When Red Cave Ventures launched the GMC24 project, they also boostrapped a "Community Fund" by designating some of the GMC24 shards to "go to MoonCatRescue Development/Marketing" (press release). That was all the direction they gave, leaving the rest up to ponderware's discretion. So, the ponderware team has discussed internally how to handle these funds, and have this plan for moving forward:

The "Community Fund" is the wallet address 0x795afF8df356872FA867fA77241bBF27EFBD5EbA, which is a ponderware-controlled address. The current assets in that fund are 400,000 GMC24 shards, which is worth about 38.4 ETH.

General intent

We're interested in spending this money transparently and with the community's desires in mind to make the MoonCat ecosystem broader and richer. If you as a community member think ponderware is doing a good job managing those funds for the community, you're welcome to also donate to that address, and we'll put your donation to good use as well!

Holding assets

For the time being, the majority of the assets in that fund will be held longer-term, with smaller payments going out monthly for active projects being worked on. To keep the funds that are "at rest" still being of most use, ponderware is investigating different DeFi products to invest the assets that aren't needed immediately in, so they can be earning interest for the community.

The initial plan is to aim to hold about 50% MoonCat-related assets (GMC25 shards, MCAT20 tokens, CAT20 tokens, individual MoonCats, or similar), and 50% more generic Ethereum-related assets (Ether, stablecoins, and DeFi investment tokens).

Disbursement options

Right now the MoonCat ecosystem's main needs are:

1. Keep the servers and hosting for the MoonCat-related websites up-and-running (infrastructure needs)
2. Development work on MoonCat exclusive content and tooling (with that work mostly being done by the ponderware team)
3. Development work for interacting with other projects (with that work mostly being done by other development teams)
4. Marketing, "spreading the word", and bringing MoonCats to the attention of those who still haven't heard about this project.

And so disbursements from this fund will primarily fall into these categories to start with. Items 1 and 2 will be recurring needs for the next several months, with items 3 and 4 popping up as frequently as ponderware can find solid partners and opportunities to work with.

Additional future disbursements could take place for marketing the MoonCat community and incentivizing others to join in being a MoonCat owner. The "MoonCat-specific" assets in the fund will primarily be used for these sorts of purposes (as "airdrop" rewards, raffle/lottery prizes, or similar).

If you have ideas for other purposes for these assets, feel free to leave a comment on this post! And please do peruse ideas other community members have left and up-/down-vote them to give ponderware a sense of which ideas are most popular with the community.

Initial Disbursement

For May 2021, the first round of disbursements ponderware plans to make are:

• $1,000 to isotile for their development efforts on integrating MoonCats into their app
• $1,500 to each of the three ponderware engineers for the active development on the MoonCat wearables project and overall management of the MoonCat ecosystem
• $40 to ponderware as a pass-through to pay for server costs (Heroku, CloudFlare)