It will require 3% of total NEM Blockchain importance projected at YES address, and a 65% majority in favor.
I actually was mistaken earlier when mentioning the 2%.
Not sure @CarbonClick it was there when I posted the link up and then someone mentioned the page wasnāt available so I took it down again.
I think we should let the NEM fund die. NEM should open source and not move to create any more legal entities. Let the foundation govern as it has but move towards autonomy instead of away from it.
Also I read how people switched to NEM because of its community fund - that is ridiculous. If McDonalds is giving out free hamburgers I might switch from Burger King for the day. Most projects proposed are by young entrepreneurs with little experience. Which is fine and I admire the ambition but the reality is 99% of those projects that got NEM funding will fail. My point is I think a community fund is not what NEM needs to excel and grow. We need more transparency and open-sourceness and community contributions instead of the community taking. I say veto this proposal.
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I do see the logic, if it was a proposal to run a pure VC with only profit as the goal, however it is realise other benefits for the community and solve problems that are causing with the NCF right now while also making profit. This is because the traditional VC profits available likely pale in comparison to the profits that can be made if we drive XEM adoption and resulting price growth through targeted and managed investments.
As was noted by an earlier poster, the fund is currently not that big so attracting the types of profile mentioned is likely to be hard or impossible from the initial conversations we have been having, they are also primarily motivated by pure profit which is not the solution we are proposing.
If XEM hits dollar figures again, the main NCF funds will still be there, this is only about managing approx 1/3 of them as Nembit noted. Assuming the price increase happens - the NCF will already be held in a legal trust so could be invested with a pure VC if that is what the trustees decide in conjunction with the community. However, to do so, there would be a need to incorporate the funds as an entity, which this proposal is covering, so it will actually facilitate that where it is not possible right now.
The flip side is that if the NCF continues as it is - funding for free, the tokens that were distributed would also represent 10s or 100s of millions of dollars if price increases - if they are invested into companies that the fund receives profit share from, the fund benefits as well so compounds the price growth with extra profit.
The two approaches arenāt mutually exclusive, this proposal is a good approach to fix the current issues, help drive NEM adoption via viable projects, contribute to the ecosystem and contribute to XEM growth while benefiting from profit share while helping projects succeed. If the fund grows exponentially due to price change, it will not be under Ventures management it will be under a trust - mandates can change and solutions can change in response to those market factors.
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Thanks Mark. Killing the fund off completely would be another option which would also solve the current issues. However, other technologies exist with funding vehicles so we may find viable projects look to those since the founders still ultimately need help to get going in many cases.
The open source side is close to our own hearts and is why we have included it in the core principles, if projects are taking investment and prepared to open source, we recognise that as a non-financial return for investment and reward it accordingly, we also expect the community will get behind them more as well and we will make plenty of noise to draw attention to those that do.
I completely agree with you that selecting a technology just because a funding mechanism is available is ridiculous, it also makes it likely that they may switch away if another mechanism offers them more elsewhere later. It is, however, appropriate that is is one of the factors in making a business decision to select a solution. Our intended approach is to make it a condition of the investment that it is built on and stays on NEM (unless there is a specific justifiable technical reason why its no longer possible) and part of the screening process will be to thoroughly assess the tech solution being proposed to ensure it is both possible and viable.
Obviously we have a bit of disconnect on the best way to achieve it, but I think we share a lot of common ground in the middle. Your project(s) have done great work open sourcing solutions which are being built on right now, we would like to encourage investments to adopt a similar approach wherever we can.
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hi everyone 
its Nelson here one of the Council Member
our job is to check and make sure everyone is working towards a harmonious pathā¦
i chat with David the other day and checked his references, its confirmed he is a high calibre professionalā¦ iāll get in touch with Kailin so we get to knownthe other team member as well.
I will update this post as I check the other team members tooā¦
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Thanks Nelson! Iāll admit it came as a bit of a surprise as someone who has been talking to projects and mentioning our NCF to potential projects who want to onboard with us.
I agree with a poster above that a venture of this magnitude needs some more time and scrutiny before being voted on, we are all very busy with our other duties and communication lines need to stay open.
Cheers.
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Of course you decide this decision by community voting?
Those who can not read English can not translate documents that can not be copied even if they are uploaded.Are not you thinking about anything?
Please broaden your horizons.
This proposal will be dismissed.
Hi Kailin,
Sorry it took me so long to reply, this is a very involved discussion and weāre all super busy. It does feel a bit rushed. i think that having the developers play a role in vetting appointments of trustees is an excellent idea. I believe that the queen of england plays a similar role in british politics. I may be off in the details here but I think that she has to vet all appointments to office by the prime minister. in this case it would be appointments to trustees. Devs dont need to be concerned with appointments, but all appointments must be agreeable to them. While not real power, it serves as a strong deterrent and leaves final decision with persons who should generally have few other incentives apart from the benefit of the nation or the chain. Devs wouldnāt have to be involved in regular politics, but they could provide a final layer of safety in the case of a hostile takeover.
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I think that you are mixing up two points very often in the justification for this project. You do not need to take 33% of the nem fund to establish a legal entity that is able to handle equity. That is one issue, and handling the nem funds directly is another.
