your call to action to join the newly established Discord for deeper engagement. It seems that the Catalyst system needs a multifaceted approach—using Telegram for quick updates and Discord for more structured, in-depth discussions could be a winning strategy.

The points you’ve raised about needing a centralized place for information, better dialogue before voting, and earlier feedback to proposers all require that elusive “time and effort” you talk about. Without a funding model that supports this, IOG centralizing may become a necessity, albeit a counterintuitive one for a project that aims to be decentralized.

The proposal to contribute in a more engaged manner is compelling, but as you rightly pointed out, community challenges geared towards marketing or fixing systemic issues didn’t get funded this time. Maybe the community’s appetite for such ‘meta’ work will increase as more people experience the system’s limitations firsthand.

In closing, I wholeheartedly agree that it’s time for us all to “take up a shovel.” Here’s hoping more people will do so, whether it’s through this forum, the Catalyst Telegram groups, or the new Discord channel. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and I hope we can turn these dialogues into actionable changes.

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58

HI,
I’m not sure if the discord shared is very active.

If you haven’t seen the Catalyst discord, here’s an invite as well.