Mars Colony — Project X

Funding Proposals Investments
1

Mars Colony — Project X Investment

Hey everyone, Mars Colony here! We’re requesting a Project X investment of $250,000 for CLNY token. We’re also requesting the sum in stablecoins, as that’s how we manage payroll.

100% of CLNY token is owned by the Mars Colony (MC) community, however, including the treasury which we currently control while the DAO is in development. For this reason, we put this investment proposal to our community for a vote.

After a nearly unanimous (and enthusiastic) vote (240 voters with a 95% yes rate), it was clear there was nothing left to do but post here!

Why are we seeking funding?

With additional funding, we’ll be able to greatly increase the size of our team, and rapidly ramp up development to accomplish the stages of our roadmap faster. While we’re prepared to continue successful development patterns, additional funding would give us more control over timing and enable us to pursue auxiliary interests such as dedicated marketing and the nice-to-haves of our plans for game mechanics and graphics.

How will we use the funds?

Hiring is our main priority. Exact amounts will vary depending on the qualifications of new hires and the scope of their roles, but all active departments are in need of additional skilled team members; smart contract developers, 3D and game designers, independent audits, marketing strategists and an advertising budget, and more.

What is Mars Colony?

Mars colony is a GameFi project with three main pillars:

  1. An NFT-land based game which will eventually be complete with NFT avatars, plot/quests, land upgrades, and more.
  2. A thorough in-game and cross-chain DeFi ecosystem with a DEX, stablecoin, lending/borrowing platform, etc.
  3. A DAO framework for game development, investing, and blockchain colonization.

You can read more about the project at these links: Vision, Tokenomic, Whitepaper.

11 Likes
2

Excitement is an understatement. It’s a privilege. Looking forward to this collaboration.

:blue_heart::blue_heart::blue_heart: :red_circle::red_circle::red_circle:

4 Likes
3

likewise @frwrdslosh

4 Likes
4

I would like to graciously approve this proposal following the Project X criteria.

@lij @dpagan-harmony @papi

:blue_heart:

5 Likes
5

I would also like to welcome Mars Colony as a recipient of our Project-X investment. Looking forward to more. @Eugenefinch @brother we’ll send you a link to a form to complete. Thanks!

5 Likes
6

Awesome, @dpagan-harmony @frwrdslosh.
Looking forward to bringing Marscolony to the next level with you guys.

2 Likes
7

To be fair. Not the biggest fan of this funding proposal. as mentioned earlier (in for example; hermes proposal), Why do you require this funds? Doesnt this show that your business model isn’t up to par /generating enough profit to be working on your developments?

As somebody who has been involved in the startup scene in the Netherlands (Deep-Tech), I’ve learned a couple of basics…
[Maybe start here](How To: Business Model Canvas Explained | by Sheda | Sheda | Medium

Unfortunately, the talk.harmony.one forum is littered with people hyping up own projects while not asking any sensible questions. 250K USD for a non profit generating product and tokenomics that make little sense (so far…) seems a bit like a stretch and (again) a fast way to drain ecosystem development funds.

Basically you’re expanding right now with no MRR? What are your churn metrics? Engagement metrics of dapp users?

additional funding would give us more control over timing and enable us to pursue auxiliary interests such as dedicated marketing and the nice-to-haves of our plans for game mechanics and graphics.

Morre funding enables more control? To me that seems (and literally no investor I have ever spoken to gives you funding for such a argument) you require proper project management tooling (that is also free, bootstrap it sers)
Dedicated marketing like what? Paid advertisements? Marketing is also one of the easiest bootstrappable things to do, I ran more effective campaigns with 1K USD than competitors leveraging 10/20x those funds… Especially within crypto it’s fairly easy to bootstrap your marketing efforts

Continue to build and work on your project, I’ll be happily follow you along the stars

2 Likes
8

(post deleted by author)

9

I don’t understand your critique of this proposal. Just because a project is asking for funding doesn’t necessarily imply that they need it. What start up couldn’t use more funding? Speaking as an active member of the Mars Colony community I can guarantee you there is immense interest in this project and more funding means faster growth, something many Harmonauts are eager to see.

If you want metrics look at the numbers on NFTKey.app. It’s the top performer across all chains. 25m ONE in total sales (current value: $6.41m) in less than two months. Floor price is over 13x the discounted listing price right now. Out of 21,000 plots there are only 270 listed.

There’s much more I could say but I don’t have the time at the moment. I’ll just end it here by saying I think everyone stands to benefit from this. Harmony, the MC team and the community all share in the success of the other.

4 Likes
10

Thank you for your reply Rutherford, i’ll try to explain it further and rephrase + clarify myself.

To be frank, this is (to me) thinking and reasoning a little bit in circles. Yes, every startup always could use more funding, doesn’t mean that it’s a smart move right away (obligations to funding party, capital inefficiency, scaling problems etc). Since you mentioned that you’re an active community member you also have to take into account some of the biases one could have. I believe that it would be wise to have more unbiased people weigh in their opinions/thoughts on those subjects from time to time.

The point I was trying to make (and yes my apologies, I should have framed this more clearly) is that I’m missing sensible metrics/reasoning on where those funds are being utilized for exactly. I have read your roadmap and proposals closely, unfortunately it’s not yet very metric driven or SMART*.

image
image845×1024 88.1 KB

More control on Timing and Dedicated Marketing are terms with little meaning to me. It is for example quite easy to blow a big piece of your (expected) runway on (paid) marketing efforts.

A lot of the reasoning being used is as follows:

More funding means faster/more growth

Floor price = xxx Amount of mint price (vanity metric imho, especially with no use case right now)

Immediate questions that arise from my (albeit limited) startup investment experiences are: Where are you planning specifically to utilize it for? How does that funding correlate in more growth? Can you express it in metrics? Do you have any actual metrics? DAU, WAU, MRR, Avg. Time on Dapp etc?

I see and have seen quite a lot of funding proposals asking for funding that defy all logic with figures that make those with experience in traditional startups blink, why not bootstrap some more? For example; why not bootstrap your ideas with a bounty system? Or perhaps make those goals more metric-driven to convince nitpickers like me :wink:

The reasoning for funding from the project’s perspective is understandable and the immense interest is something that I fully agree with, am just missing a couple of metrics to remove bias.

In short; I am a big supporter of funding that might launch projects / help scale projects / grow adoption / educate users.
However, prior to asking for such funding, I would love to see a more sustainable business model (including more specific reasoning on funds being strategically utilized) being presented and or worked upon including a more metric-driven approach to reach those goals.

Personal Note: Please take most of this as constructive criticism so that we all can learn and grow from it, I love to be proven wrong and learn from the community but also truly feel that I should weigh in/give my opinion on various funding requests. The community forum from marscolony is great and shows a lot of the potential but also showcases a couple of potential problems (like a lack of focus/clear direction on the product). Seen things go wrong for all sorts of reasons on those dino chains, we should be cautious to not misuse ecosystem funding or become easy cash-cows. Am also a part of the mars ecosystem so please keep building :+1:

11

Project-X investment amount has been transferred:

Looking forward to continuing our work together and bringing your ideas to fruition!

2 Likes