Community Grant Proposal: Terra Bites v2 [Updated]

Governance & Proposals
1

Submitted on chain. Click to view in Terra Station

Terra Bites Proposal

Terra Bites has established itself as the leader in news, information and developer resources for the Terra community. Throughout the last year, we’ve built an audience through podcasting, livestreaming, community discussions, developer materials and events.

Our mission is to continue educating developers and the broader community so that the Terra ecosystem and its projects can continue to flourish. In 2022 and beyond, we at Terra Bites want to expand our content offerings in a few key areas:

Expansion of Terra Academy

One of our primary missions is to continue developing, filming and publishing developer tutorials for Terra Academy. Developers are the lifeblood of the ecosystem, and by giving them resources to learn tools such as Rust, CosmWasm and TerraJS, we help expand the pool of talented developers building the future of finance on Terra.

Please see the current modules we’ve published for Terra Academy here: CosmWasm Smart Contracts I

Academy 2.0 will include modules for the following:

  • Developer Tools (Terrain, CWScript, etc.)
  • Tokens
  • NFTs
  • CW Storage Plus
  • Multi-Contract
  • Testing and CI/CD Integration
  • Other under-taught areas in full-stack Terra app development

Developer Tooling

We’re also creating tooling for developers to help them in ways beyond what v.1 of Terra Academy provided.

The first example of this is Playground, a graphical interface for learning, developing, and interacting with smart contracts. Users can not only take actions but see all of their effects – and learn how to retrieve those effects in any development environment.

We’ve already begun building the interface for this tool. For example:

  1. Load a smart contract and see the available actions and queries.

  1. Run those queries or execute those actions.

  1. See all of the effects of those actions, including transaction details, effects on storage and block details.

  1. See how to retrieve these details from command line, JavaScript, Python, or from within a smart contract.

Community Growth Content

In addition to our commitment to developers with the above, Terra Bites will also continue to support the following “community growth” content initiatives.

  • Premium quality, documentary-style coverage of teams, projects, and initiatives in the space

  • Roundtable discussions with leaders in the space covering topics like TeFi, Gaming, NFTs, Stablecoins, Regulation, etc.

  • High-quality targeted articles to attract outsiders into Terra

  • Whitepaper breakdowns and simplifications

  • Hackathon content hosting and support

  • TeFi Alpha event hosting, livestreaming, and support

Expansion Breakdown

For us to continue growing the Terra Bites & Terra brands, our team and our operations must scale. We are asking for the following resources to support the growth and initiatives of Terra Bites:

• Full-time Staff @ $19.6k/monthly

• Part-Time Staff @ $9.75k/monthly

• Equipment, travel, studio rent, giveaways, business expenses @ $4k/monthly

TOTAL: $33.33k/monthly

Term: Through EOY 2022 (400,000 UST)

Treasury Strategy

UST awarded will be deployed in a safe yield-earning strategy, using primarily insured Anchor Earn and secondarily audited vaults built atop Anchor products, in order to maximize the effectiveness of funds.

Another consideration is that Angel Protocol has discussed the possibility of expanding into “public works” funding, which might be an additional way to later receive sustainable funding for developer course content.

Please Note: Due to feedback during the draft stage of our proposal, and internal discussions with content creators in the space, we have decided to leave any funding for TerraTV out of this particular proposal.

Review of Our Impact Since Launch

Terra Bites Live

Livestreamed discussions on the latest happenings in the Terra Ecosystem, plus interactions and community question answering in real-time.

News Coverage

Concise news content to help everyone stay on top of the latest in the fast-paced Terra ecosystem.

Project Podcast Guests

Project founders and associates share their vision with the Terra Bites audience.

Developer Tutorials

Dozens of educational and walkthrough videos introducing developers to the tools and techniques required to build the future of finance.

Hackathon Content

Presentations by mentors and teams supercharge the experience for builders, potential investors, and excited community members.

Event Coverage

On-the-ground interviews and livestream broadcasts from major Terra and DeFi events around the globe.

Organic Growth

• ~40k Twitter Followers

• Averaging >1 million Twitter impressions per month

• ~18k Youtube Subscribers

• Average 70k monthly views

• Over 1700 Developer Course enrollments

Thank you all for considering this proposal, and we look forward to receiving more feedback. This proposal can and should be updated during this phase. Edits can be viewed in the forum interface.

8 Likes
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Out of curiosity as I do not work in dev, 17.5k USD monthly is for a senior RUST dev ?
I was there for the first episode, listening just before going to work, enjoying the sense of something belonging to history happening under my eyes. Well done for the job !!

3

It would be really good if you could share your current earnings details from youtube AdSense and Validator fees. Shoudnt that be enough to cover your extra cost to setup these things?

