Full proposal

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Problem statement

Lack of research and analysis about treasury systems

There is a lack of initiatives that conduct research and analysis about treasury systems and processes across the Web3 industry to help with better understanding what approaches could be effective, what’s working and what isn’t and what opportunities and data exists that could help ecosystems with improving their own treasury systems and processes.

Time consuming to keep up to date with industry progress

There are many Web3 ecosystems that each have a treasury to manage and disburse. Projects within these ecosystems also usually require their own solutions for managing and disbursing treasury assets. The vast number of ecosystems and projects that are building treasury systems in parallel makes it increasingly difficult for these teams to have enough time to find out what is happening across the industry. Not having easy access to the progress being made in surrounding ecosystems can make it easier to miss insightful learnings and ideas about how to better approach solving important treasury problems.

Difficulty in determining which solutions are working most effectively

Existing treasury solution builders will often have a limited amount of time to look at other treasury solutions across the industry due to the level of effort it would require to understand and properly analyse these alternative systems and approaches whilst also trying to build their own solutions. A meaningful amount of time is often needed to properly analyse the available data and determine the current impact that those treasuries are currently generating to more confidently identify which approaches might be actually effective or not.

Lost learnings from failed or pivoted projects

Treasury systems are complex and require ongoing iteration and improvement. Ideas can often be trialled and then discarded once the outcomes do not produce the desired result. As each ecosystem executes these experiments in parallel it will be easy for those learnings to get lost by not being documented. A lack of available learnings on what approaches haven’t worked for other ecosystems can lead to situations where different ecosystems end up adopting a similar and ineffective approach due to the lack of available evidence that covers the issues these certain approaches may have.

Isolated learning & duplicated efforts

Without any collaborative and supportive structures in place most treasury teams could end up learning in isolation on how to improve and iterate on their own solutions. A lack of external collaboration decreases the amount of skill and thought diversity that could have helped with more identifying effective solutions for solving different treasury problems. There is not a large incentive for competing ecosystems to collaborate and support other ecosystems. Less collaboration across the industry results in a reduced flow of information and insights between the teams working on similar treasury problems. Development of treasury systems in isolation due to less collaboration can result in efforts being more easily duplicated across multiple ecosystems concerning research, analysis, development and experimentation of new approaches.

More information about our shared learning approach can be found here - https://docs.web3association.co/approach/shared-learning

Proposal objective(s) or solution(s)

How does this proposal change the network? How do the milestones of the project achieve the ultimate goal?

Our focus is to support existing teams across Web3 ecosystems with improving their treasury systems. We achieve this through the creation and continued improvement of knowledge resources that help provide insights and actionable information for teams to use when improving their own treasury systems. The Web3 Association is looking to create the industry preferred destination to learn about Web3 treasuries. We're looking to nurture and grow a collaborative effort to bring people together from across the industry to more effectively share knowledge about how treasuries can be approached to more effectively generate impact.

Treasury knowledge resources are created each month and these then get shared with the wider industry. These resources can help with suggesting new experiments and potential changes that can be made to existing treasury systems such as OpenGov. Our efforts can help with increasing the speed in which Polkadot and projects building within the ecosystem can iterate and develop more effective and scalable treasury systems.

More information about the opportunity to improve treasury systems can be found here - https://docs.web3association.co/focus

We maintain a roadmap to keep people informed about our current areas of focus. This roadmap is updated when we complete work on these areas or when we identify more impactful areas of work that would be more beneficial to the industry. Our current roadmap is maintained here - https://docs.web3association.co/roadmap/current-roadmap-plan

Example resources

Disbursement decision approaches - https://disbursement.treasuries.co/approaches/decision-approaches

Disbursement incentive approaches - https://disbursement.treasuries.co/approaches/incentive-approaches

Contribution verification approaches - https://disbursement.treasuries.co/approaches/contribution-verification-approaches

Who does this solution help?

