DonDiegoSanchez - HA Report

HA Report - July/Oct

HA program :

I tried to bring my experience in “decentralized organization” (Discord’s DAO voting with thumbs…) to the program. Especially in terms of organization, reach of consensus; voting and reporting by providing 3 simple tools to create the most basic and efficient governance framework for the group.

1 - A Discussion forum to exchange idea asynchronously, reach consensus and deal with information asymmetry
2 - A Voting forum dedicated to officially enacting the reached consensus.
3 - A Initiative forum dedicated to report on our personal initiatives and ideas for the program in the hope to inspire and get inspired but as well to form and coordinate bigger initiatives.

It is to my opinion and my experience that those are far from enough to synchronize any size of groups, the only variable being the delay needed to suppress information asymmetry inherent at any “global and horizontal” organization.

Aside from that, i’m trying to tackle the lack of support and the difficulty faced by BD agent when onboarding devs and projects due to the current state of our documentation and the lack of identified “desks”.

Community growth & empowerment :

Creation of Le Nexus :

Le Nexus is the new French-speaking community that aims to offer a phygital space to the potential 300 million French-speaking citizens of Polkadot.

It is now a DAO with 100 members, involved in Polkadot through various initiatives:

  • A safe community space for all French-speaking members of the Polkadot community.

  • A democratic voting pool of 20+ voters who have already voted on 120+ ref.

  • A localized DevRel unit with a taskforce of 24 devs ready to help and guide newcomers.

  • A localized event/meetup team. One meetup held in May (Nantes) and 2 new ones planned (Paris and Honk-Kong) as well as 3 events for 2025 (CryptoXR, Dijon, EthCC8).

  • A newly created localized BizDev/Customer Success Desk where Ecosystem Agents can benefit from various types of support when onboarding companies and projects to Substrate and Polkadot.

  • We have also built some bridges with OG.tracker to help them in their divine task, and with Nadroj to bring our part to the OpenGov bot, first by providing a docker version of the bot, and next by facilitating how users would send their feedback (ideally directly from the summariser channels).

  • We are in the process of creating a nomination pool and are about to launch our own validators.

  • We’re also finalizing a proposal to OpenGov for the creation of a physical space dedicated to Polkadot in the heart of Paris. You can find the latest version here: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

Le Nexus is an initiative I’m really proud of, and while it allows me to keep the pulse of the community, it has now completely outgrown me and is acting on its own, which is even more exciting.
I strongly believe that this kind of community is the future of OpenGov and Polkadot, and I warmly welcome similar initiatives to spring up in this space, and I invite anyone who wants to start a similar initiative to get in touch if they need any advice or support.

Embassadoooooooooring :

Even before my election, I was the boring polkadot guy at the many meetups and events I attended, now I have a blockchain that says I can. I won’t do you the insult of listing them, because my main reason for being there is to make an impression and have free drinks.

Apart from that, I tried to be a true ambassador, being the face of Polkadot to the various official bodies and institutions, as I hoped the programme would grow into. Being the first on-chain elected body of token holders representative is making-us de facto a really interesting study case for various stakeholders of the civil society. Because our very existence calls into question a lot of legal and fiscal aspects and precedes the tidal wave that DAO is going to sweep the society with.

Syndicate & Group of influence :

I have started the process for Polkadot to become a member of the biggest influential groups and lobbies I know of in the European Union. ADAN, EUCI & W3DL are my three main targets but I’m still in the process of identifying other influential groups.

As well as connecting with the people who represent our industry to other industries, private bodies and governments, it’s also a very cost-effective way of raising awareness of Polkadot directly with the most active and largest industry players for a very symbolic fee that will soon be suggested to OpenGov.

Creation of lobbying task force for MICA 2 :

MICA as it stands today doesn’t really deal with decentralized systems, but MICA ‘2’ will be about decentralization. The first leaks are not reassuring and no one is really defending decentralization out there, Mica is the first large-scale regulatory framework, it sets a precedent that could be dangerous.

That’s why I’m in the process of setting up a task force of lawyers and jurists, co-funded by a large sample of our industry’s leaders and co-chaired by Polkadot. The idea is to gather the most influential web3 protocols and create the right litterature to interact with the ESMA and make ourselves heard as the voice of decentralization and the privileged point of contact.

In addition to the positive impact on the concept of decentralization itself, I believe this initiative could bring a lot of positive visibility and awareness to Polkadot among the most active protocols out there, by fighting in the trenches with them.

I’ve already received some informal expressions of interest from a dozen protocols in the top 100 and half a dozen lawyers and jurists from across the European Union. This initiative will probably be hosted by the Web3 Defence Ligue.