I disagree with you completely here. Projects need the money to get started. Right now every single crypto fund that I know is only interested in flipping tokens, and I know a good few. Maybe this is peculiar to China, but I doubt it. If you want to get crypto funding at the start you need to give discounts of up to 900%. This is what killed the industry this year.
On the other hand, you can approach any chain to get funding, WAN, EOS, IOTA, STRAT, Ethereum Alliance, NEO, QTUM, DASH and many more, and they will not make these ridiculous requests for discounts of you. Successful projects then will benefit the whole ecosystem, rather than further destroy our reputation but even these funds generally require you to distribute tokens for them to flip, even if your project doesnāt need them. One could approach traditional funds also, but with chain funds, projects based on those chains meet quite directly their fundsā investment criteria and so it makes sense to start with them and approach others as the project grows.
Most of these chains do not have a DAO but instead take equity and/or tokens and have incubators and connections to other investors to further improve their investments. Our project for example can develop much faster and better on NEM because of all the features already implemented, it saves us time. We are not very worried about the incubation aspects because we have our own connections in this area. If NEM did not offer funding/grants, we would chose another chain since the added development time will be more than paid for by the grant they would give us. We have already been in discussions with our second and third choices. Itās very easy to get around the BurgerKing/Mac Donalds issue that you described by writing strong contracts. Itās not that big of an issue. It is a competitive landscape and you need incentives to attract the best projects. Why would any good project go to NEM with no fund when any other chain would give them 200-500k AND offer incubators services thrown in.
Added to this, it has been shown in most (all?) of the DAOās so far (EOS, DASH, ETH etc) that the decentralised model is seriously lacking. Itās a nice idea but you really need to have professional and dedicated people making decisions, not netziens. Populism, rule by mob, lack of incentivisation are reasons that no country in the world has a pure democracy, they would quickly be overrun by bad actors, the current systems we have are the survivors. Blockchain and the DAO doesnāt solve these problems, it exacerbates them since even fewer people are involved in decision making than would be in a pure democracy.
There is a strong case for creating a system such as proposed by NEM Ventures but it is a huge decision that needs to be reviewed very carefully. Personally, I donāt see any great reason to have them take 1/3 of the fund in one go. They can apply for enough funding to run the office and that would solve pretty much all of the issues. Half a million annually should be more than enough to run the office and run the odd stealthy startup that needs it.They could present their research to the community during community votes and keep it decentralised but with a lot more (and public) due diligence.
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Maybe the fund could concentrate more on school and kids projects.
This indeed would be a worthy cause an an interesting endevour.
Also the fund seem at present to be targeted in SEA when in fact have we any Russian projects?
Japanese Projects, Korean, Chinese, Indianā¦ the list goes onā¦
Cheers
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Hi Dan,
Absolutely agree we should have a focus on the younger generation. This was partly covered in the previous guidelines update, with the inclusion of a smaller grant system and lower tiers of funding, with some not requiring community vote so as to lower the barrier to entry. This is intended to allow smaller projects, which could include school projects either by teachers or students. We have continued the lower tier grant system in Nem Ventures and expanded on it in the new proposal, introducing initiatives like scholarships and research funding, so we have covered a wide array of possibilities.
Projects being mainly focused in SEA are for two main reasons. The first is that the foundation has quite a strong presence in SEA/ANZ and is doing a great job of promoting nem and the possibility of getting funding from NCF. The second is that the NCF is not a legal entity, so OECD countries are restricted because of stricter AML laws.
WRT jurisdictions, because the Nem Ventures team are much more centered around Europe, and the new entity will resolve the AML issues, its likely we should see a large uptic in projects based in areas other than SEA.
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Correct by public vote @GodTanu
I made a mistake with GDocs - I checked I could translate it into Spanish, which half of my family speaks so I could check it, I hadnāt checked it on incognito and the option is greyed out now that I check.
It has now been published which allows it to be run through Google translate, the URL for the Publish is below, Iāve run it through a few languages and it should be possible to use the drop down on any of them to change the language (I donāt speak them all so canāt be sure how it translates):
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Thanks @corporal_clegg - it wasnāt my intention to cross the wires there, they do both provide separate benefits which is why they are both discussed:
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We need a legal entity around the funds to sort out challenge with the origin of funds, including for funding NEM Ventures, so we are proposing to sort that issue out once and for all given it needs to be done for NEM Ventures and provides an enduring benefit to the community.
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A mandate is being sought to create the investment vehicle to take equity positions but does not put the entire fund under the management of the same vehicle, separating the concerns provides transparency and governance barriers to for example the entire fund being invested by NEM Ventures, it intentionally limits the scope. It should be noted that 33% is in terms of current $ value, not tokens, should the NCF explode with XEM growth, the extra $'s are returned to the NCF not held in NEM Ventures
You are quite right - point 1 would be enough to take an equity position, but would be a risk of potentially controlling 100% of the funds in the process, which we are not suggesting, so it is simpler and more transparent to separate the two is our thinking - both for ourselves and for anyone that comes into the organisation ongoing.
