Challenge “Developer Ecosystem - The Evolution” was done very well in Fund8 and Fund9. In Fund10, this is the challenge to continue and develop. This challenge is important to the Cardano mission because it encourages creating new open-source projects and building dApps. The challenge helps get developers involved in Catalyst. Set a challenge to help develop the tools and infrastructure to support your business.

I fully support 100% for this challenge. In my opinion, this challenge is one of the most important challenges in recent funds, which keeps recurring from Fund 8, 9. Cardano ecosystem still needs a lot of tools (IDE, API, deployment, testing, monitoring…) to support developers to develop Dapps. These tools are just like “infrastructure” on which Dapps will be developed. One example is Appstore. The number of iOS apps really bloomed only when Apple focused on developing tools for developers. So funding challenges like this is extremely necessary to grow the ecosystem. It is no doubt that the challenge perfectly fits the four Fund 9 strategic goals, which is “Prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem”, “Turn Cardano into an open-source project & attract more developers”, “Build real-world solutions based on the Cardano blockchain”, and “Improve tooling to support human processes in Catalyst”. I vote 5 stars for this challenge with the belief that this challenge will accelerate the growth of the Cardano ecosystem.

This challenge is critical to achieving Cardano's missions as this community needs constant incentives for tool and infrastructure improvements. It is very important to encourage developers to come up with even more innovative projects. It is important to ensure that dApp development is accelerated. Doing this will increase the number of open source projects on Cardano. This challenge ensures that developers have the opportunity to create or complete new or existing innovative projects. This challenge will ensure that the ecosystem will integrate many new interesting projects. In Fund9 there were many innovative projects that could certainly use further financing in Fund10. I am convinced that this part will have a very big impact on the Cardano ecosystem.

This challenge is a continuation of similar challenges proposed and funded in Funds 8 and 9, and is a foundational piece of the Catalyst system, since developers form the backbone of the Cardano ecosystem, a role similar to what bees play in the ecosystem as pollinators. It is thus crucial to stimulate and incentivise their presence in the ecosystem, and offer them the best possible context to flourish and continue to build the critical infrastructure.

Can this challenge help prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem? Without a doubt, yes. This challenge has the potential to support developers’ activities and critical infrastructure and turn Cardano into a prime choice for building dapps, innovating and collaborating with other stakeholders. Moreover, this challenge is probably the most outspoken one in terms of supporting the development of open source solutions.

Can this challenge help build real-world solutions based on the Cardano ecosystem? This challenge will have an indirect, but massive impact on the ecosystem’s capacity of delivering real world solutions, since it will push forward a “layer zero” of infrastructure necessary to all the other projects: APIs, repos, open source solutions, standards, knowledge bases, etc. These will not be real world solutions per se, but they will be the building blocks of such products.

For all the right reasons, this challenge deserves at least five stars and should be present in the Catalyst selected challenges for at least ten more rounds.

This challenge is about the creation of developer tools, software, and other infrastructure to facilitate the building & scaling of DApps, Products, and Integrations on Cardano. The Cardano blockchain has been built from the ground up following the science-based formal methods approach. It utilizes the Haskell functional programming language, and IOG developed Plutus (a language based on Haskell) for writing smart contracts. As this is the new language, creating DApps and other products on Cardano becomes difficult. However, with the inception of the Plutus pioneer program and other supporting tools & resources such as Cardano stack exchange, and Gimbalabs, this has been overcome to a certain extent. This challenge will help in further smoothening the development process by incentivizing the creation of developer supports tools and resources.

This challenge helps with the strategic goals as it prepares & trains the group of people who will be able and willing to contribute to the Cardano ecosystem. It also accelerates the growth of the developer ecosystem and thus enhances the creation of DApps and other products. Regarding open source projects, the author mentions that this challenge invites proposals from both the open-source and not open-source. However, I believe the solutions developed under this challenge should be open source to gain the community consensus on their credibility. Furthermore, it should be open-source with the aim of the work executed being available for the benefit of other projects to use and build their applications.

In terms of attracting votes, in Fund 8, the proposals under this challenge accumulate the highest number of votes combined. We can expect more or less the same again for this challenge. This challenge will be a springboard for Cardano adoption as it lays the groundwork for the future creation of DApps and other products on Cardano, which people will use worldwide. Given all the above points, this challenge is critical for Cardano's mission.

