The Stellar Community Fund’s Lab fund voting rounds began on November 1 with nine projects to be voted. The Lab fund presents the results of the restrategization and transitioning of the SCF version by Stellar developers to version 2.
The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) transitioned into version 2.0 in the past few months. This is owing to the events that unraveled with version 1. This brought the Stellar Development Fund (SDF) to the point where they had to strategize and decide on a way forward to make the funding process efficient, fair, and transparent. They came up with an idea to categorize projects to be funded into two based on the development phase they are in. Lab fund and seed funds were the two phases that were created.
Lab funds focus on projects that are experimenting with the use cases, an entry point for exploration and discovery of the stellar protocol. According to the Lab-fund web page:
“The goal of the Lab Fund is to inspire experimental use cases, open-source software, documentation, events, market presence, and real-world stress tests… This fund is an entry point for exploration and discovery. It’s designed to encourage and support wide and varied ecosystem experimentation, and will have lower prize amounts, higher frequency, and more entrants than the Seed Fund. The bar for eligibility is therefore quite low: use, talk about, or showcase Stellar in some way and you’re welcome to participate.”
12 qualified projects are selected by the nominating panels from those that applied. Selected projects are then voted by the community via a quadratic vote. The quadratic voting model enables the community to reveal their sentiment on the projects to be voted on. Members of the community can give “velocity” to their votes via voting weights. Each member can log in to the SCF website with their phone numbers and cast votes with 100 points that are allocated to them. Each vote cast costs the square of the points until all points are exhausted. For example, 2 votes cost 4 points, 4 votes cost 16 points, 8 votes cost 64 points, etc. Community members can also flag projects by flagging them if they find something fishy about the project.
Each member can see the effect of their votes on the grant fund to be sent to each project.
SCF 2.0 lab fund has nine qualifying projects which include Relax, Ayadee TRAK Supply Chain System, Edunode, Anara Farmer’s Market, Crypto Link, Lumenswap, DEB, Stellarscam.report, and Blocknify. These projects will share a pool of 500,000 XLM at the end of the voting rounds. Each will receive rewards based on the points received. SCF lab funds will take place quarterly. The next phase of the Lab fund will begin in January 2021.
SCF seed fund presents a more stringent method of grant allocation and a lot more rewards than the lab fund. It will take place only twice a year with 5,000,000 XLM to be shared between 3-5 projects.
“The goal of the Seed Fund is to help viable, innovative, first-mover businesses and utilities get started on Stellar… Applicants for the Seed Fund provide a business model as part of their project submission, and the nomination panel bases qualifications for participation off both that plan and a proven track record of building and contributing to successful endeavors. The panel looks for ideas that can survive successfully for at least a year.”
Ayobami Abiola, a cryptocurrency enthusiast and writer at The Currency Analytics crypto news platform, opined via a tweet:
“@StellarOrg SCF 2.0 Lab fund and seed fund has a lot of initiative input into it. The quadratic voting method is just creative enough for many other #crypto projects to follow. It is not surprising SCF 1.0 taught them a big lesson making them wiser. #stellar #xlm”
SDF has already stated that the SCF is a learning curve. It is expected that as things progress, the Stellar community will see exciting updates to empower their favorite projects.
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