tyvdh I take it "earlier this morning" is in reference to UTC time? 😅

    The SCF round 5 submission phase has closed. What a wild last 24 hours! So many procrastinators 😉

    All told if my count is correct we've got 33 entries this round. Amazing! Not all entries are created equal however and like last round we've gone through and combed out a few which didn't quite measure up to the standards of the SCF. These entries in no particular order are:

    StellarSpace
    Insufficient effort around functionality already natively available on StellarTerm.

    Changing lives with cryptocurrency such as XLM
    Not an entry. For charity or donation efforts explore services like Lumenthropy.

    Stellar Community Forum
    Already won the SCF.

    ZTrust
    Little substantive work done. No live element.

    Ceviche
    No evidence of substantive work done. No live element.

    Hide my secret
    Not utilizing Stellar in any meaningful way.

    Tokenbox
    This project is interesting and it was a tough call but ultimately the entry just isn't ready.
    Live aspect isn't working, entry template wasn't followed well and it's not clear how or if Stellar has been implemented in any meaningful way.

    Ai-Fi.net
    Doesn't seem to have Stellar implemented in any meaningful way. This grant is not for funding bug bounties. Once they can implement and deliver on some of their other intentions it's possible this entry would be reconsidered for future rounds.

    Russian Speaking Stellar Community
    As much as we want to support content and documentation entries in the SCF it's clear this entry is not and has no intention of competing within the rules or spirit of the SCF. This is a fund for work completed or proven not for a promise of future work.

    StarForex
    Entrant has made it clear they have no intention of competing within the rules or spirit of the SCF.

    Aside from these disqualifications there are several projects right on the edge of a disqualification which will be disqualified before the nomination vote if they don't significantly improve their entries in the coming weeks. I see a strong effort but the delivery is weak. We need the community review process to be as seamless and straight forward as possible. Leaving too much clicking and exploring outside GalacticTalk is a big ask when there are this many entries. I will be reaching out to these projects individually with my critique.

    If you aren't in either of these lists now is not the time to rest. Keep improving and marketing your efforts. Make it easy to understand and "get" your idea. We've got a pretty sizeable pool of entries this round and the results will largely be determined by your ability to quickly sell your idea to a busy but educated community. Be very detailed and direct, explore new avenues like audio and video, don't keep it simple, keep it Stellar.

    For all the reviewers and voters out there remember to keep it civil and please use this form to report on any issues, complaints or ideas. We are listening and your feedback is and has been incredibly important in shaping the outcome and progress of the Stellar Community Fund.

    ❤️ you all, onwards to the discussion phase!

    We at Ai-Fi.net are not sure if this is the right place for the discussion. Let me know if this is not and then we will find a different venue for it.

    We have been working on the project for about two years now. It is designed to be a privacy-centric network (Internet) infrastructure such that users may construct their own social networks (most are inherently private), cloud storage or servers, personal VPN (for smart homes), and all other Internet functions that need not be hosted in public services (Facebook, WeChat, Homekit, etc.). We'd like to do this without being part of the surveillance capitalism and without demanding the account registration from our users, much like the Bitcoin/Stellar distributed ledger architecture. With this goal in mind, we pretty much need to fund it on fees and the service charges on our users are going to be on a per transaction basis which is naturally "micro" in nature. Cryptocurrencies are the only technology that will make this micropayment service scheme possible.

    We think collecting cryptocurrencies as service charges is fairly straightforward. However, collecting them in an anonymous way is quite an another thing. We have put off this effort to the next release with some decent ideas on how that can be done. However, for the current release, we have built a system based on Stellar network for managing the digital assets. We have put together a mechanism such that some digital assets may be published over Ai-Fi Root Registry, which is protected and tied to Stellar Network accounts that may be publicly accessed but privately audited and protected, much like that for Certificate Transparency, but self-managed by individual asset owners. We have implemented this protection mechanism for users' email addresses by taking advantage of the Stellar Network blockchain without re-inventing the wheel like the Certificate Transparency architecture. This Stellar based Root Registry supports the encryption of our end-to-end SecureEmail and protects our users' public identity from theft.