The challenge team identified the goals of the challenge as “Equip and support developers with tools and infrastructure”, “Make Cardano first choice for developers” and “Incentive large ambitious open source projects”. They are important to achieve Cardano’s mission and achieve F9 strategic goals of “able to make contributions to the ecosystem” and “open source project & attract more developers” directly and has the potential to help achieve the other goals.

This challenge is one of the core settings that has survived from fund to fund and supports the developer infrastructure, which is also one of the core funding categories suggested by the IOG research paper on crypto-currency treasuries (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/435.pdf). It should be noted that there are always several versions of this challenge proposed every round, and this particular proposal is headed for its 3rd iteration, having been funded in both F8 and F9.

As a general rule, Developer Ecosystem (especially when you add in the support for Opensource Development challenges as well) are the best performing challenge settings in Catalyst. The F8 version was the highest voted challenge setting to date (1321 unique wallets and $218.7m ADA approval), and the F9 version was in the top five approved challenges. In F8 the proposals under this category performed best-in-fund, with 26,030 unique wallets voting and averaging 530(!) unique votes per proposal. For contrast the next best challenge was Opensource Development (and yeah, that probably had a lot of developer infrastructure as well) with 25,803 unique wallets and 300 votes per proposal. Dapps, which usually gets the lion's share of funding every round had 25,090 wallets voting and only 183 votes per proposal.

But where this category has really shined, to date, is when looking at completed projects, where DevEco is completing projects almost 3 to 1 compared with the broad Daps category, so ROI has been easier to gauge from this challenge. With this version of the challenge setting absorbing the Opensource setting under a larger budget, it really matches well with the Fund 10 goals.

We can tell this is a builder's world right now, and while sectors such as governance (DAOs) and interoperability (x-chain) are making strong showings, Developer tools is likely to remain a strong category with great short and long term alignment to Catalyst and Cardano. 5 stars.

This challenge which is a continuation of previous Dev eco system challenges is the definition of the strategic goal: 'Turn Cardano into an open source project & attract more developers.' As such is perfectly aligned with the community and IOG wishes.

There are millions of developers who are equipped with coding skills and are employed by IT companies of all sizes. On the contrary, there are only a handful of them who are versed with coding on Blockchains. The one reason for that is that most of the Blockchains have their own programming languages and coding tools and one needs to learn these tools before that person can start building on a Blockchain. On top of that, most of these Blockchain developers are active on Ethereum as it is one of the most developer friendly platform and also because Ethereum has most number of users as compared to any other Blockchain. This makes it easy and profitable for these developers to build on Ethereum.*** Being coded in Haskell and having adopted eUTXO model gives Cardano a great deal of advantages but it is also true that this makes it very hard for developers to build on top of Cardano. There has been many initiatives to teach people about Haskell and Plutus and there has been programs like Plutus Pioneer Program, but there is as much which can be achieved through these initiatives.***

The goal of this challenge has been to create proposals which make working on Cardano an easy and fun experience. This challenge has been part of Fund 8 and 9 and there has already been some great proposals submitted under this challenge. The objective has been to achieve Accelerated dApp development and increasing the number of open source projects on Cardano. This challenge catagory is perfectly aligned with Cardano's mission and it is essential for the growth of the Ecosystem. I would also like to suggest that other then making building on Cardano easy, the objective of the challenge should also include incentivising the developers to build on Cardano.

This challenge setting proposal aims at developing tools and working infrastructure to attract developers, in order to accelerate Cardano Dapp developement. This is obviously critical to Cardano's mission, and the challenge setting proposal is directly aligned with Fund 10 Strategic Goal #1 "Prepare a group of people willing and able to make contributions to the ecosystem." and #2 "Turn Cardano into an open source project & attract more developers"

This challenge setting perfectly aligns with the four strategic goals set forth in the Catalyst Fund 9 Proposal Assessor Guide. The continued evolution of the developer ecosystem is a continuation of challenge settings from Funds 8 and 9 into the next round of funding (Fund 10). Increasing open sourced development is a core value of the Cardano community and this proposed challenge doubles the available funding from the current levels to provide the incentives and continuity open source developers need to be successful. Providing ample resources to encourage larger and more ambitious projects, this challenge also aims to accelerate dApp integration and stimulate more rapid development. This in turn will create an impetus for outside developers to migrate to Cardano and engage in Project Catalyst.

