Proposal “dash-incubator-rion-2025“ (Active)Back
| Title: | Dash Incubator Rion 2025 |
| Owner: | rion |
| Monthly amount: | 300 DASH (6837 USD) |
| Completed payments: | 7 totaling in 2100 DASH (5 month remaining) |
| Payment start/end: | 2025-01-07 / 2025-12-31 (added on 2025-01-08) |
| Votes: | 622 Yes / 201 No / 109 Abstain |
| Will be funded: | Yes |
|
Manually vote on this proposal (DashCore - Tools - Debugconsole): gobject vote-many c24be3cbc6581372c788527c2071f6a5177581cee6087e214dcb9cc3a997de2e funding yes Please login or create a new DashCentral account for comfortable one button voting! | |
Proposal description
Dash Incubator Rion 2025
Proposal to fund the Dash Incubator reserve administered by Rion Gull, Dash Incubator Lead Strategist.
I'm requesting 300 DASH/month (down from 450 DASH/month). Like last quarter, this will be Incubator's only proposal. Unlike my previous proposal, which had a 3-month proposal duration, this proposal has a 12-month duration. The rationale for this change is explained below.
Incubator Updates
In my last proposal I provided an important update regarding our Incubator strategy (see my 2024 Q4 proposal for details). In summary, starting last quarter, each strategist would continue in their roles until their reserves were used and if they wished to continue working for Dash they would submit their own proposals independent from the Incubator. Up until now, only Mikhail/pshenmic has done this; no others have submitted independent proposals so far.
Current strategist reserves as of August 17, 2025 are:
Rion: 155 DASH Ash: 102 DASH Mikhail, Tim, Jojobyte: 0 DASH
Mikhail, Tim, and Jojobyte have depleted their reserves, but remain as strategists for potential future voting or reactivation. Ash still has a reserve, but I am effectively the only active strategist in the Incubator right now.
As noted in our April 17th Incubator Weekly episode, my main priority is to help Matt and Mikhail work together to make the JS SDK as reliable, performant, and good to work with as possible. Aside from development, I continue to pursue developer relations, research, and technical marketing efforts so that when the SDK is ready we have an effective plan to market it to developers and investors.
I've kept the rest of the proposal text below unchanged, as it's still informative and largely accurate regarding my future plans when we have a stable JS SDK to work with.
Future Plans
It appears now that DCG's existing SDK will receive a major re-design and re-implementation. AJ's prior proposal to add platform support to our/his Dash tooling didn't pass, but it was very close, even reaching the 10% passing criteria just after the voting deadline. Because it received significant community support he has put up another proposal to give MNOs another opportunity to fund it (or not).
As stated last quarter, my main goal with Incubator moving forward (if funded) is to focus on outreach, primarily to developers, but also to a wider audience. I will introduce developers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners to Dash and Dash Platform and help them submit independent proposals if they need funding for development or integration.
We now have a web application that simplifies this process by allowing people to submit new proposals from a website rather than needing to sync a full node and deal with tricky console commands. We need to simplify the proposal creation process further by adding support for in-app proposal content, hosted on Dash Platform and using DashPay usernames for auth.
I'm convinced that Dash will be better off if we can increase the number of people and orgs creating independent proposals and competing to add value in the Dash economy. I'd like to focus exclusively on achieving that goal throughout this year. Rather than scaling up internally in the Incubator, it's now clear to me that it's better to help people become independent and fully accountable directly to the MNOs. That maximizes the value they deliver and experience they get. I'm also convinced that without help from someone with experience in Dash, we will miss out on what might be our most valuable contributors. So that's my focus now - find people and give them the initial help they need to navigate all things Dash, including initial funding, experience using Dash tech, introductions to people in the Dash community, help with proposal creation, etc.
With this 12-month proposal I'm committing to a modest budget that's enough to work with, has some upside for scaling if and only if Dash's purchasing power increases, and is predictable for the DAO over a longer term. MNOs can always fund or defund any given month of the 12-month duration. Of course I hope to earn your support each month.
