Hi Katie - Ryan Selkis here. I wanted to provide some higher level context on why I believe this is important industry infrastructure, and how this falls under tooling and UX in particular.
For some context, Messari has been working on crypto community disclosures standards for five years. Our work informed SEC Commissioner Peirce’s “Safe Harbor” proposal, which was introduced as a bill in the US by the next Chair of the House Financial Services Committee (oversees the SEC). We believe designing bottoms up professional reporting standards will be an existential need for the industry in the coming quarters given an imminent regulatory crackdown. Proving that communities are invested in reducing information asymmetries by providing grant funding for financial reporting will be helpful in showing policymakers - in the US AND internationally - that the industry is taking steps to self-regulate and clean up some of the messy self-dealing that has plagued us for years.
The UX matters. We have analysts that cover: project descriptions and risk factors (human capital dependent), “corporate actions” and governance activity (human capital and taxonomy dependent), and descriptive overviews of quarterly performance and key milestones (human capital dependent). We also have a large team invested in creating and maintaining open subgraphs with common data structures (as Jack has mentioned) that is fully open source, and we ensure these reports and data are distributed broadly and freely. This grant is about providing scalable data and reporting standards, broad distribution, and consistent messaging to policymakers about standards setting work the industry is working towards.
This will be critical for the industry moving forward, and I hope this community will be cognizant that quality matters and shortcuts on research, data standards, and distribution won’t help where it matters in the next few years…among regulators. We know we’ll do a good job helping solve this broader problem, and in adding significant value for the OP community.
Thanks for your consideration!