Welcome!

Dash Proposal: Dash Platform Incubator - Phase 4

1. Summary

This proposal provides a “Phase 4” to the Dash Platform Incubator Phase 3 proposal (https://www.dashcentral.org/p/dash-platform-incubator-phase-3) to extend bounty funding for the development of tools, resources, Dapps and Protocol enhancements for Dash Platform on EvoNet and leading to Testnet for a further 3 months.

2. Phase 3 Review

As per Phase 3 goals to improve Dev onboarding, as well as continuing and expanding existing bounty work, we’ve completed a set of bounties to upgrade the Incubator itself as a standalone open-source / open-data App, to make it more effective in onboarding devs and flesh out the incentive structure to help us  scale, with all existing funds and bounties migrated to the new system:

https://dashincubator.app

How this will work going forward is that my series of proposals will provide funds into the App (its input) and a group of Admins will create and manage Bounties that provide incentives to users to produce work via the App (its output).

This is V1 of the App and still uses Trello on the backend for Bounty management and a Gdoc for accounting so its far from fully automated, but work will be ongoing now on V2 to implement our own (public) backend wired to the site ASAP, followed by a Dapp version once Platform is on mainnet (and ultimately i’d like to Dappify the funding side too using smart code if our protocol allows).  

The goal of the App is to provide an optimal way to translate blockchain funds into valuable human labor for Dash (with a focus on Dapp development), built on the principles that maximizing transparency in decision making and operations can also maximize productivity, accountability and ROI to the Dash network, with the right tools and incentive structures in place.

The App is essentially governed by a set of Rules implemented by both the App’s code and the Admins governing it, who i’m appointing today as we soft launch the App.  Each Admin has the ability to create, manage, and earn commission from their own set of Bounties within the App and operate within their own budget.  These rules represent the full terms of how these Proposals and the App itself will be implemented as of today:

https://dashincubator.app/rules

Whilst eventually we’ll move to full decentralized control by Admins (via quorum based decision, election, review and removal mechanisms), for the time being as Proposal Owner I will retain overall control/veto on decisions until I’m happy that the system is mature enough to decentralize completely.

List of the Admins i’m appointing is as follows:

• Andy Freer (Proposal Owner)
• Cloudwheels (Community Dev)
• Rion Gull (Community Dev)
• Readme (Community Dev)
• Pasta (DCG Dev, L1)
• Ivan Shumkov (DCG Dev, L2)

I’ve selected this group to have a wide range of skills / experience / interests and with positive reputations within the Incubator already, including some DCG devs to give them access to help expedite or flesh out some peripheral parts of their work that might help Community devs get what they need faster.  

3. Phase 3 Highlights

Instead of manually listing all the progress this past Phase, we’ve created a page now that shows the Bounties produced by Incubator users in realtime:

https://dashincubator.app/output

4. Phase 4 Strategy

Now that we have a group of Admins, each will have their own strategy for the output they want to incentivize within the context of the overall Incubator strategy which is stated in the rules as follows:

https://dashincubator.app/rules#14-strategy

My own strategy as an Admin during this Phase is:

•  Continue to work with other Admins and devs to improve processes within the Incubator App itself, as laid out in the roadmap https://dashincubator.app/rules#7-roadmap
•  Focus on completing current high-value Dapps into a fully demoable state ready for Testnet, such as our first Social Media Dapp (Jembe, the Twitter alternative), including surrounding work needed to easily on-board users to Dash (Evolution) and get them using these Dapps with minimal friction and the best UX.  I’ll be working with Dashameter and TheDesertLynx to achieve this.
•  Continue to raise proposals and represent the Incubator, providing the baseline funding and strategy as we grow, and mentor and guide the Admins and developers involved.

In terms of funding, I've increased the ask slightly to factor in the additional work we are taking on to develop and improve the Incubator App itself (referred to in the App as Meta Bounties).   This being said, there are some upcoming Bounty projects that could easily accelerate our burn rate beyond these levels (for example, some new work connecting ETH to Dash in the form of externalizing smart contract storage, providing Oracles to the ETH network and wrapped-Dash on ETH, which are larger projects than we usually take on and involving Ethereum developers).  In such cases, from some discussions with the Admins, I or another Admin could raise some supplemental ‘top-up’ proposals to ask the Network to provide more funding for specific projects and let those stand on their own merit; In either case I will continue to raise my proposals as a baseline to keep the core Incubator strategy funded on a quarterly (ie. 3 superblock cycle) basis.

5. Terms

You can read the full Rules aka ‘protocol’ for the App here, these are comprehensive and supercede the rules from my previous proposals:

https://dashincubator.app/rules

6. Auditing

All resources required to publicly audit all information, source and output of the Incubator are available here:
https://dashincubator.app/rules#6-resources

Thanks

Andy Freer
Dash Developer