Encointer Treasury Proposal

Encointer has innovated community currencies with its secure and decentralized sybil-defense protocol, laying the foundation for a brighter future with basic income. Field-tested with several hundred users, this protocol, known as Encointer LoCo, has proven its capabilities in pilot communities like the Leu community in Zurich.

With new products, Encointer will not only benefit Kusama as a laboratory for personhood and local community currencies. It will benefit Polkadot directly as well:

• The faucet will be useful for new token launches, i.e. on Polimec, but also for highly geo-targeted charity
• The personhood oracle will be useful for privacy-preserving sybil-resilience for projects like KILT, frequency/MeWe, subsocial, jur, Saturn as well as many others
• BeeDance will foster community engagement at meetups and events everywhere around the world and could become a massively useful tool for Polkadot ambassadors

So far, expenses have mainly been funded by the KSM treasury. Starting with September 2023, the team proposes to be funded by the Polkadot treasury on the grounds that Polkadot and its parachains benefit from new products to be released in the next few months. See milestones.

Our recent proposal passed OpenGov on Kusama and will cover expenses for July and Aug 2023. The controversial discussions surrounding the Treasury proposal have led Encointer to draw some important conclusions:

1. There is a pressing need to focus on the global expansion of Encointer communities, indicating a strong interest in reaching wider audiences.
2. The primary reason for pushback was attributed to the limited funds available in the KSM Treasury as the proposal amounted to roughly 3% of currently available funds.

We understand that launching new communities and navigating the complexities of the protocol can be demanding, slowing down widespread adoption. But fear not! We'd like to propose a viable solution: BeeDance.

BeeDance opens up a world of possibilities for event organizers to create their very own Encointer community, whether it's for a single event or a series of regular meetups. With BeeDance, organizers have the freedom to choose the event location and determine the timing that suits them best. The beauty of BeeDance lies in its simplicity and flexibility, making it far easier to launch compared to Encointer LoCo. While it serves as an excellent onboarding tool for LoCo, it also stands strong as a standalone protocol for proof-of-attendance (PoA). Expect more info on BeeDance to be published before decoded'23.

Common Good

Proof-of-personhood will become such a fundamental primitive of our online lives that we suggest to acknowledge it as a basic human right. Therefore we claim it it is imperative to not let a for-profit entity take care of it (like i.e. worldcoin as a bad example).

Inclusivity in web3, too, is a common good for the entire Dotsam ecosystem as it helps onboarding the long tail of the wealth distribution: A market that should not be underestimated.

As Encointer's offerings are non-excludable and aiming to be non-rivalrous, there can't be a business case here which would offer an ROI to investors (into Encointer). However, the Encointer protocol adds value to the ecosystem as a whole which will inevitably cause buy pressure to DOT/KSM.

Milestones

• July '23 deploy Encointer Faucet, enabling all reputables of Encointer LoCo to drip a tiny amount of KSM (to be followed by any tokens through XCM)
• Aug '23 deploy the privacy-preserving Encointer personhood oracle for the nostr protocol, showcasing sybil-free social media public channels. To be followed by integrations with KILT and subsocial.
• Q4'23 PoC demo for BeeDance on our testnet with a beta mobile app, involving a social event of at least 30 people.

Treasury Spend

We propose a treasury spend of 423'000 CHF (approx. 469'953 USD) = 99’672 DOT for Encointer's expenses for 4 months (Sept-Dec 2023)

Please read our detailed proposal which is consistent with our previous split proposal on Kusama