Discussion - CPS Venture Capital Fund

Contribution Proposals
#1

Hi All -

I wanted to open a discussion around creating a Venture Capital style program for CPS.

We have a robust and decentralized grant system on ICON, but few pipelines to recruit teams from outside the ecosystem. For this reason, I believe CPS would benefit from a team that can actively go out and recruit builders and market success stories to the wider blockchain community.

A potential structure for this project / organization:

  • Associate (2): Searches for development teams, fields pitches and builds recruitment pipelines through their personal network, social media platforms and dev ecosystems.

  • Analyst (1): Helps teams curate their proposal before applying to CPS. Researches potential use cases and develops strategies to attract talent to build them.

  • Marketer (1): Creates media around successful CPS projects and runs ad campaigns.

  • Incentive Program: [EDITED] Referring community members receive a 2% reward for successfully completed CPS projects. This will incentivize all ICONists to recruit and onboard projects themselves.

A potential recruitment pipeline:

  • Team organizes a Hackathon (in-person or virtual), partnering with Universities, Blockchain Clubs and CS departments.

  • Team schedules Min Kim, TJ and a celebrity Crypto Influencer to judge projects.

  • Winning teams get $7.5K, runners up $2.5K.

  • Associates then reach out to teams and try to get them to build out their project longterm. Analysts help prepare them for CPS grant process since there’s a bit of a learning curve. Marketer documents the event and blasts it on socials.

  • Ideal outcome: cement ICON and CPS as a path to building on Web3 for university programs that are consistently pumping out new builders and entrepreneurs.

To recap, I believe we should consider:

  1. Creating a CPS Venture Capital Fund to scout teams and recruit builders onto ICON

  2. Offering a 2% reward to ICONists that have referred a successful CPS project

This is just an early concept for what a VC style CPS fund could be. I am interested in creating a CPS proposal to test pilot the idea. If successful, we can bring it to the Foundation to potentially incorporate it into the longterm CPS infrastructure.

#2

Great idea, I believe this element of sourcing talent is required!

2 Likes
#3

Love the detail. This is a must for the CPS!

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#4

Thanks for writing this up @maxicongrowth. Want to add one thing:

This actually already exists, and is much higher than you were proposing. P-Reps actually receive 20% return on their sponsor bond, which is partly why I wanted to change the UX to P-Reps competing to sponsor projects.

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To be fair, this isn’t very obvious to P-Reps unless you read the CPS Yellow Paper so that is my fault. I’ll try to add this to the Sponsor section for the next upgrade.

3 Likes
#5

Overall this sounds like a great direction. I’d be happy to help out as this takes more shape

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#6

Thank you for pointing this out TJ.

What do you thinking about creating a 1-2% reward parameter for any referring member of the ICON community that helps bring a succesful project to CPS.

That way we encourage active recruitment for CPS throughout the entire ICON ecosystem rather than just P-Reps.

#7

This (the referral system) unfortunately can be abused because wallets are anonymous so anyone can just refer their own project to get a cut of it.

#8

Good point. A generalized finder’s fee might be difficult to accomplish in a fully decentralized way.

#9

Yep I agree - people respond to incentives and I’ve been working to find the best way to incentivize both P-Reps and the community to bring external developers to our blockchain.

I’ve briefly explored an affiliate program, similar to what you mentioned:

I think what @GeoDude is correct, that due to the decentralized nature of the CPS and anonymous wallets it’s hard to prevent abuse of this system.

One interesting question would be if this 1%-2% is worth it to incentivize the marketing towards new development teams, even if it means some projects will choose to abuse this feature. Could still be a net-positive incentive.

#10

One interesting question would be if this 1%-2% is worth it to incentivize the marketing towards new development teams, even if it means some projects will choose to abuse this feature. Could still be a net-positive incentive.

In my opinion it is well worth it. Especially if the referrer is required to be vetted in some way.

I see a feature like this as a huge opportunity for your average ICONist who want contribute beyond Tweeting about the project. It provides a tangible reward and motivation to go to other blockchain ecosystems and recruit teams to build on ICON.

With the launch of BTP, the heavy lifting of marketing will ideally be decentralized through the community. This feature helps incentivize crowd-sourced growth.

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