This proposal requests for money that will run out by EOY 2022, how are you going to sustain post that? What are you plans to sustain?. The last thing we want to see is for you to come back for more money.

Addtional notes

  1. Staff cost are way too much. You can find many talents for production via per request or remote-work staff. Cost should be much lower.
  2. You need to provide breakdown for 8k monthly for equipment or travel.

Please lets dont take this in a negative way. Transparency is key when you are requesting for Community fund. Just based on little information provided above, i cannot vote yes. It just sets precedence to every content creator out there to come in ask for community spend.

5 Likes
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Hi, thanks for listening! The 19.6 is earmarked for the whole full-time staff in content, education, and developer departments. The part-time allocation is for an additional contracting developer to help with development tool projects.

5

Hi guys, thanks for your great content!!

Will you be able to self sustain after the end of next year? What is your current revenue stream from ads and projected growth throughout 2022?

Thanks,

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I think @crypt is being very fair, we need not set a precedence for every content creator to ask for funds out of our community funds without extensive breakdown of the use for the money.

I think it is imperative that you provide:

  1. breakdown of current earnings from YouTube (and other platforms if those exist)
  2. breakdown for the staff (21.5k usd to a month is a lot of money for content creation staff especially when you also get to keep making money out of ad revenue)
  3. breakdown of costs of equipment.
  4. Since, as aforementioned, the funds will only suffice for 2022 how does terra bites plan to operate terramoney tv as well as its own ventures in 2023 and beyond?
  5. It seems as if the goals of the “expansion” are mainly to expand on the amount of content produced and not on the amount of people it reaches (beside “High-quality targeted articles to attract outsiders into Terra”), would that assessment be fair?
3 Likes
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Hi crypt, thanks for your feedback! I’ll do my best to answer your questions succinctly.

We do not run any ads for profit. We do not plan to run YouTube ads for profit, unless they are indisputably relevant to our viewers. We may consider ads elsewhere, meant to bring more people into Terra. (There are one or two long videos on our channel that were monetized by other parties due to music used in certain segments - these are our only videos with YouTube ads.) Our YouTube and other platform ad income is zero.

Terra Bites validator income in dollar terms has varied significantly with LUNA price, staked amount, staking rewards. This data is publicly available, if tedious to collate.

So far this year, rewards have gone mostly towards infrastructure costs for our mainnet validator and testnet validators. We charge 3% of rewards, which is lower than most validators. (5 to 10% is entirely reasonable, and we are gauging community sentiment but have no current plans to increase commission.)

Recently, reward income has increased, allowing us to do more giveaways and other promotions and to improve our validator infrastructure and staff. We’ll use rewards to build the sustainable position mentioned at the end of the proposal and the end of this comments.

Competent staff knowledgeable enough in video production, general crypto knowledge, and the Terra ecosystem to produce quality work in an efficient manner are not easy to come by. The costs of Fiverr/Upwork production freelancers may seem attractive, but onboarding and keeping them would prove costly and ultimately unlikely to be sustainable. We’ve tried this route before. And this is especially true for staff assisting with developer content and development tools.

Instead, we have found effective staff and intend to enable them to give their full attention to Terra content.

Travel and other costs vary from one month to another. Some months, for example, we have travelled to locations with major events, along with two production staff members (“interns”). The costs for one such event can sometimes soak up the whole budget. We cover additional costs when necessary, or find partners to help.

Regarding treasury management, “coming back for more money” is possibly what could happen in 2023 – whether we deserve it or not will be a community decision then. However, it is possible that the TerraMoney TV sustainable content funding project we mentioned will prove sufficient by that time. We hope it does! Perpetual funding, or at least self funding, is a major goal.

As mentioned in the final bit of the proposal, we’ll begin allocating to a yield position. However, asking for enough funds to pay costs on yield alone would amount to a $2.5m ask, rather than the current ask.

With our own means – supplemented by the partner and staker support we were fortunate enough to receive – we have created Terra Bites content for 12 months without a community pool request. Now, 2022 is the time to maximize exposure of the Terra ecosystem to the world.

9

My question is, why wouldn’t you monetize YouTube/Social Media content? It’s hard to justify community funding for content creation when there are tons of ways for you guys to get paid to create content.

I’m confident traditional YouTube ads (the CPM for content around finance is usually very high too) or even sponsored videos can help you out tremendously and I don’t think anyone is against it. It’s part of the game.

All love :v:

3 Likes
10

Definitely a Yes for you guys!! Danku should also ask for funds to support more our terra community

1 Like
11

Fuck Youtube and other personal data selling scams. There’s got to be better.

