The Future of Money: A Project Proposal

Shade Grant Proposals
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A few weeks back I proposed a Silk Roads brand here on the forums and learned the name is associated with a sketchy underground market. Name issue aside, the community felt that the scope of the project was simply too ambitious and costly for where we find ourselves in the market and the life of Shade.

This proposal addresses both of these concerns to land with what would seem to be a more phase-appropriate plan for producing high quality content around SILK .

The purpose of “The Future of Money” is to narrate the story of SILK, stables, and CBDCs through compelling written content.

People often say that I make complex ideas understandable and actionable. That is the goal with this content. Shareable, engaging written pieces that draw readers into the value of SILK, explore the larger world of stablecoins, and the looming implications of CBDCs.

I’ve secured the Medium and Twitter handles. Have logo and design help in process.

The goal would be a minimum of one long-form piece a week. Between research, synthesis, writing, publishing, and community engagement around the finished product 11hrs/wk would be a conversative time commitment.

In my experience with Medium, adjusting to and learning from your stats as they roll in is key. For example, depending on the nature of the content, two 500-word pieces might be far more effective than a single 1000-word article.

Reads, views, and shares are all key engagement metrics for success. I will share this data with the community on-request and, of course, if given the opportunity to return for a renewal grant at some point.

Relevant Experience

  • Produced 14+ pieces of video and written content for Shade Protocol
  • 10 years in creative content production
  • 14 years as an Executive Coach
  • Professor and Teacher for 11 years
  • 2x founder (both non-profit and small business)
  • 5x published author
  • Doctorate in communication skills and contextualization

Grant Ask (Aug 15, 2022 - Dec 15, 2022)

  • 11hrs/wk @ 50/hr
  • 17 weeks
  • Grant Total = $9350 (850 tokens @ 11/ea)
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A few weeks back I proposed a Silk Roads brand here on the forums and learned the name is associated with a sketchy underground market. Name issue aside,

Association with the underground drug market place silk road started by the imprisoned Ross Ulbricht is the opposite of an issue to me. That being said nearly $10,000 definitely requires some samples of your work. Many people are already doing this work for free and I would rather reward some of their efforts.

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Very legitimate ask! I made this for free a few months ago and will, in the confines of this forum, temporarily retract some of the anonymity I had hoped for with it. The Future of Money - YouTube

When it comes to writing, I have done a lot of work for Secret and am an Agency Lead for Education and Design. Published this today. This is happens to be a more creative/fun piece but I am quite capable of more technical writing as well. DeFi’s Disturbing Privacy Problem | by Secret Network | Aug, 2022 | Medium

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I agree that this project feels more in line with Shade’s current phase. I also don’t doubt Sean’s capabilities after working with him as the scrt edu lead.

Questions that come to mind:

  1. Will this be a separate Medium or could this be posted on the official Shade Medium? Less fragmented attention I think is best (everything should point to official Shade Socials)
  2. Do we already have members writing articles? Where have we received previous long form articles?
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Thanks for the vote of confidence Melch!

Would love community input on those Q’s…

From my point of view, there is a freedom that comes in having a separate Medium and Twitter. An individual can probe topics and areas of research in a way that might be thin ice for a branded entity. For example, I really want to probe SILK in contrast to CBDCs and those alternative futures. Guessing this would not be wise for Shade publicly although I’m sure it is discussed privately.

This also may support decentralization. If a piece of content is successful and resonates, and Shade’s socials retweet, it leaves the brand looking more decentralized and less self-promoting since a community member put in the work and it didn’t come from the core team.

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I personally would rather see a payment schedule where payment is distributed in line with deliverables (i.e. you are paid per article) and payments are contingent on:

  1. novelty of user base - i would say most people who read the secret medium already know about shade, so we would have to be capturing new users
  2. growth of user base - the volume of new ‘unique’ users (inflows from outside of secret network basically) needs to actually be large enough to be worth paying for

i’m not sure how to actually measure that from analytics that medium provides, beyond maybe comparing follower list on both blogs. are marketing cookies supported? would be extra nice if we could map the flow of users from the medium post to the protocol’s app page. to be clear when i talk about users i’m talking about medium users- followers, readers.

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Great thoughts. Definitely need to lean into as much info from the analytics as possible. I think the two main pathways for new users/readers here are

  1. twitter engagement as the community shares and I build some followership with the new account @silkismoney :slight_smile:

  2. keyword targeting with how the Medium is formatted, titles, tags, and so forth

On Medium you can see your email subscribers but you can’t see your followers. Right now the SN has 1040 followers and 77 email subs. Would be hard to get more granular data than that although with this project I have already connected the Twitter and the Medium to see if any additional data can trickle in from that.

Overall, I feel like my priority should be to create such compelling content that our community resonates, enthusiastically shares, and both door 1 and door 2 for readers have plenty of people flowing in.

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We are in August 2022 and beside the staking derivatives, the biggest chunk of the protocol is yet to be released

There is already enough material online to understand how Silk and stablecoins work and I don’t think funding these initiatives should be a priority (yet).

Edit : Free Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road was not a sketchy business but a free market place where free money was used for the first time. Worth the research.

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Hey Waffle - thanks for jumping in and apologies if I created offense by using the word “sketchy”. I first learned of the marketplace a couple weeks ago. Some people have told me it was questionable and others have said it is a shining example of freedom. I do not have an opinion and was only using the adjectives I had heard in connection with it.

I could not agree more regarding the sufficiency of material online regarding how Silk and stables work. I have already written over 50 pages of material on this topic and am not interested in repeating that.

My research interests are really in the philosophy of open, free money and making a case for that. So to speak in marketing terms, I want to help people who are more “top of funnel” sense the enormous disparity between a future of CBDCs and the possibility of private, decentralized money like Silk. This means guiding people into an examination of everything we believe about the nature of money.

In my work with both Secret and Shade, I have always told people, “I am not here for the technology. I am here for how the technology can support the daily life and well-being of people.” I think Silk has that potential and that more soulful angle on Silk is very interesting to me.

If its not the right time, I’m ok… I’ll keep learning, researching, and pressing into these conversations regardless!

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Hello all. As a note for everyone we have spoken with Sean P alot over these past weeks on this proposal.

  • for anything regarding this brand idea we would want to see some analytics and information before funding.
  • We also think that since products are not launched yet it may be best to delay on this, as we did with the video series.
  • Moving forward we will have definite interest in SeanP and his writing abilities to help make great content that shows the full capabilities of Silk and Shade. Thank you all for your feedback!