ICPSWAP has hardly grown in the past few years. What are they using this money for?
1 Like
I get what you’re saying about the traditional world, but in crypto, three years is a really long time, especially for small projects. It’s like forever. Most crypto projects don’t have much time to prove themselves. Usually, if they don’t make an impact in a few months, they’re basically done. So I would keep that in mind.
2 Likes
I don’t really disagree with you although 3 months is a bit short for me to call a project dead.
We need to evaluate projects once per 3-6 months to see if they are trying to make things happen, or just sitting back and draining the treasury. If they are building and their community is growing, they should be supported.
I really think we need a dynamic fund (could be the repurposed NF or could be something else) where a well informed community votes on funds for current and future projects at regular intervals.
1 Like
I think those projects should apply for grants.
It is essentially what you are describing. Or just get loans like every other business does when in need.
1 Like
From another perspective, dedicated builders often need funding to keep operating; not every project can achieve sufficient revenue and returns in its early stages
SNS should adopt a milestone-based standard. In my view, the purpose of SNS is to support early teams that are diligently building and aiming for long-term development; it is not a reason for already self-sustaining projects to seek additional funding here.
Uniswap and OpenSea can generate sustainable revenue—but would they need SNS?
Looking at other chains, developers are largely interoperable and share Solidity, whereas on IC the uniqueness of the stack makes developers relatively scarce
Without SNS, new Uniswap- or OpenSea-level projects may struggle to emerge, and the ecosystem could remain quiet for a long time
Waterneuron held two additional sns sales to raise funds. So they are actually a real example of your solution.
The key point😂
The key point is waterneuron did exactly what you’re saying. That’s why they have that low of a treasury.
Anyways grants would solve most problems here not the use of the neuron fund to subsidize a project that can’t produce revenue.
Seems like you just want to argue about a project that used its treasury to raise more funds. Even though that’s what you suggested other projects do.
“SNS should adopt a milestone-based standard.” Correct this is what i have suggested early in April to SNS team and if i am elected for Voting neuron I will push this alongside other things
2 Likes
We all know for a fact nobody is generating enough revenue to sustain any project on IC, the ecosystem is dry as the Sahara desert, this was already unsustainable for the past 3 years and I don’t think DFINITY has enough money to bail you all out like they did with WTN, unless the millions of ICP printed go above $50.
I would suggest find your own market, no SNS has enough product-market-fit inside ICP (even DeFi if you do the math liquidity/fees), there is no high demand for any of our services, that’s just the truth.
I enjoy so much developing on ICP but damn, nobody cares unless you pay them to care.
2 Likes
They didn’t bail out wtn. Wtn didn’t need a cash infusion to survive like this topic is talking about.
We have chain fusion, there is no excuse…
Hey,
I have helped create an SNS project (https://www.kinic.io/) and also have raised VC capital in the past (1% of startups are every able to do this). Here is what I think…
SNS and more generally seed rounds should ask for what they need to make their project sustainable. What is the minimum amount we need to make what we are proposing be self sustained or in a high growth phase? Sometimes people ask for too much.. sometimes too little.
All SNS are in a race to make their token valuable before they run out of runway.. 
*The IC community should help here! Community videos, social media posts, using the product and giving feedback, voting etc, ARE SUPER IMPORTANT. If you have not tried Kinic, or XYZ sns project yet… do that now. Projects can also help each-other.
If the project never had a path to sustainability.. the community and core dev team failed at basic due diligence and planning.
Super basic example: Kinic needs 10k monthly users at $10/mo and or $10/Kinic token price to enter a growth phase. How do we get there? We need Google webAuthn login via II version 2. I have been asked 1000 times why registering is so weird 
Iterating on good product with user feedback. Make viral features. We are in a race to get KINC to $10 or above!