Feel free to ask any questions you might have. I'm happy to answer and expound on anything.
Thank you for your support!
Rion
Proposal to fund the Dash Incubator reserve administered by Rion Gull, Dash Incubator Lead Strategist.
I'm requesting 300 DASH/month (down from 450 DASH/month). Like last quarter, this will be Incubator's only proposal. Unlike my previous proposal, which had a 3-month proposal duration, this proposal has a 12-month duration. The rationale for this change is explained below.
Incubator Updates
In my last proposal I provided an important update regarding our Incubator strategy (see my 2024 Q4 proposal for details). In summary, starting last quarter, each strategist would continue in their roles until their reserves were used and if they wished to continue working for Dash they would submit their own proposals independent from the Incubator. Up until now, only Mikhail/pshenmic has done this; no others have submitted independent proposals so far.
Current strategist reserves as of August 17, 2025 are:
Mikhail, Tim, and Jojobyte have depleted their reserves, but remain as strategists for potential future voting or reactivation. Ash still has a reserve, but I am effectively the only active strategist in the Incubator right now.
As noted in our April 17th Incubator Weekly episode, my main priority is to help Matt and Mikhail work together to make the JS SDK as reliable, performant, and good to work with as possible. Aside from development, I continue to pursue developer relations, research, and technical marketing efforts so that when the SDK is ready we have an effective plan to market it to developers and investors.
I've kept the rest of the proposal text below unchanged, as it's still informative and largely accurate regarding my future plans when we have a stable JS SDK to work with.
Future Plans
It appears now that DCG's existing SDK will receive a major re-design and re-implementation. AJ's prior proposal to add platform support to our/his Dash tooling didn't pass, but it was very close, even reaching the 10% passing criteria just after the voting deadline. Because it received significant community support he has put up another proposal to give MNOs another opportunity to fund it (or not).
As stated last quarter, my main goal with Incubator moving forward (if funded) is to focus on outreach, primarily to developers, but also to a wider audience. I will introduce developers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners to Dash and Dash Platform and help them submit independent proposals if they need funding for development or integration.
We now have a web application that simplifies this process by allowing people to submit new proposals from a website rather than needing to sync a full node and deal with tricky console commands. We need to simplify the proposal creation process further by adding support for in-app proposal content, hosted on Dash Platform and using DashPay usernames for auth.
I'm convinced that Dash will be better off if we can increase the number of people and orgs creating independent proposals and competing to add value in the Dash economy. I'd like to focus exclusively on achieving that goal throughout this year. Rather than scaling up internally in the Incubator, it's now clear to me that it's better to help people become independent and fully accountable directly to the MNOs. That maximizes the value they deliver and experience they get. I'm also convinced that without help from someone with experience in Dash, we will miss out on what might be our most valuable contributors. So that's my focus now - find people and give them the initial help they need to navigate all things Dash, including initial funding, experience using Dash tech, introductions to people in the Dash community, help with proposal creation, etc.
With this 12-month proposal I'm committing to a modest budget that's enough to work with, has some upside for scaling if and only if Dash's purchasing power increases, and is predictable for the DAO over a longer term. MNOs can always fund or defund any given month of the 12-month duration. Of course I hope to earn your support each month.
Feel free to ask any questions you might have. I'm happy to answer and expound on anything.
Thank you for your support!
Rion
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BACKGROUND
When I submitted my 2025 proposal at the beginning of the year my plan was the following:
> My main priority is to help Matt and Mikhail work together to make the JS SDK as reliable, performant, and good to work with as possible. Aside from development, I continue to pursue developer relations, research, and technical marketing efforts so that when the SDK is ready we have an effective plan to market it to developers and investors.