    Our SecureEmail takes advantage of the Stellar Network to protect one of our most important cyber identities and deliver the end-to-end encryption to emails, the most popular software in the world, without requiring an Ai-Fi service account and/or the need to start out with a new mailbox/provider. Our contribution to the dApp industry is the implementation of the SecureEmail that cleanly separates the public aspects (e.g email address and pre-key store) from the private (email content and metadata). This has not been possible without the help of the Stellar/blockchain technologies. We want to make sure if this is the thing you deemed as "Doesn't seem to have Stellar implemented in any meaningful way".

    By the way, to support the various privacy-centric utilities and services without demanding an account (trackable), we need to re-invent just about everything. The "Krypton Token" is one of them, which is a bit counter-intuitive and needs our users to pay more attention to it. This is why we concocted our "Bug Bounty" program to put money where our mouth is. The bounty happens to be in Stellar Lumens, which is probably something you want to encourage. This absolutely does not imply we will use the grant solely to fund the bounty program.

    All in all, we think we have utilized Stellar in a very significant way, delivered our SecureEmail to protect the world's most popular software regardless of the email providers, integrated with a powerful file sync utility (Nextcloud), and accomplished all these with anonymity totally in line with the spirit of dApp without demanding an account sign-up. Hidden in this 2.0 release are those foundational supports critical to all other upper-layer applications, not immediately obvious to ordinary user. There are many exciting features to come in future releases, especially the anonymous micropayment design slated in 3.0 that we are very proud of.

    Please don't construe this reply as a demand for reconsideration. Nevertheless, we would appreciate if you can answer some of the points raised here. We are doing some great stuff, but its broad scope makes it difficult for us to evangelize it. Stellar as a payment/exchange infrastructure will be a great help to our cause and we want to be part of it.

    We have constructed an infrastructure which is difficult to encapsulate in our short proposal to your SCF program. We do have a website containing write-ups and documents that attempt to explain us more. We also have released a mobile client Ai-Fi Central and a sync cloud Ai-Fi HomeCloud client in the Apple App Store, a home server runnable on Raspberry Pi 4, and an Ai-Fi Desktop extension on Windows platforms. We are doing over a large number of Internet applications, based on an over-the-counter, pay-as-you-go payment scheme and many foundational supports underneath. The best way to understand us is to try out our applications first hand to see for yourself whether or not we are the real thing and or we have Stellar implemented in a meaningful way.

    Thanks for your time.

      BryonSato

      Thank you for your detailed and professional response. I personally appreciate being able to discuss these issues openly and respectfully.

      The Stellar Community Fund is just that, a fund for the community to take part in distributing Lumens. This leads to some powerful and incredible opportunities while also presenting some unique challenges and obstacles. One of the obvious challenges with a community vote is that it's the community evaluating. A busy community. A community with other full time jobs and responsibilities. A community that cares but has other things to do. Aside from a time constraint you also have an expertise constraint and while many of the community are engineers, business developers and entrepreneurs, many of them are not, yet we should all have a say and voice in allocating an informed opinion towards the projects we care the most about.

      In order to best serve the voters we disqualify projects which aren't obviously relevant to the mission of the SCF. Too much cognitive and time load for any one entry is grounds for a disqualification. There are other factors too like unacknowledged legal liability, deep unforeseen technical challenges, just being off topic, etc. all of which we carefully consider but we intentionally don't give extremely deep or overly careful consideration for each individual project simply because voters won't either. If we don't "get it" quickly, neither will the voters, ultimately siphoning valuable time and mental energy away from other entries. This was the case with your project. What little Stellar there seemed to be was buried in so much other stuff which, while interesting, we were unable to grasp quickly.

      The simple answer is you shouldn't support something you don't understand and for the SCF if it cannot be understood quickly and simply it's going to have a hard time competing and must result in a disqualification in order to refine the entry pool.

