It’s amazing to have been a part of the Safe ecosystem before SafeDAO sharing Safe research and being a small part of the DAO creation through the collaborative forum discussions and the experimentation of many types of builders coming together to improve self ownership of digital accounts. I enjoy working on product research as I discover areas to help all types of Safe users. For example the recent focus on multi factor verification MFV of Safe transactions.
@Andre or someone else from SEF, it’d be useful to share a link to who is currently on the “Council of the Safe Ecosystem Foundation (SEF)” that can lift the funding pause.
Impact of SafeDAO
One of the highlights for me so far has been serving in the Safe Grants council as the product lead. This showed promising examples of how an organization and community can work together to create important products, services, and tech. For example, during the biggest crypto hack in history to date it was @devanon’s grants project, Eternal Safe, that normal users to heads of the largest exchanges used to securely transact with decentralized Safes. On the developer side I’ve received unsolicited feedback from a friend on how good working with @marc’s grant funded Candide Labs, has been for using their APIs and tooling their startup. @mozrt and team’s Fluidkey is on it’s way to seeking product market fit for more private transactions.
I agree with the Safe Foundation’s proposal on the large amount of time, energy, and resources required to fund high impact initiatives like the few above and more. For every handful of serious builders and projects there are dozens to a hundred to filter through that don’t provide detailed time estimates, exactly how the funding is being allocated, etc.
Future funding
Focused
SEF may continue financially supporting the ecosystem from its own funds, e.g. through direct investments.
It’d be great to have requests for proposals RFPs for funding high impact opportunities both that are well known and ones that are less defined, I.e. We need a product, service, tool, to solve X.
It’s also important to have a path during the proposed 6 month pause for well defined and scoped initiatives with high impact to Safe Labs and|or Safe Research to pitch directly to the SEF for funding.
SAFE token
I agree with @corbinpage on the opportunity to power Safe’s ecosystem with the SAFE token. There’s the strategy of distributing and powering Safe services with the SAFE token like in @DennisonBertram’s discussion.