What’s the bigger picture roadmap for Kabocha?

Here is Rich (Decent Partners) unpacking Kabocha’s vision/roadmap. I copied it from a group convo on telegram with his permission, and to save him writing it again.

The tldr (from my perspective) is that Kabocha is staying true to the multichain minimalist philosophy set out by Polkadot and Kusama, and will go ahead with their own “multi-chain essentialist philosophy” by building its own family of chains, but with more of a grassroots development approach. Kabocha will start by launching as a parachain in the Kusama network. After that we create our own relay chain.

Question from community developer:

But a question on overall vision, if there’s such. Besides work on individual pallets, is there a bigger picture roadmap?

Response:

“We’re aiming to return to the original Substrate vision, which was one of multi-chain essentialism… as shown by the DOT/KSM relay chains – they are true app chains, single purpose projects that have clearly defined and communicated value capture mechanisms rather than the swiss army knife / EVM chains for apps that we currently see launching in the ecosystem, which all rely on a vague notion of being better at being Ethereum than Ethereum.

For us, the foundation is simple and perhaps more in keeping with the original ambitions of Bitcoin, Decred and other projects that that attempted to become sovereign non-state money. Unlike Bitcoin, but like Decred, we have the ability to fund contributions from a borderless work force, via on-chain governance and community proposals.

With that in mind, we’re focused on introducing a design template to Kabocha (and chains we incubate beyond that) where the funding of projects via our decentralised currency, also accrues value to the chain’s treasury.

Rather than inflating a supply and directing it into a treasury – as has been done by all Substrate chains so far, we will only be minting new KAB when a proposal is approved by the community.

Therefore, we can say that every KAB minted after launch is to fund a specific job.

In addition, those requesting funds will assign NFTs to Kabocha’s ‘reserve’ that are representative of their ideas / concept or project.

We call this ‘cultural collateral’.

These NFTs will also confer access rights, permissions and future utility to those holding KAB and can be upgraded as the funded projects develop over time utilsing https://rmrk.app.

The narrative idea is a rework of the well known ‘Store of Value’ concept which has been the major hook for Bitcoin.

Except rather than being backed by machines / sunk electricity costs of miners, Kabocha is backed by the time, effort and insight of its contributors. Those investing in Kabocha are essentially betting on the future collective cultural value and access afforded by the assigned assets.

We call this ‘Store of Values’.

We have zero interest in building another Ethereum knockoff, we want to solve the most interesting problem out there, how to create non-state money that can fund real work, by real people, in a real economy.

Given our collective experiences with Edgeware and my work previously with Decred, Kabocha is a bridge between the old insights of crypto and the possibilities afforded by Substrate.

If we can make this work with Kabocha, then there is a clear path to using the Store of Values concept as a template to creating a whole ecosystem of sovereign public networks.

Our general thesis is that most current parachains on Kusama and Polkadot will fail owing to a lack of core focus and value capture, or be hamstrung by regulation within a few years owing to their centralised distributions and inability to function without a lead team.

So we like to think if we can quietly create an emerging network of truly decentralised public networks, then they could onramp to Kusama and then to Polkadot, gradually replacing the incumbents

A more optimistic stance is that this approach could yield more sustainable, scalable and values aligned ecosystem of chains over time than either Kusama and Polkadot can achieve, simply because they (and Web3 foundation) are not filtering parachains based on a multichain essentialist philosophy – even though that was what we believed Substrate was focused on.