      Every round we iterate, improve and come back stronger and better able to serve the purpose of the SCF. A big goal of mine for the future is to allow for better support of complex and technically mature entries like yours to compete and receive the support and feedback they need to win while still providing a space for experimentation and exploration of new ideas.

      All told if I were to sum it up the SCF is made up of three ingredients. Stellar, Community and Fund. Eligible entries must have Stellar as the key ingredient, carefully explained and marketed to the Community. Then and only then will entries be eligible to participate for a chance at the Funds.

      Personally I'm intrigued by your project and I sincerely hope you'll join us in a future round with a refined and focused entry. I apologize for the confusion and disappointment and it is my hope to continuously improve the SCF to be able to avoid these kinds of conversations in the future. Your professionalism and tact is greatly appreciated and I hope you choose to stick around.

      fwiw if you're able to achieve a sort of anonymous micro transactions service like Coil, packaged as a standalone service, that would be a great fit for the SCF in my estimation.

      You can also always reach me on Keybase tyvdh or via email tyler@stellar.org. Happy to chat.

          tyvdh
          Thanks for your detailed response. Now I understand where you are coming from and what SCF is all about. In the future rounds we will submit more focused project that hopefully is more consistent with SCF's objective and the review process of this community. You will definitely see more of us.
          The Coil service is certainly interesting. Thank you for the link.
          Your consideration and patience are greatly appreciated.

            15 days later

            Johns There is no way in this round. We also failed to apply. So we are waiting for the next round in + -3 months

              12 days later

              We’ve made it to the nominations phase! Over the next week we’ll be narrowing down the 21 projects to a final 8. Voting will happen over on our stellarcommunity.fund voting application. The voting process is pretty simple but please ensure you read and follow the following carefully.

              For a refresher on all the rules please see our community fund page.

              Voting:

              Voting will be held on stellarcommunity.fund
              Before voting, please take some time to read through the proposals carefully. Proposal authors have put a lot of work into their projects, so do them a favor and spend some time reading what they’ve put out there!

              Prerequisites: You will need a Keybase account to vote.

              To vote:

              • Click the "Sign in to vote" button on the top right of stellarcommunity.fund
              • Enter your Keybase username
              • Click "Sign in with Keybase"
              • You will receive a message from SCFBot. Click the confirmation link to complete the sign-in process. (You can verify that it’s the real SCF bot by checking the DNS proof)
              • Once you’re logged in, you can start to select your nominee picks. You must vote for 3, but can vote for up-to 8 proposals. (Remember to read through proposals!)
              • Once you’ve chosen your nominees, click the submit button. Once you’ve cast your vote, there’s no going back! (Your picks will stick around in memory, so you can mark them and come back later before a final submission.)

              Important bits:

              Only one voting account per person is allowed. We’ll be checking to make sure no one is manipulating the vote. Play fair and everything will be great! Bad actors will be removed from participating in the vote and future rounds.

              That’s all there is to it! Start digging into those proposals!

              Just a heads up the projects who are voted into the final round this week will need to make a video to showcase their project before the start of the final round. (August 3rd) This will be a video that voters will watch and (partly) base their decision on. Now may be a good time to get started on that, whether or not you make it to the final round you won’t want to leave this till last minute.



              Here are the guidelines:

              • Your video should not be longer than 3 minutes. 
              • The format should be 1920x1080px. 
              • More recommended output settings can be found here. 
              • It’s up to you which platform you record your video on (Loom.com works well and is free) and how you want to fill your three minutes. Here are the videos from the previous round: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmr3tp_7-7Gj7hGDKyVa53ZdEUMLB9oNy
              • Create a thumbnail for your project (branding/logo of your project), also 1920x1080px.

              Good luck and don't forget to vote in our nominations round if you haven't yet!

              4 days later

              Stellar Community Fund round 5 nominations have closed! The votes have been counted and the final 8 projects have risen to the surface! Kolten beatbox please...

