Catalyst is a convenient, accessible and immediate app that enables ADA holders to vote on proposals in seconds, straight from their mobile phones. The app supports private voting, push notifications, reviews and single vote casting. Users can also check the proposals they have voted for during the current funding round using the app.
There have been various upgrades to the app since its development, which have supported user needs, making it easier to follow proposals as well as eliminate bad actors on the platform. One of these recent upgrades has allowed users to select the push notifications they can receive regarding voting, proposer and community advisor. The visibility of advisor reviews has also been improved considerably.
Although the app has been very instrumental for Project Catalyst, it is not open-source and cannot be used by native asset issuers. Therefore, there has been a need for an open source version of this voting app.
The Open-Source App Proposal
This project has been co-proposed by the ADOSIA IoT team as an alternative voting app for Project Catalyst. The app needs to be developed and released as open-source, so that it can leverage Jormungandr voting capability to engage token holders in decentralized and distributed governance.
Once the proposal is documented, the voting app can be used by other issuers of Cardano Native assets for voting. In combination with the multi-sig treasury, this app can enable basic governance of projects running on Cardano with privacy preservation.
Many decentralized projects have been created to offer privacy that’s missing in centralized organizations. They cannot be compromised based on the technology. However, it has been proven that even these projects can be compromised, subsequently endangering user data and assets.
The use of the open-source app together with multi-sig treasury can allow developers to create and launch their dapps knowing they have another layer of protection against hackers.
This open source voting app will allow users to explore alternative governance schemes, proposals presentation, and enable a wide range of other experiments around governance, for both Cardano, and projects building on the network.
Team
There is a team of two behind this proposal. One of them is only identified as 2nd Layer on Ideascale and their partner Kyle Solomon, a developer that is referred to as @adosiawolf on social media. Kyle is a developer, entrepreneur, stakepool operator and marketing professional who has been a member of Project Catalyst since Sept. 17, 2020 and has contributed to 16 ideas.
The proposal has also been co-proposed by the ADOSIA IoT team, whose platform is a free cloud based tool paired with an open hardware initiative that enables anyone to create, customize, deploy and manage custom WiFi control systems using supported open IoT WiFi hardware.
Budget
The team is asking for $74,000 to be used in the following ways:
- 60k – Fixed Term price contract to supplier – AiKIT
- 7k – Project & Vendor management
- 7k – Jormungandr / Catalyst side-chain documentation and general user documentation
Once funding has been released, the app is expected to hit the market in 3 months. 1 month will be used for resource allocation on the supplier side and the 2 months on add development.
Final Thoughts
The catalyst voting app has allowed users to vote on proposals presented on Project Catalyst, follow advisor reviews and keep up with all their favorite proposals. However, the app is not open-source hence cannot be used by native asset issuers. This proposal seeks to build an alternative open-source app that can be ready in just three months.
The team has listed several measures to be used to show the success of the app once it is in the market. This includes the amount of projects using the app for their own voting as well as number of GitHub forks.
Check out the full Catalyst proposal here.