Purchasing power at the time of the proposal submission was around 40 USD/DASH, enough to cover 1-2 US-based full time contributors. That dropped significantly right after submission, and has since averaged closer to 20 USD/DASH, enough for 1 part time contributor.
The rationale for the 12-month duration was that if the price recovered then we'd be able to afford to pay more contributors with that income, but if it dropped then the DAO wouldn't be able to afford more, so there would be no need to increase the request. In that case, I'd be able to at least "keep the lights on", continue developer relations and market research, and help individuals submit modest independent proposals for anything beyond the minimum so that MNOs could decide what to fund.
JS SDK
Our first trial of an Incubator-sourced independent proposal was Anthony Campolo's (ajcwebdev's) Autoshow proposal. The value proposition was to test the JS SDK and build good will in the web2 space by helping to fund an open source project from someone with connections and influence with prominent JS developers. That way, when the JS SDK was ready I'd be able to more effectively promote it to influential JS devs. I still consider this worth pursuing, even if his original proposal closes out with only 2 of the 6 requested payments (by passing the final one this month).
Regarding the JS SDK's readiness to promote, DCG's SDK is showing signs of promise, but it needs to be packaged into an NPM library and have good DX and API abstractions before I can promote it to my target JS devs. Mikhail's SDK is on NPM, but it lacks required features (as does DCG's). What we need is a senior developer well-versed in both Rust and JS to get this JS SDK across the finish line. Incubator contributor, Matt (@ricochet1k) would be ideal for this, but with limited funds it's difficult to attract and maintain such a developer.
UPDATE
My challenge recently has been figuring out how to fund Matt or another (expensive) senior dev to work with Sam (and/or Mikhail) to finish up the SDK work. The only solution was for me to find primary income outside of Dash (and crypto in general) to support my personal/family's income needs, which I've done. It took time last month, but now I can use most of Incubator's 300 DASH/month to first fund the SDK to completion, and then fund bounties to introduce it to my target JS devs.
With that background, if MNOs continue to fund the Incubator proposal you can now expect it to go primarily to Matt or any other dev that Sam or Mikhail might find valuable to help them with their SDK efforts, potentially including community volunteers like @Darwin or others qualified to help. After that, I will promote it to the JS devs I think will help grow our Platform user base, based on my market research and adoption strategy. With this change I am also now able to sign up to send part of my upcoming outside paychecks to buy Dash through Spritz, instead of selling through Spritz.
Happy to answer any questions and am interested in your feedback about this update.
- Rion
I see next to nothing to show for and only 47 Dash reserve for Rion as of July 17th.
Totally unacceptable!
We covered this proposal (and several others) on today's Incubator Weekly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW0A_MbZ0GY
(refer to the timestamps in the video for the specific chapters)
Other than the reserves section (which was updated today), I've kept the original proposal text unchanged, but the main update from the video is that Matt and I are still working on the native JS SDK. It's my main priority to have Matt and Mikhail work together to make the JS SDK as reliable, performant, and good to work with as possible. Aside from development, I continue to pursue developer relations, research, and technical marketing efforts so that when the SDK is ready we have an effective plan to market it to developers and investors.
https://mnowatch.org/votethenumbers/votethenumbers3/calc3.php?proposals%5B%5D=dash-incubator-rion-2025
Remember at the end of the cycle to POSE_BANNED your masternodes, this increase your voting power by 10%
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/bug-report-should-the-votes-of-a-former-masternode-that-just-keeps-his-collateral-be-counted.53370/#post-236487
https://mnowatch.org/the_results_dashd_2025-02-08-17-29-35.html?0=HelpElecAllo
too early HelpElecAllo, you should do it at the end of the cycle.
https://mnowatch.org/latestlink_theresultsdashd.html?0=POSE_BANNED
https://mnowatch.org/the_results_dashd_2025-02-08-17-29-35.html?0=75aa332d4023b710458b114a5fa7b48a092a3f61a76ccb5e743234d9b3895c45
So this proposal is in danger to fail because of a bug.
pathetic Dash protocol, and pathetic DCG developers!