              In alphabetical order:

              Big claps to all the finalists, I'm just so proud of all of you! ❤️

              Don't relax yet though, there's still one week left for final voting and it starts next Monday August 3rd. This last voting round will split the 3,000,000 XLM prize pool by vote percentage to each project.

              For information on how voting works and where it takes place just scroll up a bit.

              For those who didn’t quite make the cut this round, don’t give up, continue to improve your projects or perhaps shift gears entirely. There’s a whole world of innovation and excitement out there just waiting to be explored and built. Take what you’ve learned and leverage that to vault you into greater success. You’ve got this! 👏

              SCF Round 5 Nominations Postmortem

              First off I want to thank everyone for their participation and care around the SCF. This is truly a community fund and I want to always foster that core value. We are also a fund however and giving away any money but especially a lot of money comes with a pretty large set of challenges. Regardless of how you feel right now though the SDF and this community has done a good job with the SBC and SCF. Could we do better? Absolutely. Never be duped though into thinking we don’t care, aren’t intentional or are just throwing money away carelessly. That is not true and never has been. Good projects have come out of the SBC and SCF. Tools and apps we use every day, people you know, talk to and appreciate. For some, like me, it has actually changed our lives entirely. The community funding programs the SDF has put on have been phenomenal. It’s incredibly difficult to give money away well in a public or decentralized way but our efforts have not gone unrewarded. Please don’t lose the forest for the few trees which didn’t make it. Every SCF has gotten better and SCF 2.0 will continue those improvements in a more concerted and exponential way. I’m here for you if you all will continue to be there for each other and this fund. Keep showing up, voicing your opinions respectfully and pushing this program into better and better places. We are a growing and maturing community, remember this is not just about you and your project, it’s bigger than that.

              With that said, in the spirit of transparency I would like to take this opportunity to pull back the curtain on the numbers and criteria of the SCF nomination voting process. Let’s kick things off with a graph:

              The first thing to notice is that nomination participation in this round has nearly tripled compared to previous rounds. That’s a huge jump. The next obvious thing to notice is that vote removal is on a very aggressive exponential curve upwards while the leftover valid votes have remained relatively static. One thing this chart doesn’t show is that our criteria for removing votes has always stayed the same throughout all of these rounds. Up until now we’ve chosen not to publish those criteria as that would make circumventing those criteria much easier. I’ve had a hunch for a while that a day would come where our criteria and the verification process we’ve been using would crack and we’d see the exponential curve we saw this round. This is why SCF 2.0 is so essential for the survival of the SCF. A panel of judges is necessary for the nomination phase and better voting mechanics is essential to help counteract, not just catch bad actors. Suffice it to say we’re not going to be using Keybase verification anymore, it’s entirely insufficient for distinguishing between malicious and new voters. It’s relatively high friction for participation yet that friction doesn’t assist us much in helping to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate voters.

              Our criteria for voter disqualification for every round has been:

              • Duplicate IPs with sufficient account profile evidence to suggest they could be the same person
              • All accounts created on or after the round announcement date with zero proofs, no bio info, no additional devices and which only voted for 3 projects
              • All accounts created during the nomination week

              These criteria all have significant flaws but they are right for Keybase as a verification method. Duplicate IPs could just be a roommate voting for his buddies app which would be fine, but they could also be indicative of a click farm or the same fellow once on his laptop and again on his phone or tablet. I'm fine with the roommates, but click farms and multiple devices from the same person is cheating. The issue is I can't know for certain, and that's the rub, you can rarely know for certain, you can only give it your best guess and lean on the most fair side. Disqualifying all accounts created on or after the round announcement date is hardly fair but if the account in question has added zero social proofs, no bio info, only has the single device and only voted for 3 projects, that’s a very strong signal they could have been paid, coerced or manipulated into voting for a specific project. Removing all new Keybase accounts during the nomination week doesn’t actually remove many votes, but it's pretty obvious if you're only now creating an account, you don't care about anything but voting for a single project which A) means two of your votes are meaningless throw away votes or B) could mean you've been paid, coerced or manipulated into voting for that specific project.