This challenge setting proposal is the continuation of the traditional 'Developer Ecosystem' challenge found in previous Funds. Cardano relies heavily on its developing community to build and expand this blockchain. Development creates tools to create much needed use cases. Therefore, it is of great importance that this aspect gets nurtured by the community. The challenge setting proposal adheres perfectly in terms of alignment by focussing on the strategic goal of attracting more developers. Emphasizing the need to identify what tools should be prioritized first and keeping into account what the delevopers want makes me fully agree that this proposal is mission critical for cardano.

This is one of the most critical challenges within Project Catalyst, and I find it very interesting how the team that prepared the proposal framed the challenge question. This is because they hit the nail on the head as to why it is critical. And by that being critical, it has been present in Catalyst since its conception and from my point of view it should continue to be. While we have had many successes in this regard (Plutarch comes to mind). If we compare it to other ecosystems inside and outside the industry we still have a long way to go. This challenge will allow more developers to feel incentivized to build within the ecosystem, so it is related to the first strategic objective of the next fund. Moreover, the team that prepared this proposal emphasized the importance of open source from concept through implementation, therefore, there is a direct alignment with the second strategic goal, and I consider that there is an indirect alignment with the third strategic goal, as there are better tools available, the likelihood of building solutions in the real world increases.

It is highly critical and important that the Cardano ecosystem makes onboarding of new developers and dApp developers as easy and simple as possible. Being a Plutus pioneer program participant myself and a senior developer, I have seen that setting up a local Cardano development environment on your local PC is neither trivial nor quick, when compared with setting up an entire Node Js, JDK or .Net core based development environment.

The good news is that we are still quite early in the Cardano development ecosystem and IOG has provided a solid base that needs to be quickly strengthened, expanded and grown upon via project catalyst funded ideas. Therefore these challenge settings along with the open source developer ecosystem are two challenges that will define the future of Cardano in terms of developer adoption and dapp creation. Hence, I strongly agree.

This challenge proposal is a continuation of previously approved challenges F8 and F9: Developer Ecosystem, each with $1M budget. It is a challenge that has been present in Catalyst since its inception, except for F7, when only its open-source version was voted in. This challenge is very well aligned with Cardano’s mission goals of turning Cardano into an open source project, since it is stated in the challenge brief that open sourcing the tools or make a plan to do so in the future is something that should be considered by the Proposal Assessors when evaluating proposals submitted in this challenge, and this would indirectly help to build real world solutions and to bring more people who are willing to contribute to the ecosystem. The alignment of this challenge proposal with Cardano’s mission is very high.

This challenge is critical to achieve cardano's mission because we have built out the foundation for Cardano, but we are still early on in the adoption phase. According to Outlierventures research, Ethereum is still the most actively developed Blockchain protocol, followed by Cardano and Bitcoin, while Polkadot, Cosmos and Avalanche are seeing a consistent rise in core development and developer contribution. https://outlierventures.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/OV-Blockchain-Dev-Q1-2021-_v7.pdf Cardano must compete as a platform with others, and while we may have great technology, we need to provide real financial incentives for new developers to build on Cardano, and make it easy for them to get started. It is also important to simplify and de-risk the process for large institutions to begin onboarding to Cardano. While many media institutions ignore the progress of Cardano, some are reporting on the growth in developers and Github commits. As Zycrypto has reported:

"Cardano developer activity surpassed Solana and Polkadot on Github. Santiment notes that tracking developer activity is one way to gauge the growth of a blockchain. Cardano’s ecosystem has exploded in activity since it enabled smart contract functionality in 2021. Blockchains are trying to outdo each other with new developments being unveiled with increasing regularity. One blockchain analytics firm has created a way to judge the growth of blockchains by looking at its developer activity on Github and Cardano appears to be winning." https://zycrypto.com/cardano-thrives-over-solana-and-polkadot-in-development-activity-as-ada-ecosystem-flourishes/

This does not mean we can slow down, but rather we should continue to build on this momentum and continue to incentivize and attract more developers, who will build more apps, that will bring more users and use cases. Previous challenge settings that were similar to this one have proven to be successful, and therefore we should continue to leverage catalyst funded development, which is a unique competitive advantage that Cardano has over other blockchains. We must use this Catalyst platform to accelerate the growth of our ecosystem. This challenge setting is perfectly aligned with these goals as the metrics in the proposal are directly tied to developer count, open source projects, and Gihub commits.

