FAQ

Definitely. There are many use cases. You may have developed an AI algorithm in the past that you want to make API ready. Or perhaps you are a student and want to test some of your work on a larger audience. Or you are working on a larger project that consists of a number of separate services that have use cases of their own. The options are endless. We suspect there are many AI developers out there that have a good idea, or a half-finished service. We would like to support you in going the extra mile, submitting a finished service on the platform, and start monetizing it!

At SingularityNET and Deep Funding we believe in openness and collaboration. Even the greatest idea depends on good execution and adoption. By being open you enable community members to offer valuable feedback and we can drive publicity to your idea. So we can't protect your IP, but you are free to take any measures that you feel are appropriate, such as not disclosing your identity, not detailing any crucial parts of your proposal, setting up a legal protection framework, etc. But note that all these things might also impact your chances of being awarded by our community.

We do not just want to support teams to make great AI services and AI-enabled software, we also want to make sure that we are driving adoption of the platform. Therefore we have defined that 25% of your grant should be spent on activities that support this. The 25% for API calls from third-party services will be very relevant when we have our AI-DSL up and running that will help AI services to dynamically connect to each other. Until that time we also allow the 25% to be spent on hosting costs of services that are published on the platform. In proposals where there is no use case for either of these, we will be flexible with this rule.

Yes, you can! The first goal of Deep Funding is to help grow our decentralized AI platform and we can only be successful if we have good processes and an involved community. To achieve this, we need your input. Therefore, Deep Funding is not just about funding, it's also about governance and learning what is the best way to operate a decentralized organization. Ultimately, our goal for Deep Funding is to become a fully community-driven DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). Today you can already give feedback on one of the 'Missions' on our portal: 'Deep Funding improvement ideas". Add your suggestions there, and give feedback on the suggestions of others. This way we can all help to make Deep Funding better!

We are working very closely with Cardano Catalyst. But there are a number of reasons why we decided on our own platform:

• We want Deep Funding to be a community-driven program. That also means we need to be able to implement certain requirements that are put forward by our community. We can only do that if we are in control of the environment. 
• There are already some experiments that are different from Catalyst we have for instance different pools with different maximum grant sizes and on our voting portal, we will apply 'grade voting', meaning that one can give every project a grade between 1 and 10.
• We are planning to work on other things like wallet logins, reputation-based ratings, and incentives.
• With two platforms we can define different experiments like these on both platforms and learn faster together. Perhaps when our learnings and feature sets converge again we will decide to merge our platforms into one.

Swae is the supplier of our portal software. We use their product to submit proposals, give feedback on them and rate them. But in the same portal, there are also 'missions' to give suggestions on how to improve DF, ask for support from the community, or offer your services as a community expert. We are in close collaboration with Swae and aim to make it the best of breed Next Gen decentralized governance tool.

Liquid democracy enables people to temporarily assign their voting rights to other members. In liquid democracy, this can take the shape of a chain of people assigning their (collected) voting power to others, that assign their rights to yet other people. The idea behind this is that people will assign their voting rights to others that may have a better judgment on specific topics or have more time to assess all the ins and outs of a vote. This could lead to a self-organizing structure of democratically appointed (temporary) opinion leaders that make decision-making faster and more informed.

The basis of a reputation system is that participants in a system are ranked based on their contributions. These contributions may be rated positive (e.g. giving constructive feedback) or Negative (e.g. giving false information). The liquid attribute refers to ratings that one may get from references or feedback given by other participants. The weighted part relates to the principle that the impact depends on the ranking of the participant that is giving the feedback. E.g getting a 'thumbs up' on some feedback from a participant with a very high rating would have more impact on one's ranking than the same action from a user that is just new on the platform.

This defines the system that we implement to motivate participants to display desired behavior. E.g. it is important for the Deep Funding program that the community will interact with the proposers, give constructive feedback and rate their proposals, and ultimately votes conscientiously on the 'best' proposals. An incentive structure aims to reward such behavior. This can be in the form of AGIX tokens, but there might be other, perhaps better or complementary ways to accomplish this, e.g. by 'badges' that mark the value level of a participant, by distributing NFTs, or any other value-bearing attribute.

Token holders, based on the principle of 1 token = 1 vote. While we believe this is intrinsically fair, we work towards balancing this in the future with other mechanisms such as weighted liquid rank reputation or liquid democracy. Besides voting there is also the opportunity to give feedback to the proposals, and give them an informal rating signaling voters and proposers what the consensus is on the platform.

Yes, this is already possible, though not always recommended. Deep Funding is about openness, sharing, and building trust. If you are a proposer and you want the community to put their faith in you (and vote for you), staying anonymous may not be the best strategy unless you can explain the reasons why (like a potential conflict of interest with your current employer). In the case of getting awarded, you will have to disclose your identity to SingularityNET. People that are providing feedback can also choose to keep their identity hidden on a case-by-case basis. Once your comment has been published this cannot be changed retroactively anymore.

Yes. Even if you do not get funded you will still have the opportunity to get valuable feedback on your proposal. We will promote your proposal on our Youtube channel (if you provide us with a 3-5 min. video), and you still have access to our group of community experts, to ask for advice or support on your project.

In spring 2021, our community voted with an overwhelming majority to mint additional tokens to increase the speed of development in SingularityNET. These tokens are minted on a monthly bases in batches of decreasing size. It will take 91 years before the last full AGIX token is minted that way. 30% of these tokens are earmarked for Deep Funding and this is currently the main source of income. If we are successful in our goal of seeding and kickstarting the platform, (along with other technological advances in SingularityNET), the demand for these tokens will likely increase. Also, over time additional sources may be unlocked, such as shared revenue from successful projects, partnerships, crowdfunding options, or other creative solutions.

Deep Funding supports developers to help us build a global super-brain that belongs to no one but helps to make the world a better place for everyone. The friends of SingularityNET decide together which projects are best suited to become part of that brain and help it to grow and become a friend of humanity.

First of all, the fund is being financed by our token holders, so it makes sense that they also have a stake in deciding how their funding is being used. Secondly, we believe in decentralization, collaboration, and openness. We aim to build a strong ecosystem of creators, experts, and reviewers that has the capacity to design, build and market better and more benevolent solutions than any isolated entities would be capable of. We hope that we will be able to steer Deep Funding to a future where it is completely governed by the community as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).