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Just a quick correction - we are not proposing the $10m investment budget in one go, it will be dispersed in 4 tranches subject to milestones, as will the operating budget, if at any stage the trustees (representing the community) feel it is going the wrong way the funding can be stopped or delayed.
There is currently approx $2m of proposals in the NCF backlog, its unlikely all will be funded but until they can be reviewed we donāt know what proportion will be - partly why the funded is tranched in $2.5m as you suggest, we have also factored in a business plan rework in Q3 in collaboration with the trustees specifically to deal with any over/under estimation.
At this stage it is hard to know exactly how much the governance and audit costs will be to take the anonymous funds and place them into a legal trust, the costings are estimates from discussion with a couple of suppliers but they canāt formally quote until a legal entity can request it which is part of the Q1 work.
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what will yourself and the other founders be paid? is there a transparent cap on this?
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Thatās an interesting take on it. You propose 1/3 so as not to be in control of the entire fund. What is to become of the remaining 66% then? I think that you would get a lot more mileage out of funds under management than are currently gotten out of community voting and I reiterate that I think itās a great idea but the founders trustees etc need to be shackled by design also and this should be crystal clear. A system of checks and balances needs to be in place. I did notice some of these in the proposal but I think this detail should be extracted, clarified and brought into an open discussion for refining and the burden of proof is on you. i think people would find the proposal easier to accept also if it was very clear, without having to study the proposal what you can and canāt do, and what systems are in place to prevent abuse/misuse of power, for example, payment of staff could be equal and handled by smart contract for all to see.
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Hi All,
Iāve continued thinking alot about this proposal and have some questions/points to make:
- Firstly, Iād like to propose an alternative to the VC fund proposal. I propose we tweak it and instead create a virtual incubator. The incubator is designed to standardise the process for evaluating proposals ensuring all pass through the same set of gates towards NCF funding while increasing the chances of success for selected projects and increasing the value to NEM. The incubator would fund businesses to start/accelerate their business using NEM. Initially with a small, equity free starter grant (say 20k-50k) depending on how far along they are. They would be enrolled in the virtual incubator, assigned mentors/advisors and specific tasks they need to complete, like defining the problem, opportunity, solution, āWhy blockchainā, business model, product/market fit, financial modelling, etc. Once they pass through the necessary gates/milestones, they may unlock some additional incubator-granted funding (say up to 200k) and at some point, the incubator takes an equity stake (weād utilise the existing legal entities created for the VC fund).
The goal here is to to make business ideas NCF investment ready (note: This would take the business closer to investment ready in the ārealā world). These businesses would also get āIncubator Certifiedā and can then go on and request further money from the NCF fund in a standardised way via public vote (as today). As the business grows beyond the incubator, there would also be a programme to ensure the business has support to succeed. Note, this model covers both an initial allocation (say 5-10 million) and the remaining NCF funds. I genuinely think this model will better achieve what the VC fund is trying to accomplish. I know of several very experienced people I could approach to run or help start/run this incubator and/or explore the idea further. It could be run in a fairly decentralised manner, and we could stay quite true to the DAO.
Should the idea above not proceed and we continue down the VC path, I also propose:
- As mentioned by several people already, this is being rushed and vote should be delayed. 10 days is not enough to review a proposal of this scope. I propose adding at least another 10 days and a requirement of publishing:
- Summary of proposed changes on NEM blog & Medium/Steemit & reinstatement of https://medium.com/nemofficial/attention-to-pending-candidates-for-nem-community-fund-ncf-8072421cab2b <- still donāt know why this was deleted?!
- video interview of @DaveH, @kodtycoon & @Bwanamakubwa by an independent person representing all NEM tokenholders. They should each answer several succinct questions posted by NEM community members ahead of time.
- Clear endorsements by several key (suggest 3-5) NEM foundation/committee members elaborating why this proposal is being endorsed, fast tracked and pushed ahead outside the boundaries defined by the existing NCF.
- To remove any doubt whether the proposers (@DaveH, @kodtycoon & @Bwanamakubwa) have the best interests of NEM in mind, I propose that they remove themselves as executors and instead submit their CVās into a pool of candidates for the vacant positions. A special exemption would be made by the NCF to pay a recruitment agency (with global reach) to find suitable candidates for running the fund. The NEM community should be able to propose candidates as well. From the pool of candidates, the NEM Committee, in a transparent way, chooses who will run the fund.
Again, as per my previous statements and as a business with an active proposal, we support change, we support equity stakes but bottom line, I still have a feeling deep down that the current proposal is not ideal. I hope the suggestions above are received well and as constructive feedback. Iām passionate about the success of NEM and am committed to see the NCF succeed, even if CarbonClick is not funded.
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The simple fact is that many companies now building on NEM wouldnāt have done so without the Community fund as a way to justify the expenditure. You have to understand that many C-Level people still donāt see the value in Blockchain and see it as expenditure that could be better used elsewhere while continuing down the same monolithic database routes.
The community fund for us lowered the barriers required in order to push forward with our blockchain project, otherwise it would most probably have been pushed back in favour of other projects we need to complete in the pipeline to a few years down the line - a few years is a LONG time when you are a start up.
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