The success criterion is entirely consistent, which is proven through the results achieved from the projects in the previous fund. Metrics are clearly shown and can be specified. The challenge calls for proponents to participate in the project's construction through the telegram community group "Developer Ecosystem" This is a new challenge development. I believe that in this fund, the success metrics will increase.

The proposers gave good metrics to evaluate this challenge. Because this challenge welcomes not only open-source proposals, it separates KPIs for open-source proposals and those that are not open-sourced. I think it is reasonable. I think these are important and relatively complete metrics.

Success criteria and suggested stats are properly set up to measure progress in tackling the challenge. These statistics are divided into several parts. Very nice KPIs have been included to see if this challenge has made it easier for developers to build on Cardano. This is a very important part that should ensure that the ecosystem is expanded. The main challenge is to stimulate large ambitious open source projects. Questions are clearly included for this. Care has been taken to provide very clear directions that can be addressed. The other metrics serve to measure a positive open source impact. This challenge should definitely be taken up because it is crucial to provide developers with tools and working structure in the Cardano ecosystem. It must be ensured that people are convinced to work with Cardano. This challenge can provide additional opportunities that can convince people.

There are three measures of success that the proposers have included in the challenge: number of open source proposals, number of contributions (github forks, clones, repository traffic), and level of community involvement (discord, telegram, etc.). While the first two are rather evident and fairly easy to measure, the third one is a little less so but still not impossible, and rough approximations / proxies can definitely be used to get a feeling of the levels of community involvement, so I believe that the proposal does a good job at defining these measures of success.

The same thing applies for its capacity to generate healthy competition - since the problem statement is very well defined and so are the types of proposals welcomed - it will thus be easy to measure the community’s capacity to offer solutions and compare them across a wide range of categories, if desired. So definitely five stars for verifiability.

The author mentions the potential directions for the proposals under this challenge. The author also mentions several metrics such as the number of API & developer tools created, the number of developers actively building, and the increasing number of open source projects that can be used by auditors or interested parties to measure the challenge's success. I suggest the author include the metrics to measure the proposals' progress while it is being executed, especially if it relates to software development; it can be the number of GitHub commits or project tracking on the Jira board or milestones achievements. Anyhow, I am rating it five stars as the author does provide the possible directions which can be considered to ascertain the metrics.

As stated by the author success of the proposals under this challenge will be the accelerated DApp development using the tooling & solutions created under this challenge and the growth of open-source projects.

The focus area of the challenge is make it easier for developers to build on Cardano. Defined clear and measurable metrics, measure number, this is quantitative rather than qualitative. Easy to compare past and current data, informative. Highly relevant to the focus area - support developers. The challenge is a continuation of F8 and F9 challenge, the past challenges have attracted many proposers and voters with a healthy amount of competition between proposers. The team has experience setting challenges.

They helpfully have upgraded some standard software KPIs to gauge things like MoM (month over month) gains in reporting on things like commits and open repos. This should help to gauge not just progress of isolated projects, but the velocity of the ecosystem as well, which can help provide even more data for driving decisions like budgeting for this challenge going forwards. As part of a core group of challenges (alongside things like Marketing and Governance) it is important for these challenges to effectively sense into the future a bit too, by finding data points for long term alignment and parameters, so it is good to see that starting to happen.

The ultimate success metric is clearly stated and succinct: is it easier to build on Cardano at the end of the day? This clarity should help projects stay on track, and help voters prioritize the projects in this challenge.

Because the team has provided quality progress metrics, alongside longterm tracking points, with a clear vision of success for the proposers that aligns with the Fund 10 goals, I believe this proposal warrants a full 5 stars for verifiability.

The proposers have given some metrics with which to measure the success, but not if actual targets, only increases. It would be good if the goals could be quantified in the future, as that requires understanding of what are base effects and what is missing to further increase a given metric.