Post Seed
So let’s say SNS is the seed round in the ICP community — the project does well and attracts more people and investors. They could use their own token treasury.. one example is PE / VC / Private investor could make a vote to fund the KINIC treasury with 50k ICP for 50k KINIC tokens. The new neuron could be locked for vesting. This would also help to decentralize many projects as wealthy investors from outside of the ICP ecosystem would have skin-in-the-game in SNS DAO, and could vote. The DAO would still need to vote for grant funding.
*Sad truth. Most SNS projects have very low chance of attracting web3 VC or investors outside of our community; only 1% of all startups ever get funded that way. But some very rare ones will! 
Alternatively - they could go back to the community and use their token treasury as an SNS version 2.
What SNS success looks like?
- Success is then the token price with inflation (in the case of KINC 2.5%) cannot only sustain the SNS project — but also give it room to grow. i.e. locked dev tokens receiving voting reward.
- Demand for the token inside and outside of the community is sustainable and high. No dumps.. just organic buying and selling at decent volumes with high liquidity.
- Token burns.. to fight inflation.
- Re-supply of the ICP treasury.
- PMF should be super easy for anyone in the community to explain to anyone in any community.
- “I should have bought more KINIC at $1” - real world usage based FOMO.
We have a lot of first time founders for SNS..
”What happens in 6-9 months when most SNS projects run out of runway?”
Their projects die. This should be motivation to make sure your project does not die. Same with VC seed.. SNS rounds.. your personal money… if you were unable to make it sustainable within the funding timeframe.. that is it! Its philosophically the same question about aging and psychical time.
Founders pivot and think on their toes.. to steer the ship to make the product great. 
Founders don’t rug.. why the hell would you create something if you did not think it would have high impact on society? 1000x growth as a by-product.
Founders worry about how fast they can get into the growth phase. Not just about basic survival.. 
Founders should have the vision for their project.
We probably should just have all future SNS make basic pitch decks and let the community grill them.. this is before they write a single line of code
*I think a few of the projects mentioned are self-driving cars at this point ICPSwap as one example.
6 Likes
Ok we can call it strategic investment towards decentralization purposes
Yeah Chain fusion is pretty cool IMO, I participated in an ETH Global hackathon 2 weeks ago with a cross-chain atomic swap, burns a lot of cycles but that just got patched to be able to make 1 RPC call per subnet.
Check it out:
It’s open source btw:
I think I didn’t even got to third place, DFINITY judges invalidated my project
But not giving up, here’s another hackathon that I’m using Chain Fusion for a cross-chain NFT marketplace, trying to bring in some Magic Eden fans.
https://dorahacks.io/buidl/28824
I raised VC capital for Cosmicrafts in 2022 , literally I had proposals from 3~4 VCs a week, they’re all gone now. We’re living different times now, but opportunity should still be there.
Can’t dig anymore into that, it’s “Case-sensitive” and I can’t afford anymore to be disqualified (for no given reason) from all the hackathons and events DFINITY creates.
1 Like
The treasury tokens were meant to be used for a third sns sale.
Thanks to Adam’s frustration that he could not 51% the dao and all the false accusations he spun up, dfinity had to step in and they made it so there is a trusted 3rd party in wtn governance. (Even though the wtn devs are ex Dfinity employees.)
Are you a pirate? Oldie… but goodie..
Most people would make far more money just working for someone else. Being a founder is a high risk road.
1 Like
I checked out Kinic, I have been trying out other solutions for vector db use such as AnythingLLM, LangChain, etc. I will try your tool and compare it to my other tools analysis. I am researching all of this to create a CaffeineAI app that acts as a personal life coach.
2 Likes
Thanks! Houman, from the greater ICME team, is a vibe coder and runs demonstrations in NYC and online often on how to use KINIC for that! He still needs a Caffeine code
Follow up with him on demo or let me know any direct feature requests so we can dev them in.
Lot’s of things to build I am very excited about.
Almost all SNS gonna fail as it has no solid REVENUE MODEL. The treasury of those projects should lock for 8 years. team should work a self sustained platform . Development progress is speeding thanks to caffeine. So the DAO should lock all the ICPs and proposed to split the maturity among communities.
1 Like