Definitely NO!!!
Finally, this discussion is being brought up. Thanks @Mingshi
I’ve been an active participant in the dApp Staking program since day one.
I was involved in onboarding the very first dApps and NFTs , witnessed the first rugs in the ecosystem (Astarians NFT, AstarPunks, AstarBots, Orcus Finance, etc), saw incubated projects get abandoned or getting no traction (AstridDAO, Starfish, Avault, Starlay, Arthswap, Sirius Finance, etc), and actively contributed as part of the SpaceLabs team (the voluntary bizdev and onboarding group). Based on all this, here’s my conclusion:
- In the beginning, teams from various ecosystems came to explore Astar as it was a new network — and the vast majority were rugs, only interested in farming rewards. Even after spending hours on calls, doing due diligence, doxxing teams — in the end, we’re dealing with people, and that’s the biggest “risk factor.”
Also, I’d like to mention that @moonme was one of the members of the Astar growth team and actively participated in all meetings with project teams — he certainly had access to internal insights.
I really miss Toga’s involvement in the ecosystem.
- With clearer and stricter rules in place for dApp Staking, the SpaceLabs team aimed to onboard high-quality projects. We held hundreds of meetings with teams worldwide. The two most common scenarios we faced were: early-stage/seed projects, or more mature projects looking for grants. The seed-stage ones lacked community and resources to survive long-term, while the more mature ones would only deploy if there was a grant involved (money talks — this is crypto, not philanthropy, haha). In short, dApp staking incentives were irrelevant to projects already profitable on other chains.
With that said, I strongly support reducing rewards for dApps and focusing instead on targeted UCGs or treasury-funded grants tied to clear roadmaps and deliverables.
The current “let the builders build” model — where the community decides who gets rewards based on staking — hasn’t proven effective. In general, the community doesn’t really care about what’s being built or the actual utility behind it, as long as the APR is high and there are financial incentives like airdrops.
In the end, we’re funding projects that don’t add value to the ecosystem — at the cost of increased inflation, more token emissions, and dilution of the token’s value.
I’m in favor of a complete restructuring of the program.