3 Likes
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TerraMoney TV will begin as a centralized “Bloomberg of Terra

I like you guys, respect what you’re doing but do we really need this?
In 2021 do we need to bootstrap a centralized Bloomberg of Terra?
In my humble opinion the idea, when you “theorize” it sounds way better than what you actually get :
another redundant source of information that we could get elsewhere without funding almost half a million a year.

1 Like
13

I’m not sure if we’re confusing people with providing our history, or if people are simply unaware of our work in building Terra Academy because our YouTube channel is the only touchpoint they have with Terra Bites.

@Lorenzo with all due respect sir, please read the first two initiatives we plan to focus on in 2022:

If you believe that this would be “redundant” content then by all means, provide the community with some links for developer resources and tooling. We’re starving for it.

For those who want more details on budgeting we’re happy to provide it. We will rework the language of the proposal and present it with more transparency.

I think a lot of people only recognize Terra Bites as a YouTube channel and think we’re asking for money to interview projects. While that is a large part of what we do, we hope to build out a self-sustainable model to grow content creators (see TerraMoneyTV). Only a small portion of this funding would go towards that initiative which we clearly wrote in plain English above.

On the other hand, we want to focus a large part of our resources to growing and educating the developer community, as we stated in the draft proposal.

14

This is no brainer. Yes! Investing in TerraBites and TerraMoney.tv is the best investment the Terra community can make in the future of Terra and onboarding future Lunatics. Remember: UST is not backed by Luna, it is backed by Lunatics.

I hope that many from the awesome Terra community can jump in join the TerraMoney TV DAO and help out with marketing, social media, engineering, partnerships, etc. By creating a Terra community DAO this effort can scale, provide high quality content, leverage UST for real-word business, be transparent, and also would hopefully become self-sustaining without needing community funds after 2022. But to bootstrap this effort for next year I think using funds from the community pool is a good investment.

We all owe Terra Bites a big thank you for the success of Terra and Luna this past year!

15

Love this! I’d consider this a community marketing and PR effort.

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The first 2 points are pretty vague and, as a developer myself, I would love to hear more about them.
My mistake if I didn’t pay enough attention to them.

Still, 4 out of 6 points are basically “Fund our youtube channel and help us transform it into an obsolete mono-official source of news for the Terra Ecosystem”.

While Terra Bites plans to expand its content offering, it’s impossible for one channel to keep up with all the news and projects in the Terra Network. 2022 will bring much more attention, more projects, more apps, and more issues to cover.

This is the exact reason why there’s no rationality in funding this. Community creators will emerge like you and danku or speicherx did, in the good old ways where you make great content to get recognized and not disappear in the absurd amount of content actually available. When there’s demand and offer will come, as always. And demand makes offers sustainable without community funding.

My 2 cents, no flame and/or disrespect. Please bear in mind English is not my first language and I may struggle to transmit my real tone.

In the end, I would absolutely support a proposal where the first 2 points have more details but completely disagree on the news/community content side since it’s a world that can be self-sustained.

2 Likes
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Are you applying for a Grant or are you submitting a proposal to Governance?

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Sure thing! Please see our previous developer educational coursework here: CosmWasm Smart Contracts I

We are especially open to your feedback (as a developer in the ecosystem) on how this can be improved moving forward.

We’re also planning to create tooling for developers to help them in ways beyond what v.1 of Terra Academy provided. The first example of this is graphical interface for learning, developing, and interacting with smart contracts. Users can not only take actions but see all of their effects – and learn how to retrieve those effects in any development environment.

Teaser:

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Since the inception of Terra Bites our plans have been fluid, so our approach is to let our work speak for itself rather than planning out every painstaking detail along the way. We’ve spent 2021 delivering results, and we hope our reputation can help fill in for any perceived ambiguity surrounding of our requests for community resources.

19

@TerraBites Hi team - congrats on a killer first year!

TerraBites has been a great resource for those curious, skeptical, or inspired by the Terra community. The importance of education and aggregating news for crypto is impossible to be overlooked.

A few questions about your plan for V2:

First - Where do you hope to target outsiders to attract to them Terra? Which publications?

Are these articles aimed at crypto native or crypto-curious readers?

Second - I am particularly intrigued by this idea below:

If executed properly, it could be a huge benefit to the ecosystem and drive greater user participation across different protocols. Whitepapers are unnecessarily complex and lengthy.

Do you plan to create a standardized format for each breakdown? How do you choose which protocols?

This is something as an org we often discuss internally.

1 Like
20

You had me at “Terra Bites Proposal.”

There has been no greater resource for my Terra maturation than the podcasts, developer vids, and community fostered by Terra Bites. Without Terra Bites, I would have dismissed Terra completely (for reasons they’re looking to address!). I have no doubt this money would be wisely and effectively used.

1 Like
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Me and my team are looking forward to this developer training. Thank you!

2 Likes