06 May A rewarding partnership

I am doing things a little differently today as I think that Hatchet’s most recent post on Discord is important and I wanted to share it with you. She lays out where we currently are, the motivation for the team and our responsibilities as a community. TLDR: what you reap is what you sow.

Post-opt-in

As I have reported several times now, the post-opt-in process is coming to a close. In fact, you only have a few days left to claim your XYM if you held XEM in your private wallet at the time of the snapshot as the process will end on May 10th. What I didn’t know before was what would happen with the unclaimed XYM – this was clarified this morning and it was confirmed that the funds will be used to support quadratic funding (QF).

I have described QF before but you can read more about what it is and how it will work in the Pirate Handbook. Essentially these funds will be used to support worthy community projects that are being built on Symbol and help invigorate the ecosystem.

Moving forward

Looking back over the last year you will have seen seismic changes in the management and focus of Symbol and NEM. There has been a ton of work going on in the background to wind up NGL, create the new entities and clean up the mess that was left behind. This turned into an epic battle for the captains and I am not sure how many in the community realise how much time and effort went into this.

It looks as if there will be some closure on this chapter of our history after the post-opt-in process is completed. This will free up a lot of time to do what the team and the community want to see happening – development which with the current hiring spree should move up several gears.

This is also no surprise but it is worth repeating. The aim for the future will be to provide us, the community with a (groundbreaking) working product and the tools, documentation and education to take it forward. Hopefully, by the time this handover occurs, we will have a healthy community of talented developers and that will be the time that we will have to say goodbye to Jag, Gimre and Hatchet. I am sure that they will still be lurking in the background somewhere but we will have moved away from a centralised team of developers to a true, decentralised, open-source project. The power and responsibility for the success of the project will be in the community’s hands.

Quadratic funding – we decide

I am not sure how this process will work in practice but the idea of QF is that community funding is “matched” by the pool of funds left from the post-opt-in process. The community put in their own XYM/XEM to support a project and this is then topped up from the QF pool. The greater the number of community members that donate to a project, the greater the amount provided from the QF pool.

The idea is that broad community endorsement of a proposal leads to a greater contribution from central funds as it is deemed by the community to be an important resource that is worth supporting. Here is an example from Reflections of Space Pirates:

You can see that even with the same monetary value of initial donations, the matched amount scales based on the number of contributions received. This puts the power of the system into the hands of the many and rewards projects where there is a consensus that it is beneficial to the growth of Symbol and NEM. It also means that all small donations count, and everyone has a more equal voice when it comes to deciding which projects should be supported and how much support they should receive.

As a community, we will be able to scrutinise and discuss each project and decide who to support. There is an important point here too – will we support those that are die-hard Symbol and NEM supporters who already have a track record developing on and contributing to the ecosystem or will we take a risk on new faces that are potentially attracted more by the monetary reward?

I guess we will need to strike some balance here but one thing is for certain and we have heard this before, we will not be supporting ideas. There needs to be some tangible product out there already and we should be supporting the continued development and expansion of these resources. There will be no fly by night money grabbers applying for community funds. We have seen this in the past and it won’t wash with us now.

A partnership

I know for a fact that the team appreciate the work of all of the people out there supporting Symbol and NEM. I have been blown away that my little blog is appreciated by those doing the hard work and building the protocol. If you get involved you will find that there is a lot of support out there and that the team and the community really appreciate your efforts, however small they might be.

It is a partnership between the development team and us, the community. They are building the platform and the tools we need to develop our ideas into products that will showcase what Symbol and NEM can do. This attracts more people to what is already becoming a vibrant community, more people hear about what the technology enables us to do which brings more developers and the cycle continues. Without a product we are nothing but the same goes for the community – the stronger we are, the more reach we have and the more successful Symbol and NEM will be.

Take responsibility and drive our success

The vision is there for Symbol 2.0 whatever it may end up being called. I have confidence that the team will deliver, I know that there is genuine passion and belief in the plan and we already know that these people are super talented – they’ve already developed two blockchains so why would you ever doubt them?

So, there will be no VC investments, and there will be no leaving the project and starting afresh. The team have made a commitment to us and I am very glad that they have otherwise we would be in real trouble. What do they want in return? Us to step up and do our bit to support them in their efforts and to grow Symbol into a global success.

A significant minority of XEM and XYM holders don’t realise what a valuable resource we have in the developers and what a disaster it would be for the projects if they were to up and leave. Please show your appreciation and support, help out however you can and give them the trust and respect that they need to thrive.

Rewarding those that give back

If you are contributing already, you will know how rewarding it can be, this isn’t about financial gain it is about passion, about shared interests, vision, friendship and community. With the introduction of QF it seems that there will be an opportunity for us to reward those that deserve it. This is something we have been doing informally already but now we will have additional funds to support this.

If you are someone that doesn’t believe in our shared future then you are in the wrong place. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment:

The future plans have been laid bare and it is our choice as individuals to either trust in the vision and contribute or to part ways. Those that want to help and are in it for the long haul will be rewarded, those that don’t won’t be – simple and fair. We don’t want to be about compensating those who have the biggest stake, we want to reward action and reward value.

Setting sail

I am not going to comment on these concluding remarks as they say it all already and are written far more passionately than I will be able to express.

Take a chance, trust in the vision, own a piece of the future and make history. Together we can do it.

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