Thanks for your comment — this is a very helpful perspective, and I fully agree that the Fellowship will play a central role in the long-term stewardship of JAM.
That said, the sustainability gap I’m trying to highlight is a bit different from what the Fellowship or the Prize currently address.
1. The JAM Prize already covers node/client development
I don’t think additional funding is needed there — the incentive structure is already defined, and teams accepted it.
2. The unfunded areas are SDKs, services, tooling, infra, and ecosystem growth
Right now there are 0% incentives for:
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JAM SDKs
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JAM service frameworks
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standard libraries
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dev tools (profilers, debuggers, conformance infra)
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example services / reference apps
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developer onboarding
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documentation
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marketing, events, DevRel
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education & content
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ecosystem bootstrapping
Without these layers, even a perfect JAM protocol will not achieve adoption.
A blockchain without at least one compelling use case or reference implementation simply doesn’t gain traction.
3. Fellowship doesn’t realistically cover whole teams
Even after M1:
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Only one team member can be fast-tracked to Rank 3.
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Other team members have to follow the regular path, which typically takes years.
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As far as I am aware, fellowship stipends are designed for protocol maintenance — not for multi-person teams building tooling or services.
So Fellowship is extremely valuable, but not a practical sustainability path for full teams working on ecosystem components.
A related structural challenge is that Fellowship members and Parity engineers have predictable, inflation-backed funding, which makes long-term, multi-year commitments feasible. Independent teams, on the other hand, operate without that stability and therefore carry significantly higher risk when contributing to something as large and evolving as JAM. If we want JAM to remain decentralized and supported by multiple independent teams, we need mechanisms that allow more than just the already-funded groups to participate sustainably.
4. Fellowship’s mandate is protocol correctness, not ecosystem growth
The Fellowship focuses on:
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protocol design & maintenance
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core implementations
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runtime and system logic
But not on the items I mentioned before (developer experience, SDKs, tooling, onboarding, community growth, real-world adoption, education, etc)
I think those pieces are essential if JAM is to succeed after launch.
5. So the conversation is not “pre-M1 vs post-M1”
It’s:
“Protocol implementation” vs “Ecosystem readiness and adoption.”
The Prize (seems to) cover the first.
The Fellowship partially supports protocol contributors.
But the ecosystem layer has no support structure at all, and is equally important for JAM’s real-world success.
I really appreciate your openness to induct JAM contributors into the Fellowship — that’s a great initiative. My argument is simply that we also need a mechanism to incentivize the ecosystem components that fall outside the Prize and outside the Fellowship’s current mandate.
Thanks again for engaging in this discussion — aligning these pieces will be crucial for the success of JAM as a whole. And please feel free to correct me if any of my assumptions about the Fellowship structure or incentive mechanisms are inaccurate — I’m raising these points so we can better understand how all the pieces fit together.