Scytale Digital’s Involvement in the W3F Futures program via PoKe – The Polkadot Key Account Unit

Ecosystem
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Scytale Digital and BOTLabs GmbH are taking a proactive approach to address a critical need within the Polkadot ecosystem. While the W3F Decentralized Futures program rightfully has emphasized onboarding new developers and appchain projects, Scytale Digital also recognizes the immense potential of large enterprise and government adoption for Polkadot and its ecosystem. The unique solutions provided by Polkadot, particularly through its parachains, make it an ideal choice for institutions seeking secure and trustless collaboration.

Historically, our ecosystem’s actors may not have prioritized engagement with enterprises and governments, which has led to missed opportunities and a lower-than-potential adoption rate. The Polkadot Key Account Unit (PoKe) proposal to establish a dedicated entity focused on enterprises and governments can bridge this gap. By participating in blockchain-focused industry events, political gatherings, and vertical-specific conferences, the entity aims to identify opportunities, engage decision-makers, and present Polkadot as the solution of choice.

To operate efficiently, the entity will work transparently and closely with the W3F and other coalition members. Its funding model, initially as a cost center, reflects its commitment to benefiting Polkadot and its ecosystem. Our approach recognizes the importance of the groundwork laid by our community of builders, outsources specialized functions to world leader in critical issues advisory, Brunswick Group, and involves senior executives from the W3F in negotiations.

Overall, our upcoming proposal will outline a strategic initiative to strengthen Polkadot’s presence in the enterprise and government sectors, ultimately contributing to the growth and relevance of the Polkadot ecosystem. Through collaborative efforts, clear communication, and a dedicated focus, Scytale Digital and BOTlabs GmbH aim to propel Polkadot into a prominent position within the blockchain infrastructure landscape.

As we aim to operate with transparency, please feel free to review the attached working document, which contains more detailed information on the entity’s plans and structure. We welcome and encourage the community’s input and feedback.

With best regards,

Mark

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What are the list of success cases for “large enterprise and government adoption” in Polkadot thus far?

If the success cases are few because they are “in progress” (e.g. Mythical - is that “large enterprise”?), can you enumerate at least a few of those in detail, including what you would hope to accomplish for those accounts by mid-2024 and end of 2024?

I believe it is best to focus new BD activities on 2.0 CorePlay/CoreJam centric solutions, rather than 1.0’s product of parachains, and that it will take 6-9 months to develop. I would suggest almost no expenditure in early 2024 and seed N competing “Entrepreneur-In-Residences” in Fall 2024 rather than keeping N BD people on payroll. What is wrong with this thinking?

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As Polkadot Head Ambassador, I contacted several government agencies in Central Asia regulating Blockchain space to explain the Web3 concept and Polkadot. It’s a big demand from business and government to understand what is going on in our industry. I support this initiative.

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This proposal, viewed in its entirety, could have a lot of scope for delivering benefits. However, I am a little concerned about the line “outsources specialized functions to world leader in critical issues advisory, Brunswick Group”. First of all, the language here is vague. What is actually meant? Secondly, the name Brunswick rings alarm bells with me. What I do know is that for the year 2022, Brunswick - in its capacity as a big name in corporate PR - was the recipient of a very large amount of money to deliver “mainstream” news that would benefit Polkadot (I honestly don’t know if the contract was with Parity or W3F.) During the course of that year, Brunswick failed to deliver anything in terms of PR support which presumably was behind a decision that led to that contract being terminated. (Fortunately, we had a separate contract with another agency that was more successful). The individuals at Brunswick handling the Polkadot account had limited blockchain knowledge, and took a hands-off role, choosing not to suggest proactive strategies to justify their high fee.

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Can you please elaborate:

  1. why is the senior executive from Web3f needed for deals?
  2. Why do you not mention (let alone elaborate with plans) parachains? The expertise on how to use Polkadot is not in Parity or Web3f, it’s in parachains, so actual solutions that you would sell would be powerful and effectively built.
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I think there has been a lot of discussion whether or not an enterprise/government-first approach worked well for Parity and Polkadot versus a more crypto-native approach. Admittedly, I come from the crypto-native world but am open to reading more case studies about a different approach.

For those of us who are not familiar with the previous work of Scytale, BOTLab, and the Brunswick Group so we can better evaluate the proposal?

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excellent - I’m glad to see a group representing this segment of the market.
One of the pros of the decentralisation approach is that we don’t need to pick a target for BD, we can approach many different segments of the market.

What I DO think would be useful is a group that is helping overseeing the different BD groups, proving a second opinion, helping collaboration between the teams and making sure we are all singing from the same book. Think of a scrum master running a scrum of scrums in the agile development world.

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We (the PolkaPort East Team) just had a call with Scytale today, following which we would like to express our support for their proposal.
Getting large corporates and government agencies to use Polkadot requires a concentrated effort, and this team has what it takes to do just that. I personally also really like the idea to hire Brunswick Group to facilitate these negotiations – This is the way to get things done in the real world.
As PoKe is focused primarily on Europe and the Middle East, whereas we are focused on HK and East Asia, there will be some good synergies, which we plan to exploit.

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I want to support this and I like the idea of a team focusing on “large” client adoption but I worry about budget, support, and time. If you look at the competitive landscape;

Polygon - Pays/paid their way in
Avax - Has roots in NYC and is knocking on every bank’s door
Solana - Enterprise backgrounds

Building an enterprise pipeline takes 12-18 months and if this project wraps after 12 I’m concerned OpenGov will say “You’ve not done anything” Though you will have it just takes significantly longer than net new teams to close.

Again, in support but concerned about not getting the time/budget to make it work.

