How are you perceiving the problem
Why (the reasons) are you approaching it in the way you have
Who will your project engage
How will you demonstrate or prove impact

Note, this was written as a proposal for funding to Catalyst, Cardano’s decentralised innovation programme. If this hasn’t been integrated and rewritten in more general terms, it’s because perhaps it’s interesting to read as it is and/ or we’re busy.

Perceiving the Problem: Cardano Needs Real-world Use-cases

Cardano’s framing as the blockchain for enterprise makes the case that the time has come to move beyond technical intricacies to broad-scale adoption, oftentimes with the underlying technology itself stepping more into the background to make space for more familiar and accessible value-proposition narratives. This applies to a variety of sectors, as is evidenced by the variety of panel talks at the last summits. Cardano is proving out its utility across a diversity of use-cases.

There is a huge potential for Cardano to grow roots in many industries, however, many entrepreneurial initiatives still come from within the web3 ecosystem. The approaches to break into traditional markets, create entirely new ones, or bring on-board legacy systems often comes from a perspective of seeing Cardano as something separate, and this reinforces the challenge of retention: people start because they want to build on Cardano, but once that initial excitement fades, so too does their participation in the ecosystem.

In this proposal, we put forwards a case for a shift in perspective: from one that starts with the technology at the centre, to one that puts life at the centre, as part of a much longer-term ecosystem partnership with impact networks. We’ll frame our work with Wada as the trialling of a full-stack incubator and what that means, and then we’ll highlight the upcoming opportunity to build forwards into a second and much larger network, for which this proposal is being written. First, we need to properly set the context and provide our rationale for why we’re approaching the work in this way. We’ll first introduce our framing of impact networks and our value proposition, then move onto tangible examples of success with Wada, before closing with how these two come together to create a strategy for long-term real-world projects built on Cardano.

Impact Networks, Complexity and Practice Currencies

Prisma as a project emerged toward the end of the Regenerative Finance spring, in 2022. Although many projects were still able to attract funding, largely building on the false success of the Voluntary Carbon Market, signs were already starting to appear that indicated the limitations of token-centric approaches to governance and capital distribution. Mechanism design offered a fleeting glimmer of hope that encouraged numerous efforts to determine how to incentivise a collective effort to “fix” things, in service of honourable causes. However, the current era of DAO patterning has largely failed to resemble true collective intelligence, no matter how often it is promised, and the vast majority of impact funding stayed and remains off-chain. Of the many possible reasons for this, we’ll highlight the three Prisma is actively addressing:

Mechanism design is mechanistic: Motivation to “do X to unlock Y” stagnates after a while, no matter how elegant the engineering. Life happens, things change, and people get bored when all of their experience is reduced to a series of logical combinators. As well as that, complexity creeps back in, making static, closed systems overly complicated. We address this by shifting from mechanism design to currency design, which is like saying shifting from accumulating assets to participating in system flows.
Technocratic systems don’t build trust with capital holders: This point has been laboured in many places already. We address this through storytelling that includes qualitative narration as well as being backed up by quantitative data. Additionally, impact funding is increasingly informed about regenerative principles. Many decentralised impact funding projects are ultimately still top-down, insofar as the structures by which communities are able to organise are prescribed for them by “the clever people” in foreign places. This makes impact networks lose confidence, or look outdated. We address this by going deep into how to create the conditions for the organising processes to come from the communities themselves. We also address this with the principle of hubs self-hosting their infrastructure for them to publish their stories and engage partners on their own terms, without compromising sovereignty.
Decentralised impact is complex: For everyone involved, as soon as you have multiple stakeholder types, and multiple levels of nested systems, there is a huge amount of complexity. This can feel incredibly daunting, and may deter full participation. We address this through our events, for which the organising process is about creating the conditions for emergent and aligned collective action. We frame everything in terms of working on living systems, which requires a shift from an outcomes-based approach to a practice-based approach. These practices developed are the basis of making visible the impact/ activity on-the-ground.

Impact networks are our clients. We organise events to activate whole-system transition pathways. In this way, organisations suitable to be considered impact networks to us are any group, field or institution that has purpose-led activity grounded in multiple places whilst still coordinating as one whole.

Our B2B business model is to engage impact networks as sponsors of the event organising to publish a story as a case-study of the application of that particular approach to impact. The impact networks need these case-studies because they also need to be able to build confidence in their funding sources of their work. This is why the term full-stack incubator is used: we’re working on all the organisational layers from the level of an individual participant, their hub, their region, to the impact networks and their funders.

Wada Network: Early Validation

We will soon be entering into our third year of organising events, and have grown successfully from our first experiments with just a handful of participants to over 1000 participants in a multi-hub hackathon programme. Our organising methodologies have been tried and tested, and the results are strong.

One strong success case, because it demonstrates one full and completed event, is our last completed event which took place in Accra, Ghana, in partnership with Wada, funded by Catalyst. Two interdisciplinary teams that formed are still working on their projects today, including learning technical skills and engaging local companies as partners. One team is building a participatory waste collection system, using a mobile-based chatbot to coordinate multiple roles and learning to write smart contracts for weight measurement verification. Another team is working on the transport system with a regionally-relevant business model, and has just secured a partnership with an electric bus company. The key here is that their projects are more than technical. They are purpose-led, because the teams were facilitated to work at a scale where their political will can effect tangible change. This makes them resilient, and that’s an important ingredient to retain developers.

A second strong result is how our software has scaled to support over 15 hubs organising their own events within the same network. This programme has not yet finished, but the fact that our system design is being implemented to support this level of network activation is already a huge success.

These two results show two sides of the same equation: on one side, the very immersive experience of a single event; on the other side, the technical architecture to enable local hubs to communicate work on-the-ground, whilst coordinating as one whole network. At the core of all our work are frameworks, patterns, and protocols that we use to bridge social and technological innovation within participatory, in-person events. With this core capability proven-out, we’re now ready to apply both sides of the equation at the same time to work on one whole network as a full-stack distributed incubator.

Launching a Full-stack Distributed Incubator

This proposal is being made to resource the work of connecting the different pieces of the puzzle and organising a series of resourced events, with one network, dedicated to this aim. The conditions that make this a very strong and timely opportunity are the preparatory work with Wada, the close partnership with Regenesis, and how the two can work together, which will be detailed now.

As mentioned in the category questions, Regenesis is web2 and Wada is web3. We would frame this programme as the formalisation of partnership and an opportunity to weave these two networks together, first setting up the incubator infrastructure in Wada, whilst onboarding Regenesis to web3, and setting the foundation to then carry out the same work with Regenesis immediately after.