I notice people online saying there are instances of bad actors initiating projects with the Neuron Fund’s participation. The concern is that once the project launches, the ICP is drained from the liquidity and taken out of the project. While I know this can happen with a community-driven project or one that has participation from the Neuron Fund, the general idea that’s floating around is people are worried the Neuron Fund will and has been taken advantage of by projects that are either not of much importance, lack utility, or seems like silly projects that seem to siphon the available ICP from the Neuron Fund. I believe that to protect future projects from having access to have Neuron Fund participation, there should be other barriers the developer(s) must go through to have the Neuron Fund participation. I don’t know the current state of checks and balances that go into the decision to let the Neuron Fund participate, but I want to take a step toward bolstering a stricter set of barriers to ward off bad actors.
This is just a rough idea, ALL feedback is welcome, I’d love to hear thoughts from developers and governance personnel to try to get this idea into a proposal. I think it would greatly benefit not only the people who stake their ICP that contribute to the Neuron Fund but also retain more ICP to deploy to projects by limiting the number of projects by these potential mechanisms of due diligence, transparency, authenticity, and community acceptance. The idea is as follows:
In order to have the Neuron Fund participate in future launchpad projects, on top of the framework that is already in effect, additionally, all of the following criteria must be met.
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To increase security in the ecosystem and ICP contributed to the NF from participants, all projects that go to the launchpad should have transparency for all investors and community onlookers. This would entail that the developer(s) launching the project on the launchpad should link their personal social media platforms to the proposal for full transparency. Developer(s)’ socials may be linked in the project’s social media site and displayed where it is easily accessible for anyone who inquires. This will be to bolster trust and transparency.
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Developer(s) and/or majority contributors to a project must be authenticated through a proof-of-humanity mechanism. This could be through another current IC project or some that may arise in the future and be verified by dfinity as legitimate.
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Developer(s) must have a plan in the framework to allow liquidity to be provided upon successful launch of said project, but the caveat is all of the Neuron Fund’s ICP that is allocated to participating, be locked (staked) and not available to be drained upon token launch. This will ensure the ICP from the NF is protected from participants rugging from the community ICP pool, but instead, they would just rug each other instead.
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Project MUST have one or more of the following:
a) A dedicated number of tokens locked in treasury (not from the Neuron Fund)
b) Wallets that hold and/or control transactions in and out of developer wallets be easily labeled so that even a newbie can understand what they’re reading (ie, not just principle ID wallet, or long string of characters as the name of the wallet) and be displayed outright upon launch on the homepage of the projects site.
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The project MUST be a utility or RWA project meant to boost the IC and utilize the capabilities of the blockchain. Meme coins WITHOUT utility will not qualify.
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For Neuron Fund participation, developer(s) of the project must create a video, including narration from developers explaining the team involved with supporting links, as well as a graphical explanation of what the project would do for the IC, community, and/or blockchain. There are 2 sets of criteria:
a) 2-minute long video for ONLY COMMUNITY participated projects without the participation of the Neuron Fund (example: Alice)
b) 3-5 minute long video for projects that wish to have the Neuron Fund participation. The video must go into more depth and explain why this would be a positive addition to ICP and the blockchain, how it would leverage the blockchain’s technology to further development or onboard more users outside of ICP, and a roadmap for a minimum of 12 months.
Again, this is a rough idea or outline I’ve been chewing on for a couple of days, but I would love to put something like this up for a proposal. I don’t see many potential flaws in this line of thinking, but I’m more than open-minded and would love to know what could help in addition to these guidelines or why some of these guidelines might be a hindrance in any way. Thank you for your time if you made it to the end of this. It is very much appreciated.