              The final and primary glaring issue with these criteria is they get weaker and weaker over time as sock puppet accounts get older, add fake proofs, bios and devices. Accounts that were caught in previous rounds get harder and harder to detect appropriately and soon most votes won’t mean anything as the majority will have to be removed in order to ensure fairness leaving only a select handful of original “verified” accounts. Aka a panel of judges. What SCF 2.0 will do for the nomination phase is simply formalizing the inevitable. I want to include more voters, I want to lower the barrier to entry. I want friends and family who don’t care about Keybase and adding proofs and all this mumbo jumbo to be able to participate, and they will, just not in the nomination phase. Once the right projects are in, actually distributing the prize pool becomes much more straightforward and traditionally has seen orders of magnitude less vote removal anyway.

              So in SCF 2.0 between a panel of judges for the nomination phase and SMS voter verification we’ll be in a much better place to ensure the most fair and still inclusive community fund.

              I feel for those projects caught in the crossfire of this imperfect process but there is no perfect open online voting system. What we have has actually worked incredibly well, the top 8 actually usually doesn’t shift much beyond a few projects. I’m also not accusing anyone of manipulation and neither should you. Oftentimes we just fall victim to a bigger process which attempts to make the best of a tough situation. If it smells like a bot, acts like a bot and looks like a bot that doesn’t mean it is but we have no choice but to treat it like it is.

              Finally if any entrant would like to know their own numbers in this round PM me and I’d be happy to share. I’m choosing not to publish those numbers here publicly in order to protect those who were more heavily affected by our cuts. I will say the before and after only changed the position of 3 projects and that is very common when we make our cuts, very little changes for the majority.

              Thank you once again for your care and participation. I want to do right by this community. I’m confident together we can do it if we respect one another and push for bigger goals than just our own fistful of cash.

                8 days later

                SCF Round 5 Finals Postmortem

                Well, the final results for SCF #5 have been sorted out and let me begin with a big long YIKERS. Remember in the nominations round how we had a record turnout of 671 voters all of whom we removed except for 295? Well in this final round we not only matched, but smashed that record. 4,137 unique Keybase accounts showed up last week to vote in our final round. Four thousand one hundred and thirty seven “voters”! Let’s put that in a graph compared to previous rounds. Red is removed votes and blue is votes which were left.

                This round was extremely difficult to review. We’ve never had thousands of votes to look through, the current system isn’t designed for that kind of volume. We spent the last few days and nights combing through hundreds of votes and making lots of tough calls and we’ve arrived at the following criteria for disqualifications:

                1. All accounts with duplicate IPs (679 accounts removed)
                2. All accounts created since nomination voting started (320 accounts removed)
                3. All accounts with zero proofs (2,662 accounts removed)
                4. All accounts with inactive or bounty hunter proofs (291)
                5. All accounts which voted for Trybal.Network not caught by above criteria (106)

                The first thing to address, regretfully, is that after much deliberation we’ve made the difficult decision to disqualify Trybal.Network from the final round. Before any adjustments they stood far ahead of the pack which always signals a deeper look.

                As we began our standard disqualifications it became clear that a majority of the disqualifications had a common project in their queue, Trybal.Network. IP dups, new accounts, and zero proofs were all painting a pretty unflattering picture. Once we started a deep dive into hundreds of Twitter, Github, and Reddit proofs, strong evidence became hard proof. Trybal.Network has attracted a very specific crowd of folks the SCF wants nothing to do with; bounty hunters. Once we had removed everything short of a straight disqualification Trybal.Network was dead last in the standings, and not barely, it was clear they shouldn’t even be in the final round. We’ve always reserved the right to take dramatic action like this and today we’re doing it. Trybal.Network has been disqualified from the SCF #5 finals. There’s no need or value in speculating as to the blame or specific source of the manipulation, the focus should rather be on the fact that their community of supporters are not legitimate or beneficial to the SCF or Stellar community and were twisting the outcome in an unfair and unhelpful manner.

