I’m a little frustrated with the communications here from DFINITY, so I’ll try to lay out my reasoning as to why.
First off, I’m not saying I disagree with you about the off-chain piece. I’ve been very critical about all SNSes in the past on these forums, and the risks posed by the tight coupling between the the SNS and NNS.
That being said, there’s the case of EstateDAO, a vacation home & real estate venture that “came out of stealth mode” in January and just SNSed with full DFINITY support.
As of April 25th, 8:30am Zurich time (the time of this post), this is the full list of properties currently available on EstateDAO’s website.
Again, this application was in “stealth mode” for 2 years, and has a single property listed. The EstateDAO SNS thread has zero feedback from DFINITY as of the time of this post.
DePin (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) is a new and experimental place for crypto and blockchain right now. I would put both EstateDAO and ICPCC in this category. In fact, in a way ORIGYN’s gold backed NFTs, which have a significant off-chain component also fall into this category.
EstateDAO Minimum Commitment: 75k ICP
EstateDAO Maximum Commitment: 500k ICP
ICPCC DAO Minimum Commitment: 25k ICP
ICPCC DAO Maximum Commitment: 160k ICP
Many of us in the ICP community were originally excited when DFINITY promised the community a conference after the Supernova Hackathon in June 2022, with up to 6 “Free Tickets” to the first ICP conference as the prize for the winning team of each track (there were 6 tracks total) .
A DFINITY backed ICP conference never materialized over the following 12 months, and in 2023 the ICP community organized the very first ICP Community Conference (ICPCC) in Miami Florida.
Note: The first ICP Community Conference did not receive a single promotional tweet or mention from DFINITY, nor did a single currently employed full-time employee from DFINITY (not contractor) attend. No attendees were there on behalf of, or representing DFINITY.
Despite the lack of support from DFINITY, the conference was full of ICP projects and leaders throughout the ecosystem, from ORIGYN to NFID, @skilesare, @lastmjs, @bob11, and more.
The 2023 ICPCC was completely funded by private investors in the ICP ecosystem. In-person conferences are expensive to facilitate, albeit putting on a community conference in the middle of the 2023 bear market has a huge positive impact in fostering connections, introducing new builders and investors to ICP, and just getting people excited again about the ecosystem.
As for connecting the blockchain with in-person events, at 2023’s ICPCC the physical [Ntagled](the https://twitter.com/ntagled) wallet project put together badges for that conference that airdropped all sorts of tokens to participants. It was actually really neat.
I know that other projects like AstroX have also been working on physical wallet infrastructure, and in fact DFINITY came to Bitcoin Miami the following week handing out ckBTC (DFINITY did not attend ICPCC).
Regardless of who puts on the conference, I hope we can all agree that ICP needs a conference for the entire community that includes DFINITY, builders, users, investors, and everyone in-between who’s curious about what’s possible on web3. These conferences will celebrate the ICP community and provide a way for newcomers to learn about the ecosystem.
The funds for these conferences need to come from somewhere, and in the absence of DFINITY a DAO is an novel way to manage how conference funds are managed. And by responsible, I mean definitely NOT like this:
As NNS voters I think we’re all trying to figure out what should and shouldn’t be an SNS, but @bjoernek as the current sole respondent from DFINITY I hope you can appreciate these frustrations in reading your post:
- DFINITY hinted at an Internet Computer Developer Conference, awarded tickets, did not put on a conference and still hasn’t (3 years since genesis).
- DFINITY did not support or send guest speakers on behalf of DFINITY to the first ICPCC.
- DFINITY just supported an DePin DAO project several weeks ago, voting “Yes” on Estate DAO’s SNS without providing a single critical piece of feedback.
@bjoernek regardless of if DFINITY thinks ICPCC is a good SNS project, it would really mean a lot to those attending to see both technical and roadmap/vision talks from DFINITY engineering and cryptography leaders such as yourself, @Manu, @ais, and others at ICPCC.