The challenge is measuring the success of a proposal from the acceleration of dApp development and increase in number of open source projects on Cardano. Some of the important Key Metrics to measure the success of a Proposal are Number of APIs or Developer tools deveoped to lower entry barrier for developers in Cardano, number of developers actively building on top of Cardano, number of repos on Github using the tooling, project collaborations, and increase in number of open source projects. In my opinion, the success criteria and the suggested metrics will be able to measure the progress of a proposal in addressing the challenge.

To fulfill the Cardano's objective of having billions of users, we need to attract thousands of developers to the ecosystem and this challenge is a step in that direction. I wish the team all the best

The scope of the challenge is will defined : it includes potential directions such as "APIs and Oracles" or "Testing frameworks". Metrics are listed to enable proposers and the community to assess and compare the impact of proposals in the challenge. The challenge also identified metrics to consider for a positive open source impact, like number of github forks/clones/ traffic for an open source repos.

Utilizing Github repositories and a myriad of social media platforms as a measure of KPIs, this challenge details the metric analysis necessary to verify the effectiveness of funding open source development on Cardano. Tracking developers who transition to open source is another Key Progress Indicator that has been identified as a way to measure the successful implementation of this challenge. The only metric I would like to see added is a comparison to past funds to see exactly how much the funding increase translates into the influx of new developers and the creation of more open source protocols. This comparison should also measure dApp development rates to best guage the success of this challenge.

The challenge proposal provides several directions to move towards as a potential proposer. Focussing heavily on open source encourages competition as an environment for durable production is created. The only aspect that I feel is difficult to measure is overall participation in community involvement as this might not always be equally visible.

As such, it seems that both the description of the criteria of success and the 5 proposed metrics for measuring success are appropriate to the focus areas of this challenge. I believe they are simple to measure, general enough to apply to most projects, but with clear boundaries for future proposers. I would like to draw attention to the section included in this challenge setting titled "Metrics to consider for positive open source impact" which, in addition to emphasizing open source characteristics, also encourages future proposers to establish communication channels with the community. Considering that this challenge has been present in past funds, it would be interesting for the challenge team to prepare data regarding the metrics of projects that have been funded in the past, thereby giving more power to the community and providing sufficient information for future decision-making.

This challenge is a continuation to Fund 8 and Fund 9, and there have been many funded proposals in previous rounds that fulfill the potential directions of this challenge. The success is defined as accelerated dApp development and aligned with the strategic goal of Cardano, which is to increase the number of open source projects on Cardano. This challenge overlaps with the Open source developer ecosystem challenge, and therefore I see a little room for improvement in the write up so that it helps new proposers find right challenge settings for their proposals in fund 10, should these both challenges be voted by voters.

The key metrics to measure clearly mention the concrete data points against which success of this challenge can be measured against. However, it would have been nice if some kind of statistics was provided (e.g. bar/pie charts) to visualize these data points until now. Therefore, I see some room for improvement and hence agree that progress can be correctly measured while addressing the challenge.

This challenge has been a resubmission from previous funds and its challenge brief and KPIs are being refined each round. The metrics mentioned in the challenge proposal to track the success of this challenge are appropriate and measurable, except the “A strong community of developers and proposers with thriving project collaboration” KPI, but this could be evaluated subjectively. It would be interesting to add some KPIs that were more specific and related to the potential directions mentioned in the challenge brief, for example, number of projects related to IDEs, APIs, Oracles, hackathons, etc. Overall, the verifiability of this challenge is very good, although some more KPIs could be added to increase the insight related to which areas of the developer ecosystem are being most benefited by this challenge.

The key metrics in this challenge are all directly measuring specific outcomes, and they are aligned with the challenge setting and the Fund9 strategic goals. The metrics are numerical and quantifiable, and relatively easy for the catalyst community to track and audit, as they will be available on Github and Catalyst. Community involvement is another metric that is perhaps less accurate, and difficult to attribute specifically to this challenge, but it is still possible to track the social analytics through discord, telegram, cardano stack exchange, youtube, twitter, etc. Therefore this proposal is rated 5 stars for Alignment, Feasibility, and Verifiability.