• OpenGov & W3F - Our resources and efforts help to identify different approaches and areas for experimentation that OpenGov or grants processes from the W3F could consider and adopt. We’re always available to collaboratively work with these teams working on these disbursement processes to identify what other areas of research and analysis we could help with.
• Polkadot ecosystem - The knowledge resources we release can be immediately read and considered by any project building in the Polkadot ecosystem. Any of these projects that experiment with different approaches could create valuable data that informs future changes to OpenGov or grants processes offered by the W3F.
• Wider industry - The knowledge resources also help anyone across the industry with thinking about their own treasury systems and processes. This is also useful for the Polkadot ecosystem as any experiments that occur around the industry can create valuable learning opportunities that can benefit Polkadot’s own efforts to improve OpenGov and any other grants processes in the ecosystem.

What are the milestones, timelines, and budgets?

This proposal supports 3 months of contribution efforts and some community incentives to help with increasing community participation and contribution. We use time based incentives and monthly contribution logs. This is supported by our existing analysis that explored disbursement incentive approaches and contribution verification approaches.

$7,500 for 3 months contribution effort - This is equivalent to $2,500 per month which is not representative of a month's worth of work. Instead the $2,500 requested value helps to subsidise our contribution efforts. We will complete three months of contribution efforts regardless of whether we receive funding from other sources. Over the long term we are looking to spread the cost of our contribution efforts between multiple ecosystems which can help with generating a higher return on investment for each ecosystem that each benefit from the same knowledge resources.

$5,000 for community incentives - These incentives are aimed at helping to increase the amount of participation and contribution towards improving the knowledge resources we have created. We are looking to support others in finding areas for improvement or topics we might have missed. The wallet used to store community incentives will be public, who and why incentives are released will also be logged and available in our documentation - https://docs.web3association.co/funding-received/community-incentive-funding. We will not request further funding for community incentives from the Polkadot treasury until there is sufficient evidence that these community incentives have been effective at generating the desired outcome.

Do you have other resources or additional information?

All of our available information can be found here - https://linktr.ee/web3association

Proposal report

What are the success metrics and targets linked to the deliverables?

The main outcome we want to achieve is to increase the number of experiments and changes made to treasury systems that can help with identifying and adopting better solution approaches. Even small changes could generate significant amounts of impact for an ecosystem's treasury.

We will highlight any ecosystems that make changes to their treasury systems and processes on our social channels. The W3A has little influence on how each ecosystem decides to operate and improve their treasury system. Therefore we are unable to state any exact date these experiments and changes will happen. The W3A is always encouraged to share any collaborations, changes and experiments with the wider industry as it is exactly these types of outcomes that help to demonstrate the impact of our resources and contribution efforts for generating impact across the industry.

How will you report on the delivery of your milestones?

Our previous monthly contribution efforts can tracked here - https://docs.web3association.co/contributors

All future contribution efforts will continue to be logged in monthly reports. These logs are shared across our social channels. These contribution logs can always be accessed at any time in our open source documentation. The monthly contribution logs will also be shared on our Polkadot forum treasury proposal post.

Payment conditions

Requests

$12,500.

This is equivalent to 1658 DOT, calculated using DOT EMA30 Price ( USD ): 7.541171; Number of DOT: 1657.567505, Block #18940232, Source - https://polkadot.subscan.io/tools/price_converter

$5,000 (663 DOT) is allocated for community incentives.
$7,500 (995 DOT) is allocated for supporting 3 months worth of contribution efforts.

Developments

We do monthly contribution logs which are documented and shared at the end of each month. All our historical contribution logs can be found here - https://docs.web3association.co/contributors

Submissions

This is a single proposal. This proposal will have three monthly contribution logs that are shared which will provide evidence of our contribution efforts.

Targets

The requirement for completion will be submission of evidence showing our three months of contribution effort.

Accounts

DOT Address - 13mm8mjuALSbyvfjfso22eexuFwL4MqMrcw1w5To9L52yb5h

This wallet is managed by George Lovegrove. Funds received to this wallet will get sent to two different wallets. One of those will be for contribution efforts which will only get sent when monthly milestone reports are completed. The other wallet will be for community incentives where any funds sent from that wallet will be logged in our documentation.

Communications

We are available to discuss this proposal and initiative in the Polkadot Direction channel at any time. Alternatively our communication channels include:

• Social accounts: X, Telegram
• Email: hello@web3association.co
• All links: https://linktr.ee/web3association