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What are the list of success cases for “large enterprise and government adoption” in Polkadot thus far?

There are several projects working with enterprise clients and we would deem even initiations of deals a successful step forward at this stage, such as: Astar, Energy Web, Centrifuge, Kilt, Aventus, Origin Trail, Nodle, Peaq, Frequency, Agrotoken and Mythical Games (apologies to those we didn’t mention). As a unit, the DOT ecosystem is mature, flexible and secure enough to show it is possible to convert enterprise clients from heavily leaning on private chains to opening up to the possibilities of using public blockchains ‘Secured by Polkadot’.

If drawing on the idea that success means building a solid narrative, you can see examples of this with mentions such as this, where these efforts are deemed to be a great catalyst for the ecosystem. If you only include completed, operational integrations where enterprises are on-chain and already transacting and generating volume on Polkadot’s parachains, then the list will of course be smaller, but still promising, with projects like MeWe already having onboarded 500,000 users on-chain.

Our objective is to build off of this, leaning into the assumption of feasibility for much more, generate leads and help negotiate deals together with ecosystem projects. We hope to leverage as much of what the community has to offer, involve everyone who is happy to contribute in discussions and hand off 3-5 solid prospects to the community for closing deals by the end of the initial 12-months of operations.

Polkadot Enterprise Deals to explore and build off of include:

Astar x Sony, Toyota, Japan
Energy Web x Shell, many others
Centrifuge x BlockTower and others
Kilt x Deloitte, Axel Springer, DENA
Aventus x Beatport, Vodafone, Heathrow Airport
Mythical x NFL
OriginTrail x British Standards Institution, Walmart, Google, Oracle
Nodle x Adobe, Roole
Peaq x eLoop, and their Tesla fleet
Agrotoken x Visa
Frequency x MeWe

If the success cases are few because they are “in progress” (e.g. Mythical - is that “large enterprise”?), can you enumerate at least a few of those in detail, including what you would hope to accomplish for those accounts by mid-2024 and end of 2024?

I believe it is best to focus new BD activities on 2.0 CorePlay/CoreJam centric solutions, rather than 1.0’s product of parachains, and that it will take 6-9 months to develop. I would suggest almost no expenditure in early 2024 and seed N competing “Entrepreneur-In-Residences” in Fall 2024 rather than keeping N BD people on payroll. What is wrong with this thinking?

No timeline has been announced or decided yet, but development requires user-testing, legal work, group-forming takes time for this type of client. There are some other promising BD proposals posted in these forums which do tackle this type of development as well. With that said:

  • Big clients need parachains. There were no big clients yet.
  • Big clients most likely will need even more than one parachain as it were before recent upgrades.
  • CoreJam/ CorePlay needs to exist for smaller clients as well as for pilots with bigger clients.

Ingo dives deeper into this throughout his Space Monkeys interview with Jay Chrawnna (with a focus on PoKe at 36:17)

Lastly, Entrepreneur-in-residence is definitely a great model, but not something we want to cover with this proposal.

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Hey Alex, thanks for your work as an ambassador, on behalf of Scytale, the PoKe team and the entire ecosystem! It would be great to catch up with you on your thoughts and experiences!

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Hey Oliver,

The Brunswick group is a very large organization, with thousands of employees and has been operating since 1987. As far as we know that engagement was with Brunswick PR in Hong Kong. We do not plan to work with them but with Brunswick Europe. We will not be asking for PR but for other services, namely introductions to decision makers. With this team, we had good experiences in the past.

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Hey Alex,

A senior exec from web3f as a counterpart will be able to help all BD efforts align and avoid redundancy / overlap among community efforts.

We agree that working with parachains is crucial and as we are in touch with most already, this initiative is something we’re looking forward to adding to ongoing conversations. We will be happy to discuss solutions with all teams, such as Unique. Having a Polkadot founder and c-level executive like Ingo involved also helps us to understand the perspective of other chains and CEOs when approaching them with potential deals also helps.

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Thanks, Max. We’re looking forward to discovering coworking opportunities and catching up with you again soon!

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Hey Birdo,

Thanks for the comment. The four-eyes principle - definitely. Usually the issuer of the grant, in this case, the W3F, plays the role of overseeing, based on reporting requirements issued by them.

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Will be great to chat, can you ping me in telegram @AlexPromoTeam

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Thanks for the context, much appreciated. Introductions to decision makers is EXACTLY what’s needed - I think we can all get behind that. PR, on the other hand, is pretty well covered from a number of angles across the ecosystem.

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Hi Mark, do you have any updates about Polkadot Key Account Unit (PoKe)?

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This is a very much needed initiative. I am active within the European regulatory landscape and there is many initiatives where Polkadot could be doing more. The european regulators are very much open to blockchain solutions, but they are currently working with the likes of Hyperledger since 2018 to build out their solutions. With the upcoming elections to EP and new Commission forming it is the perfect timing to refresh our efforts to educate the European regulators on PolkadotSDK and how it is perfect for what they are trying to achieve so they build the goals for the upcoming 5 years with Polkadot SDK in mind. We need to join the discussion ASAP, let’s talk with European Blockchain Infrastructure (EBSI), European Blockchain Partnership that is changing into EUROPEUM EDIC and all the blockchain lobbying groups such as INATBA or European Crypto Initiative. They all heard about Polkadot, but haven’t looked more deeply into it. I hope the PoKe initiative could help change that and I am looking forward to helping in any way I can.

To do this, it doesn’t need as much money as it needs constant effort by all the different ecosystem agents to educate all those involved about what the Polkadot is about.

The same goes for nation states and the middle east where I started discussions to.

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