It is right that this proposal was made.
Natural consequence of what the current situation is. Nothing to say.
It’s strange to only be answered now, weeks after our inevitable decision to change due to lack of support.
The only thing to add is WHY we arrived at this choice 4 months after our original proposal, because the story must be told in its entirety.
SFY has been in contact with the ASTAR team since early 2021, probably even some of the current Ambassadors were not present at the time.
We have always supported the team’s work actively and for us it remains among the most promising in terms of development today.
We were among the first teams to bring art and cultivate an nfts community to the dotsama ecosystem. Not only that, in the last 3 years we have worked with different teams (including Parity) and communities, supporting them with our work and being recognized as “serious professionals”.
This was confirmed at the time of our dapp staking proposal also by some of you and by the team itself.
Before launching our team into a new development adventure, that of a game that used our graphic experience and the RMRK technology that we have studied consistently over the years and of which we are proud promoters today, we evaluated different options.
Speaking both privately with the ASTAR team and evaluating what the contribution of dapp staking was (the good @0xRamz can confirm, he shared with us all the tables and projections of v2 staking), we understood that we could self-finance our project and we decided to expand the team to 9 people, including game and blockchain developers on the team.
With 5 million ASTARs staked we were just able to pay for the work done by these 2 professionals added to the team and it was an important support for us.
With 5 million ASTAR we received 500 astr x it was approximately. We believed in the narrative of dapp staking and began to cultivate this way of self-financing the project through targeted marketing which over the months has also brought benefits to the Astar community itself.
After a few weeks we were told that dapp staking was changing and to do everything we could to promote our work and our dapp. It should be noted that the concept of dapp staking V3 had already been presented before we made our request for dapp staking, but that NO ONE is among the Astar team (very serious for us given the relationship we have had over the years) and neither among yourselves Ambassadors who welcomed us among the developers, never even mentioned this process.
We concentrated only on our work, we could not know all the proposals taking place in the community, just as today we do not know all the discussions taking place of any other kind. So this change surprised us.
You can’t attract developers with a support promise of 100 and then change the cards on the table by switching to a value of 5.
This was the percentage loss on our rewards, i.e. -95%.
We were told to self-promote the dapp, we did it, we managed to quadruple the number of our stakers and triple the number of staking astr reaching the threshold of 15 million. Currently, despite these numbers and despite the work done by our team, support has dropped to just under a tip.
I don’t want to talk about why dapp staking v3 is non-meritocratic and ruined one of Astar’s best narratives that differentiated the team’s work from everything else.
If the choice was made because many teams in the past took improper advantage of this system, before totally excluding from this system even teams that actually worked and brought benefits to the ecosystem such as SFY or even other teams (don’t think that we are the unique, we had discussions on the matter with different dapp developers), it was necessary to have greater control over the teams, request progress on the work, milestones to be achieved.
In that way you would have excluded those who did not work and would instead have rewarded as appropriate based on the project and with LINEARITY and MERITOCRACY for what was collected.
These things have been said and communicated by our team for 4 months. There were no replies, no support, except from a few friends like @Leo , and the only suggestions received concerned our lack in terms of “marketing”.
Being then stuck for months at 14.9 million almost as a mockery, without anyone from the ASTAR core team or the ambassador community even showing interest in our difficulties.
We spent the first few weeks trying to reach a new “tier”, as soon as we managed to add a few hundred thousand ASTARs and surpass tier 4 after a few hours we always narrowly returned to the TIP tier.
We probably caused a lot of trouble by making CLEAR the poor management and design of the v3 staking dapp.
But these 4 months have been stressful and we no longer wanted to play chasing tiers, we don’t have time for this. Teams should be focused on development and should be rewarded for that, not how friendly you are with @pitcoin777 (it’s an example) or anyone else .
We continued to see teams (in some cases, with stories of proven SCAMS behind them, you should inform better…) being more supported, we continued to see teams with a “Non-development”, with stopped projects, maybe with a contract created months ago and never updated being more supported.
Our work is public, the code is on our github page. For the last month we have been working with the RMRK team @Magusz for the creation of the first 3D equipables in the history of NFTS. They know how much work we did and how much effort it took. We have already delivered the first Milestone (practically all the work started on Astar) to the Moonbeam team and if you want we can share it again here too. We were presented with a much simpler grant proposal, compared to the idea of support via dapp staking.
But definitely more effective and above all RIGHT for our case.
We are not just any team or without history, we are OGs in the dotsama ecosystem, who have always worked seriously and this seems to have been recognized by everyone except those who created this new staking Dapp and those who defend its rights at all costs critical issues without even thinking about THE PROMISES MADE TO THE DEVELOPERS.
The numbers were clear, had we reached little interest or a really low threshold of stakers on our dapp, we would never have thought of continuing. The truth is that our community, even if small, has followed and supported us with almost 15 million stars, doing even better than teams much more important than us.
We cannot disappoint them by indefinitely extending our development times or by proposing a product that does not correspond to our initial idea just because Astar has decided to burn most of the revenue received from staking these 15 million astar because it is better to support a narrative of supply burn. (While those who receive 15.1 have higher revenues, and paradoxically equal to those who have 29.9… 
)
Either you bring forward serious development support, or call it Tip staking because currently except for a few highly supported teams (not always with merit) everyone else has simply taken a big disappointment.
Our position and history in dapp staking is particular, it will be a warning for the future and will certainly bring greater awareness of future measures in the community, so in the end it will be a good thing to have talked about it. We are very sure that things will evolve for the better, because they are LOGICAL, no one in their right mind will defend these errors except in principle. The community will find a way to fix things, but we simply don’t have time for that.
We have a team that has been working for several months and needs to be supported and paid.
The negative trend of new dapp staking proposals and team interactions that do not report the developments of their dapps despite receiving greater rewards than us, is the answer that should answer all your questions.
Growth processes cannot be perfect, errors are inevitable and as long as the human factor is present they will be normal.
This is the story, each of you should make your own considerations
We wait for further clarifications.
SFY Labs