Introduction to the french gouvernement :

I had the honor of presenting Polkadot to the Treasury Department of the French Ministry of Finance; these guys plan the whole French economy and are the ones who legislate the banking and insurance sector.
They wrote the French law “PACTE” which later became the main framework of MICA. They’re also the main negotiators for ESMA. This is the place to be if you want to influence regulation.

They’re also looking closely at blockchain technology and how it could solve some of the global market inefficiencies, particularly the lack of funding for infrastructure projects in emerging markets. They’re looking very closely at the tokenization of securities, which, they know, is probably the Pandora’s box of Web3.

I presented Polkadot to them and showed them our many features that really lend themselves to global use cases and government use cases. They’re impressed globally with the simple fact that we exist and manage to operate in a completely decentralized way without any legal entity.
We also addressed the many challenge newcomers would be facing due to the very high regulation standard of Europe and various solution to address that and allow Eu to remain a welcoming land for Web3 Projects. It is planned to maintain this relationship on a bi-weekly basis.

MALTA Digital Commission :

Thanks to Lucy we’ve been approached by the Malta Digital commission, to represent DAOs.
They’re looking to create a sandbox for DAO that should end up by the creation of a new legal entity to incorporate them. Their favorable tax frameworks are making them an ideal place to do it, especially if you want to keep a foot in the European Market.

Reinforced by the experience we got with Le Nexus legal wrappers, we help them define the basis of what a DAO needs in terms of legal entity and the challenge they’re facing with existing frameworks.
Over the course of several meetings we agreed to make the ChaosDAO one of the guinea pig of their upcoming sandbox.

French Department of Justice :

I’ve also started office hours with a local section of the French Ministry of Justice to help them understand blockchain technology, how it affects a court, what challenges it poses to the current legal and tax framework, and how a truly decentralized protocol (Polkadot) works.

These meetings take place every two weeks at lunchtime and I’m basically bombarded with questions from a large group of lawyers, jurists and judges. My background in compliance and the fact that I co-founded a regulated crypto-asset service provider also helps to make my answers useful and accurate.

Saving Polkadot’s Culture :

Asset hub Ad
I’m working on a commercial for Asset Hub. Being a former producer, it was on my mind for a while, but Heroic’s videos finished to convinced me that this was a medium where not much happens and where we could actually reach the whole web3, very easily. currently in a really early phase, i hope that if manage to bring it to fruition, my background in the film industyr will help me keep the overall cost prety low.

Polkadot Citizenship App
I’va started probing French tattoo artist to see if we could do something a “partnership” regarding the Proof of Ink and the Polkadot citizenship app. The idea is to see if we could get some big name from the tattoo scene endorsing the concept and providing some “blockchain services” with their needles. It is still at an early stage and only informal contacts have been established.

Business Development :

I’m also naturally engaged in active business development initiatives.

One of my main objectives in that regard is to make Polkadot ready for the upcoming deployment of Mica. Enabling Polkadot to become a backend for this new promising market.
This goes mainly through the adoption of KYT providers, but also various services providers like custodians.

I also aim to address the many regulated actors in the B2B blockchain based payment solution in europe once Asset Hub will have a vit more track record with stablecoins.

Really connected to the French web3 space which is very dynamic especially regarding EVMs tech stack, i’m doing i’m best to lure in some of them into Substrate.

Here is my main Bizdev attempt this past 2 months :

Scorechain - One of the most Ethos-friendly KYT providers.
Smoo.th - The next account abstraction solution from the former founders of Ledger. Unfortunately, the project didn’t manage to confirm its PMF and was recently sunsetted.
DFNS: One of the largest custodians out there after Fireblocks, most regulated firms use one of them to provide large scale services.
Siemens : Siemens is N1 in supply chain and automation, they see blockchain technology as the next big leap in efficiency. Currently trying to seduce Siemmens CIO to show how Polkadot is dedicated to the global industrial Blockchain use case.
Thomson : One of the top 5 laptop manufacturers wants to dive into web3 and provide a retail facing app in their products. We’ve been working on providing a one-click staking app that allows their customers to leverage their unused computing power through various DePin protocols. This one will probably won’t go very far.

I will also play the NDA card for big listed company i’m trying to onboard on Polkadot, whith a big focus on the one linked to the gaming industry.

Overall, I’m quite happy with my personal report, I feel that from a token holder’s perspective, this is what should be expected from a Head Ambassador.
A mixture of a community coordinator, an interface with industry players and government bodies, and someone involved in identifying and fixing the little things that make our ecosystem a little more difficult for newcomers and that know the ecosystem and its tech well enough to perform accurate and efficient BizDev mission.

I’m looking forward to receiving feedback, suggestions and input from token holders.

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