¶ The Path to Decentralization
Decentralization, as many of us know, isn’t a starting point. It’s a destination — or maybe even just a journey with no end, with key milestones along the way.
When addressing the question of Where is Kleomedes Going, we have some idea of what milestones need to be achieved. How to achieve those milestones, however, is a much less clear picture. This is not an uncommon problem for Web3 projects. The industry is too new to anticipate what changes will be around the next corner. Being flexible and willing to pivot is an essential reality all web3 projects must accept. This is why a roadmap is a living thing, and must be allowed to grow with the ecosystem.
This doesn’t, however, abscond projects from having a roadmap and goals that need to be achieved to reach success. At Kleomedes we have a very strong vision of what success looks like: a Decentralized Validator Organization with contributors from all over the ecosystem participating actively in on-chain governance, promotion, development, and education.
But how do you get there?
One of the common ideas thrown around in web3 is ‘preparing for the next million users’. That is a good idea, but one that is rather nebulous and long-term. To onboard users, we first have to onboard creators! And we have to establish reliable infrastructure to support those creators and their ideas! And we need robust systems of governance to control these decentralized tools! So before we start worrying about onboarding millions of users, we need to start caring about the experience of the creators and builders already here— as well as those trying to break in.
¶ Focused Growth
In an effort to accomplish the goals outlined above, there are several key areas that Kleomedes is focusing on for future growth.
¶ Enterprise Goals
The Kleomedes ‘Enterprise’ is the side of our organization that is the most real-world facing. They run the data center, interface with regional and legal entities on behalf of Kleomedes, and spearhead our potential outside funding propositions.
Expanding our Validator to new Chains
We are constantly looking for new chains that fit our criteria for good investments. This could be existing chains that are competitive to get into, or promising new upstarts that need help from established validators like ourselves to get off the ground running.
Applying for Grants
What we are building has direct benefit to the ecosystems we build on. While we are an enterprise that intends to run at a profit, we also see ourselves as a public good and everything we build is open and shared with the public to benefit the entire ecosystem. For this reason, we will seek funding from the communities we support to help us build these public goods.
Growing our Data Center
As our enterprise grows, we will have opportunities to utilize our data center in new and exciting ways. This could include cloud-computing for projects like Akash. It could also include other services that aren’t limited to just the Cosmos ecosystem. We may even expand to multiple data centers over time.
Establishing a Legal Entity
Inevitably we will need to have a legal entity to represent Kleomedes outside of the web3 world. This is being pursued as regulations start to form around how enterprises like this can function legally.
¶ Development Goals
Kleomedes has a development team that actively works to build us the custom tooling and contracts we need to accomplish our goals.
Website Updates
We are a data-driven project that focuses on transparency. Our goal is to continually keep updating our website to be more informative, accurate, and up-to-date with anything and everything related to our project. This includes plans for live staking APR info, Validator Vote History/Commentary, Dashboards for monitoring all of our subDAO councils for each chain, and much more.
DAO Tooling
We work actively with DAODAO to improve our DAO tooling, which includes custom development of modules, shared with the public, that can be used to add necessary features for a DAO.
Developer Onboarding
As we grow, we will need to onboard more developers to expand our offerings into new areas. This includes creation of a Security Audit team that specializes in reviewing live contracts and the code that runs the very chains we operate. It also includes an innovation team that works to build new innovative solutions not just for Kleomedes, but for the entire ecosystem.
¶ Governance Goals
The main purpose of Kleomedes is to develop a system that incentivizes active participation in Governance across every chain we validate. This will provide opportunities for leaders to rise up and share their vision with the entire ecosystem.
Main Council of Leaders
We currently have a core-team led council serving as the main leadership of the project. As we grow, we have outlined roles for community leaders to rise up and join the council to help drive the project towards our future goals.
SubDAO Councils for each Chain
We are developing a subcouncil for every chain we validate on. These councils will be made up of community contributors that are rising to positions of leadership, as well as representatives from the chain’s own community/leadership that want to take part in our governance.
Community-Driven Governance Voting
To further decentralize the governance of our validators across the Cosmos, we are building a system that enables the community to be in control of how our validators vote on each chain. The leadership in place will be directly responsible for placing the votes through the DAODAO portal, but the community will be empowered through education and engagement activities to let their voice be heard in on-chain governance.
Kleomedes Advisory Club
The obligations of Governance Leadership can be intense, and the goal is to not rely on single points of failure in the system. Leaders are encouraged to retire after a term of active service. This retirement does not, however, mean they don’t still have a role to play! Retired leaders can function as council advisors to assist new leaders and mentor them as they grow, as well as go out into the rest of the ecosystem and take what they’ve learned with them to help further the goals of decentralization across all of web3.
¶ Community Goals
As a decentralized project that is driven by our community, our goals for community growth are quite substantial.
Onboarding
Utilizing various tools like Crew3, we plan to draw in contributors from all over the Cosmos and get them connected with activities that match their interest and skillset. This ensures that nobody gets left out because they are unsure of where to plug in.
Education
Starting small with simple one-on-one mentorship, eventually we plan to grow to a full-fledged Academy for training web3 contributors of all types; leadership, marketing, development, governance, and everything in between.
Promotion
By activating the community we will harness the full power of a decentralized organization. This, combined with our other community goals, will create a powerful promotion tool for every chain we validate. This makes Kleomedes a valuable asset for any blockchain community. We will be producing twitter threads, medium articles, video series, and any other form of promotional material needed to convey the purpose and value of the chains we work with.
Documentation
No plan can be complete without documentation. As we work through developing everything in our roadmap, we plan to document the entire process. By keeping a unified approach to how we document and organize our structure, it will form a blueprint that can be applied by any DAO to mirror our success and improve on our limitations!
¶ Collaboration Goals
Last but definitely not least, we plan to partner with as many projects as we can to help further our mutual goals in the web3 ecosystem.
Chain Communities
Every chain has a community and some kind of foundation for supporting it. We plan to integrate with each of these communities to provide access to all of our above community goals for every chain and their constituents. We are already on the Juno Growth SubDAO, and are currently working to join the Akash Insiders and also the Migaloo Community.
Cosmos Interchain Projects
We are already working with SparkIBC to promote their interchain hub, and we plan to continue to support this project and any other promising IBC program. With SparkIBC, we can participate in fundraising, donation programs, public goods funding, and many other interchain activities that support the Cosmos.
AI Driven Technology
We are also working with AlgoVera to implement some of their AI tools to drive the ‘autonomous’ in DAO’s. This will allow us to lessen the workload on individual contributors while providing much more accessible information to contributors. This will enable our community to be more effective at achieving our stated goals.
Support Validator Decentralization
There are other groups, like the Validator Commons, working to build more robust systems for decentralizing governance. We will actively work with them to improve their systems, as well as learn from them as to how we can improve ours.
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These are the current goals of our organization. As we grow and expand out into the Cosmos, we plan to use these goals to drive us to new and innovative solutions to the problems we will face together in this new way of working— enabled by web3 technology.
These are the actions we are currently planning on taking to help us achieve our goals. These are not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather a sample of ideas to encourage other contributors to join our organization— whether to help us execute these actions or to propose additional actions we should take to better achieve our goals!
We are excited to undertake this epic journey with all of you! Please stop in our Discord to connect with us, or check out our Crew3 quest-board to get plugged in!