[IMPACT]
This project proposes to expand LidoNation.com's Articles, Resources, and Community building activities, with a focus on enabling and onboarding people that have only had an exposure to Ethereum as their primary blockchain.
At Lido Nation we believe ""The Future is for Everyone"" and that anyone should be able to learn and participate. Cardano takes innovative approaches to many of the problems the Ethereum community is attempting to solve. Cardano is also attempting challenges not being tackled by the Ethereum community. We believe Cardano is an exciting and attractive alternative to Ethereum user – but any change can be daunting.
Lido Nation is already a trusted resource for Cardano Articles, Insights, and Community building activities. With this project, we propose to capitalize on our experience and success so far, and expand our content to cater to the Ethereum community in the following ways in 2022:
- Expand our resource Library to include 16 more in-depth articles about Cardano's approach to solving challenges being tackled by the Ethereum community with deep links.
- Direct newcomers from Ethereum to a weekly twitter space for live Q&A.
- Create an Ethereum-specific landing page on lidonation.com with resources specifically for helping the Ethereum community understand Cardano.
- Add a ""real"" website designer to the team to redesign our Website resources to make them more accessible. Currently, our ideas and content have outpaced our web-design expertise. We know that great resources are only as effective as the User Interface to access them, so we have added an experienced web designer to our team. This funded proposal will enable this effort.
Future/Scaling
Being a trusted source of relevant and accessible content in a fast-paced technology ecosystem is never a one-and-done undertaking. Ethereum, Cardano, and the greater blockchain ecosystem are evolving at the speed of light! Lido Nation has been providing fresh, up-to-date content every week for a year, and we are just getting started. This proposal is just one of several initiatives that are feeding into our commitment to continue and expand our resources for the Cardano community into the future. Efforts underway that support this include: founding a staking pool, proceeds of which will support ongoing content creation, seeking to hire a "Journalism"-focused team member in 2022, building a team at the Cardano Lab in Kenya to help with content research and writing, and more! As Ethereum and Cardano both continue to change and grow, so will we.
Our Content
LidoNation.com already provide significant helpful resources relating to Cardano tech: wallets, DAOs, Project Catalyst, Side Chains, and Defi. This Campaign challenged us think about ways to make it easy and fast for dApps and other projects to expand or completely move from Ethereum to Cardano. We think this starts with an introduction to new words, new ideas, and the cardano way of doing things. Becuase we are deeply connected in the space, we will also be deep linking to resources published by developers.cardano.org, open source GitHub and Gitlab resources from communities like gimbal labs, iohk, dcspark, SundaeSwap-finance, forum.cardano.org and cardano.stackexchange.com posts, etc. Links on lidonation.com are already smart links that alerts us should they become invalid to reduce the overhead of keeping these deep links accurate.
Here is an overview of what we are already doing:
- 40+ Articles about Cardano concepts, Cardano news, and project reviews. Many of these are also available in Swahili and Spanish.
- We Host and Co-host 8 Cardano ""Twitter Spaces"" each week (live audio chat shows), most of these shows reach 100+ participants each day! In this community, @LidoNation has established a reputation as a source for simple explanations of complex topics.
- We have 5 funded projects so far, which have funded translating our articles into Spanish and Swahili, founding a Cardano Lab in Kenya, and more. We have also participated as Community Advisor, a Veteran Community Advisor, in Catalyst Circle governance meetings – and of course as voters!
Motivation
We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and neighbors, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and futures. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide a trusted resource to help them learn, get involved, and contribute.
Our Values
We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people, and written by all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility and cross-cultural collaboration:
- Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms
- Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources
- Meet ADA standards for differently-baled users, including Audio versions of all content
- Provide our content in other languages (so far, Spanish and Swahili)
- Facilitate original content creation from across cultures, via collaboration with our Lab in Kenya, and via content contribution channels on our site.
Above all, encourage people to get involved.
We are excited to grow our capacity as leaders and mentors to help guide the migration from Ethereum to Cardano.
How big is the market
According to ConsenSys.net:
- 99M+ Ethereum Total unique addresses.
- 31.59k. Daily active dapp users on Eth
- 200,000 solidity developers (according to linkedin)
This is a huge market, with little/no knowledge about the unique innovations within the Cardano ecosystem! With the resources we are already providing, our site is marking steady progress in SEO and Google results rankings, so we believe that with this additional content we can become a top-listed, valuable resource for everyone in the looking for comparable Eth experience within the Cardano ecosystem!
So far, our site is in English, with translation work underway for Swahili and Spanish, giving us broad accessibility in at least four continents. The challenges being tackled within the Cardano ecosystem are exciting and inspiring. I've lost count how many times I've watched people melt when I explain why unpredictable "gas" cost is not a thing on Cardano. We would love to aggregate this nugget and many more resources on one page to help many more of that 99M+ unique addresses melt! These resources will be a small contribution to the overall effort, but we believe the ROI on this project, for helping Ethereum users and businesses land safely on Cardano, could be great.
Challenge Brief: How might we make it easy and fast for dApps and other projects to expand or completely move from Ethereum to Cardano?
