Hello all!
My name is William, and I’d love to be considered for the Decentralized Voices program. I am the COO of Talisman, and I lead our Signet enterprise initiative. I have first-hand experience in setting up a crypto-native organization that runs fully on the blockchain, and as the author of Talisman’s treasury proposals, I also have first-hand understanding of the challenges and rewards of participating in OpenGov as an ecosystem team. Furthermore, at Talisman, we have direct contact with retail users who use Polkadot, and understanding their experience keeps us grounded by giving us a continual sense-check of how normal people experience the Polkadot ecosystem.
I am also a graduate of the most recent Polkadot Blockchain Academy in Hong Kong. I am grateful for that experience that enabled me to connect face-to-face and spend a good deal of time with more than 100 developers, founders, ecosystem teams, W3F employees and Parity employees. Beyond that, I cherished the ability to learn about cryptography, blockchain and understand on a deeper level the fundamental decisions that made and continue to make Polkadot unique today. This is something that I believe is not easy to learn or understand coming from the user/ecosystem/wallet/Dapp level, and something that makes the PBA experience incredibly special.
I think the role of governance is three-fold:
- To upgrade the network and continue to decentralize, in order to achieve the highest quality blockspace, as well as protect the network from attacks or potential attacks.
- To ensure that critical builder/user needs of Polkadot are met and upheld, such as infrastructure, wallets, and other tooling/services that enable builders to build and users to use the network.
- To take a forward-looking view and ensure Polkadot is competitive to other ecosystems, not just in technology but also in the use cases that are enabled to thrive. We need to move beyond a “technology-only” approach, and, on the path to Polkadot 2.0, bring enterprises and retail usage into Polkadot.
If I am selected, I will explain my rationale when I vote and abstain from proposals where there is a conflict of interest.
I don’t maintain a large public following or post on Twitter a lot, but here are two recent examples of where I have spoken up for the ecosystem:
- On Giotto’s recent Twitter space centered around getting large whales to vote, I spoke up to remind everyone that governance is still not enabled for nomination pool stakers, who deserve to have a voice in governance so they can be full participants in the network
- In this Forbes article, I spoke about looking at the new opportunities that the decentralization initiative brings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/05/polkadots-path-to-decentralization-latest-insights/
Thank you,
William