Since 2023 I have propose a solution, but the DCG developers refuse to implement it.
The electorate should be defined as "all the ENABLED masternodes in addition to the POSE_BANNED masternodes that casted at least one vote in any proposal".
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/bug-report-should-the-votes-of-a-former-masternode-that-just-keeps-his-collateral-be-counted.53370/#post-236501
Incubator Weekly tasks are per show. Sometimes we miss a week, in which case we don't claim the reward.
https://mnowatch.org/votethenumbers/votethenumbers3/calc3.php?proposals%5B%5D=dash-incubator-rion-2025
70.74 % votes YES for this proposal
16.23 % was the participation.
But still the proposal fails because the polarized Net votes system of Dash, requires 8.49 % of the eletorate while it should require only 0.0001% (more yes than no, this applies to all election systems !!!!)
Let me clarify what I mean here.
I mean that when a proposal reach 8% participation, it is eligible in case it has more Yes than No.
Watch this video, look at the curve, and stop beeing stupid!
Adaptive Quorum Biasing (AQB) and Minimum Approval
In order to determine if a proposal is passing, we use positive turnout bias. The approval threshold follows the formula:
thrs=1/(1+√turnout) where turnout∈[0,1] and thrs∈[0,1]
In addition we enforce a minimum turnout of 5%.
The goal of AQB is to ensure proposals can be approved even if turnout is low. Especially noncontroversial proposals may suffer from low turnout as they fail to mobilize the crowd. However, low turnout should require a higher approval rate to pass.
AQB
The blue trace depicts a possible turnout over time. It can be expected that the initiators of a proposal will immediately vote Aye, leading to very high approval at start. Nevertheless, as long as less than 5% of the elecorate have cast their vote, the proposal is in failing state. Over time, more people will make up their mind and the proposal may flip between passing and failing state several times before eventually staying in the passing state for the confirmation period. The end of the confirmation period is depicted by the blue dot.
Tutorial
HEY, DASH COMMUNITY, ARE YOU NUTS?
(answer: yes we are....)
Any logical person around?
100% net votes leads to 100% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
75% net votes leads to 87.5% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
50% net votes leads to 75% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
20% net votes leads to 60% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
10% net votes leads to 55% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
7.5% net votes leads to 53% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
5% net votes leads to 52.5% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
0% net votes leads to 50% required YES to approve, if all the electorate votes.
In Encointer, we selected 5%.
Yes, we need this, it would definitely be beneficial for Dash! I support the idea.
What I'm having difficulties with is the amount asked. You call it a modest budget. At today's price (~$36) it's over 10,000 USD per month. You need that much money to do outreach?
Outreach is most effective when I can offer money (Dash) for doing work. We have stiff competition for developer attention with VCs throwing money at companies which throw money at devs. The best devs rarely work for free, and our Dash products simply aren't mature enough for entrepreneurs (who do work "for free" in a sense) to gamble their ventures on Dash tech without some kind of additional financial incentive.
Overall, I think you do good work in promoting Dash and platforming community members on your youtube show, the most recent example with August helped get across his ideas and that was useful, so I like that. I like the focus on bringing in new devs to the Dash ecosystem, but certainly that has been the focus for the past 12 months and while we did see some new faces, few stuck around. I think we need to address that and find out what happened to them? Were they not a good fit? Not enough work? Names that come to mind are, Anthony and Niles, but there were many others.
I think this proposal asks for a lot for what I think you do, but I assume you save most of it until you find a new dev to incubate, in that case I am voting YES. However, since the proposal is for 12 months, I may in the future change that vote and will comment again if I decide to do that.
As Dash's purchasing power rises, this proposal's funds and the treasury in general will be able to support more work from the devs I've found (and will find). Anthony, Niles, and others would love to continue working with Dash, but they will be more cost effective with better SDKs (from AJ, DCG, or ideally both).