Budget Proposal Review workshop (Marketing & Innovation) – Eastern Hemisphere, Summary

Budget Proposal Review workshop (Marketing & Innovation) – Eastern Hemisphere

Marketing and Budget

1. 🚀 Cardano’s 2025 marketing budget proposal allocates ~10% of revenue for marketing, benchmarked against leading web3 projects and $1B+ revenue organizations.
2. 💰 The budget is denominated in ADA, with estimates based on the current price of $0.72 and a conservative $0.50, providing USD figures for clarity on fiat-denominated expenses.
3. 📊 A dedicated marketing program manager will track KPIs and report progress, ensuring oversight and accountability for the Cardano community.

Innovation and Ecosystem Growth

1. 🌱 Catalyst, Cardano’s innovation engine, has allocated over 290M ADA across 13 funding rounds in 114 countries over 4 years.
2. 🔬 Catalyst’s 61M ADA budget for 2025 focuses on early-stage R&D, later-stage pilot trials, and a 1M ADA retroactive public goods funding experiment.
3. 🗳️ Upcoming quadratic voting and liquid democracy in Catalyst funds 14 and 15 aim to reduce whale manipulation and enable more equitable decision-making.

Technology and Development

1. 🛠️ The autonomous agent testing SDK enables multi-transaction, multi-actor testing for Cardano DApp developers, filling gaps in traditional testing methods.
2. 🔗 The UTXO Alliance, initiated by IOG and run by Blockchain Labs, fosters collaboration between UTXO-based blockchains like Cardano and Pi.
3. 🔍 The Discovery Center will use advanced AI tools to provide deep search of Catalyst’s innovation history, informing ecosystem contributions.

Marketing Infrastructure and Performance Tracking

1. 📈 Adalink, Cardano’s native blockchain-powered affiliate network, tracks real marketing performance on-chain using unique referral links.
2. 🌐 Google Analytics and similar platforms track traditional metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions, but measuring impact in a decentralised ecosystem remains challenging.

Community Engagement and Education

1. 🇵🇭 The Philippine Cardano Community Reonboarding Project aims to revive a 20,000-strong community through boots-on-the-ground events and visual engagement.
2. 🎓 Cardano educational initiatives target newcomers, crypto investors, and Cardano users with project-based, goal-oriented learning tailored to individual needs.
3. 🌍 The Cardano community-led events fund ($500K) supports projects requesting $500-$30K for various events, from small meetups to major conferences.

Global Outreach and Media

1. 🎥 Killer Whales TV show, co-produced with Coin Market Cap and Hacken, targets 600M viewers in 65+ countries on major streaming platforms.
2. 🏆 Killer Whales offers $1.5M in grants and prizes to accelerate Cardano projects, amplifying episodes through KOLs and community votes.
3. 🇯🇵 The Cardano Japan Renaissance proposal aims to improve awareness and adoption in Japan through partnerships, events, and institutional collaborations.
4. 🌐 Application Level Message Protocol on Cardano enables embedded chat and social features within applications, optimising for governance, marketing campaigns, and tech feedback.