We propose to provide education about the benefits of Cardano and its advantages over Ethereum. These will help newcomers to engage with the Cardano ecosystem, and help businesses understand why they might better serve their users by building on Cardano.
We will point developers who are looking to experiment to resources buried in forums and on search engine pages to get them started quickly and reduce the frustration of landing at poor resources.
Key Metrics to measure: Number of projects that migrate / Number of users of these smart contracts once migrated to the Cardano ecosystem:
We will provide a mini survey on the Ethereum landing page to collect insights.
To be honest, this project is very low risk. Our team already has more than a year of experience executing and delivering high quality content on a weekly basis. We already get lots of feedback thanking and encouraging us that what we are providing is valuable. There is no shortage of topics and content ideas, so it's just a matter of funding us to do what we do well, with a special focus on helping users and businesses currently on Ethereum land safely on Cardano.
Our biggest risks are probably something like "hit by a bus" scenarios. If we were to lose a team member during the course of this projects due to unforeseen events, it would be a setback. However, we are not single-pronged. We have three core leaders, and a growing team of individual contributors. If we do experience turnover on the team, there are others to pick up loose ends and carry on.
[FEASIBILITY]
Roadmap
- 3 Month Milestones: Have published at least 5 new Ethereum specific articles, addressing bridging technologies already being developed: KEVM, IELE, ERC20 and Milkomeda, hosting weekly AMA style Twitter Spaces
- 6 Month Milestones: New website goes live. Proportional progress on delivering published content, Twitter Spaces and Governance Marathons continue
- EOY 2022: Have completed all deliverables as described in the "Definition of Success"
Deliverables & Outpus
--> Publish articles explaining Cardano to Etheruem users and businesses
--> Host weekly AMA-style Twitter spaces
--> Go Live with a new Website UI to facilitate better accessibility to resources.
Detailed Plan
- Regarding Articles: Our team already writes articles every week about Cardano-related News, Insights, and Reveiws. This projects will mandate us to target that work for Ethereum users and businesses, which we are already proven capable of doing.
- Regarding Twitter Spaces: @LidoNation is already hosting or Co-Hosting 8 Twitter Spaces each week, with a lively following! This project will mandate us to devote a show each week to focus questions from users and businesses interested looking to engage with Cardano.
- Regarding Website redesign: We are already engaged with a professional web-designer for a whole-site redesign. This project contributes to the budget we need to spend time focused on a good UI for all these Ethereum Onboarding resources – great content is only as good as the audience's ability to navigate and find it!
This budget allows us to provide the following resources through the end of the year (2022)
$6000 –> 16 New Articles focused on Project Ethereum: Research, Writing and Editing
$2200 –> Prepare content and host 1x/Weekly Twitter Space focused on Ethereum onboarding & mentoring
$3500 –> This is a small fraction of our overall budget for website design work, this budget line item will be directed at ensuring that we have good design focus on our Ethereum onboarding resources.
About the team
We are Cardano enthusiasts. With are a growing collective of dreamers who believe in providing insightful education about Cardano in plain English, Swahili, and Spanish. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites, and build tools that everyone can use.
Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.
Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur. Darlington has deep knowledge about blockchain technology and broad experience in the Cardano ecosystem.
Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. She applies her communication skills at Lido Nation by writing and editing articles, and helping to organize ideas in a way that people can understand.
Dirk is an experienced designer and developer with a lot of love for tech, knowledge and art. He helps machines talk to humans and cleans up the mess the information age produces.
Our team at the newly-founded Friends of Ngong Road Blockchain Lab in Nairobi Kenya helps with research, translation, and content creation.
Linked In Pages
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/phuffyking>
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/profd2004>
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmkraft/>
<https://www.linkedin.com/company/lido-nation>
[AUDITABILITY]
Progress tracking for this project is quite easy and transparent:
Regarding Articles: Ethereum landing page will launch within a month of funding (already being worked) will be updated bi-weekly with new Ethereum-specific content.
Regarding Twitter Spaces: Every Monday 3:30 AM UTC @lidonation on twitter (already happening)
Regarding Website redesign: A Designer has already been engaged and work has begun. A full relaunch/Go-Live is anticipated in q3 regardless of funding; our designer trusts we will get the support of the community
Regarding Articles: 16 New Ethereum Articles publised at LidoNation.com, and cross-posted on Twitter
Regarding Twitter Spaces: weekly "New to Cardano" AMA twitter spaces with links to long-read articles for Ethereum users and businesses
Regarding Website redesign: New Design includes dedicated attention to to Ethereum Onboarding resources that are newcomer-friendly and educational for everyone!
Past Unfunded Proposals
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/simple-fund-management-dao-sdk> - F7
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/opensource-php-sdk-for-coti-ada-pay> - F7
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/spanish-news-insights-onboarding> - F6
## Past Funded Proposals
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/treasury-catalyst-proposal-api> - F6
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/newcomer-resources-en-espanol> - F7
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/translation-for-proposal-api-data> - F7
<https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/cardano-blockchain-lab-in-kenya> - F7