                We don’t take executive actions like this lightly and we always prefer decentralization and openness. However, in its current design, with manipulation of this magnitude, the SCF isn’t well suited towards a fair decentralized distribution of funds, it’s weighted by design in favor of bad actors when they choose to take advantage. To date they really haven’t, but now, obviously, they have.

                For me this leaves one final glaring question, how did Trybal.Network affect the initial nominations? Who got left behind? How would the final results have changed? The answer is not much, there’s a world of difference between 671 votes and 4,137. Most of the manipulation in the nomination round came from other projects which rightfully didn’t make it. However, if we were to apply the same disqualification logic from this final round to the nominations round: Trybal.Network and Rigel would both be out. Taking their place would have been Xlet and Cosmic.vote. These three projects, Rigel, Xlet and Cosmic.vote were casualties caught in an unfair fight. There wasn’t overwhelming support for or against these projects however Rigel got in when perhaps it shouldn’t have and Xlet and Cosmic.vote got left out when perhaps they shouldn’t have.

                In light of this we’ve made the decision to leave Rigel in the final round but to adjust their position to more closely reflect legitimate community sentiment from the nomination round and to promote both Xlet and Cosmic.vote into the finals and assign them votes which also reflect community sentiment from the nomination round. So without further ado, after all the hours of review, conversations and counsel, our final results for SCF #5 are:

                • Lettuce: Stellar-based point of sale (POS) Application | 18.1818% | 545,454 XLM
                • Stellarmint - Stellar Tokens Made Easier | 15.8103% | 474,308 XLM
                • Free Voting Platform | 15.0198% | 450,592 XLM
                • OpenSolar: Securitized project financing powered by Stellar | 13.8340% | 415,019 XLM
                • The Interstellar Platform | 13.8340% | 415,019 XLM
                • Stellar Update - Dedicated Blog about everything Stellar | 7.5099% | 225,296 XLM
                • Xlet - Open Stellar Hardware Wallet | 5.9289% | 177,865 XLM
                • Cosmic.vote ~ Working Toward Decentralized Organizations | 5.5336% | 166,007 XLM
                • Rigel - Monetize Links for Payments and Donations in Seconds | 4.3478% | 130,434 XLM

                This round was tough and far from ideal and for that we are sorry. Ultimately this is why SCF 2.0 is so important, this is why we’ve been collecting and distilling years of feedback into a new structure for Stellar community funding, it’s why we’re so excited for the future and why we’re so sure it’s time for a Big Change™. So stay tuned, SCF 2.0 is on it’s way for a timely arrival on August 31st.

                For those who won the last SCF 1.0, congratulations! You deserve it. We’ll be in touch about next steps for collecting on your prizes and taking your projects to the next level. I love and appreciate all of you and all you’ve done for the Stellar community. We’ve had some great rounds, but our best rounds are yet to come.

                Thank you Tyler for ensuring a fair voting process and thanks to the community for voting us to fourth place. We'll work hard to ensure Opensolar is a great success

                Such a shame you had to wait for the finals before disqualifying Trybal with such flimsy excuse. There is no single project in the entire crypto space devoid of 'bounty hunters'. This is a grave injustice to the Trybal project and you should bow your heads in shame.

                Congratulations to everyone, amazing to see how close every submission was, great quality! Echo thanks to Tyler and the SCF for the great job of keeping due and fair process and maintaining everyone communicated. Proud to be part of the community and looking forward to the next steps!

                Kudos to all the winners. It's a shame that a few bad apples can have such a negative impact on legitimate projects backed by hard working teams to make a difference. But this is why the vetting process is important and the SCF should be commended for taking the necessary actions to detect this and handle the situation (improving the process throughout!)

                Looking forward to participating in the SCF in a future round... hopefully the next one if all goes according to plan!

                Will SCF Round 6 Submission be starting soon? The schedule above lists August 10th and the end of round 5 with one week pause. We're planning on participating in this upcoming round. Thanks!