RFC: Empowering Latam Onchain – Astar & Soneium by Kairos Research [Draft]

[Ariiellus]

RFC | Onchain Latam Empowerment by Kairos Research [Draft]

Summary

Kairos Research presents a proposal to accelerate the adoption and growth of the Astar and Soneium ecosystems in Mexico and Latin America. Our focus is on high-quality educational content, onchain activities, and community engagement to empower local builders and users.

Key Objectives

• 2 comprehensive reports on Astar & Soneium

• 12 ecosystem updates (newsletter & livestream)

• 12 one-pager guides for key dApps

• Onchain quest with $1,000 USDC prize to attend Devconnect

• Side event at Ethereum Mexico 2025 (Flash Soccer Tournament)

• 2 interviews with ecosystem ambassadors

Why This Matters

We aim to:

• Lower the barrier for new users and builders

• Increase onchain activity and protocol integration

• Foster a strong, sustainable community in Latam

Team

Kairos Research is a team with experience in research, education, and community building in the Web3 space, with a proven track record of collaborations and hackathon wins.

Request

We invite the community to review this proposal, share feedback, and suggest improvements. Your input will help us maximize the impact and relevance of this initiative for the Astar & Soneium ecosystems in Latam. You can:

• Ask questions here, or
• Comment on the doc

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We will answer any question and iterate the proposal based on your feedback. Our main goal is to create a longterm relationship with Astar / Soneium. Full proposal here

Looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

[you425]

Thank you for your proposal!

I think the overall direction is good, but there are a few points that concern me.

• Kagla Finance needs to be removed from the dApps report.
  Instead, it would be better to add one more Soneium’s dapp.
• What are the specific cost allocations for the quests to be created in Layer3?
• Given the long duration and large amount of this project, it seems appropriate to provide funding based on milestone reports along with progress KPI reports.

Regarding the amount, I would like to hear @Juminstock 's opinion, who is familiar with the situation in LATAM.

[tksarah]

Thank you for the proposal.
It appears to be very well thought out.

That said, the activities outlined seem quite diverse and the timeline is likely to be substantial. I’d like to ask about the team’s capacity and the overall feasibility of executing this plan. In my experience, when content creation and event organization are carried out in parallel, it usually involves significant collaboration and effort from many contributors.

If a concrete implementation plan is already in place, that’s great—though I believe it would be helpful to share those details along with supporting rationale. Otherwise, it might be worth considering a smaller-scale rollout first, where outcomes can be assessed and adjustments made through a Try & Error approach.

[PolkaWarrior]

Love that you guys are thinking about how to empower Astar & Soneium in Latam. Proposal seems to be thought through just wondering: Could you please provide some more details on the “Kairos Research is a team with experience in research, education, and community building in the Web3 space, with a proven track record of collaborations and hackathon wins.”? Would love to get to know more about your past actions.

Kind regard, PW

[pitcoin777]

Thank you for the well-structured proposal — it’s clear that thought and effort went into it.

That said, I believe the current KPIs are quite underwhelming considering the amount being requested. A $15,000 budget could realistically achieve similar results through coordinated retweets by community agents alone.

KPIs for this proposal:

• Reach 550 newsletter subscribers
• Achieve 200 average livestream viewers
• 100–150 unique onchain quest participants
• 100 downloads for each report
• 20 repost for each Onepager

Additionally, I found several individual cost items to be significantly overpriced. For example:

• $3,000 per deep-dive report
• $250 per interview
  These numbers seem excessive and not aligned with the output expected.

I would recommend shifting the focus more towards scalable digital activities — such as online promotion and live streams — which tend to have a higher impact and lower cost. By removing lower-impact line items like:

• Flash Soccer Tournament = $1,000
• Travel Expenses = $1,200
• Onchain Quest = $1,000
• Onchain Quest Planning = $500

You could already reduce nearly $4,000 in spending. Furthermore, rethinking the pricing structure of the deep-dive reports would help the proposal become more aligned with the actual KPIs presented.

Looking forward to seeing a revised version with a more balanced value-to-impact ratio.

[Ariiellus]

hey, thanks everyone for your time, questions and suggestions.

@you425, happy to answer your questions

• Kagla Finance removed
• Neemo Finance removed temporaly (we are going to wait a couple of weeks to see how the situation evolves
• Bitfrost & Algem added, both from Soneium ecosystem

In addition, during our research we will evaluate other apps to find the ones that allow the best UX for the participants

We just found that Layer3 requires stake ~$7,500 in its token. Obviously this is a cost we can’t afford so our solution is to create a Notion page with all the details about the Quest.

About divide the funding on milestone reports this is a great suggestion! I just added a new section called Funding Milestones considering also the comments from @pitcoin777

tagging again @Juminstock, we had a call with him a couple of weeks ago when we started to brainstorm the proposal.

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Hello @tksarah, thanks for your comments

We just removed the IRL events and deep into our rationale for each deliverable.

I would like to share that we are a team of 5, where 3 of us focus on the research side and the other two on the community that allow us to work to create high quality articles/content and to host a monthly meetup in Puebla, Mexico (where we live).

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Hello @PolkaWarrior, thanks for your comments

Of course you can find all of our achievements in the full proposal but I’ll share our top5 below:

• A project with PBS Foundation to educate people about MEV and PBS across Latam. Here is our first report.
• Worked with the House of Representatives in Mexico to host a Hackathon focus in Digital Voting
• CeLatam grantees to build a RWA in Latam report
• Recovering assets from a hacked wallet using Flashbots
• Participated in the Morph L2 Hackathon (No-Code Track Sparkloom), building a one-pager.

Our team members has experience and background in areas like Finance, Mechanical Engineering, CS, Game Theory, Tokenomics Design that make us capable to accomplish the activities related in our proposal.

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Hello @pitcoin777 thanks for your suggestions!

We have taken your feedback seriously and made the following changes to the proposal:

Removed lower-impact deliverables:

• Flash Soccer Tournament: $1,000

• Travel Expenses: $1,200

Reduced costs for key items to better balance impact and value.

Previous total amount: $15,655
Current total amount: $$11,922.75

With means a reduction of -23.84%

I would like to share you our rationale on the Onchain Quest:

While our current engagement metrics may not seem “impressive” in isolation, our approach is designed for sustainable, long-term growth. The onchain quest is a strategic investment to:

• Attract new users to Astar and Soneium through hands-on, incentivized learning.

• Leverage the momentum of Devconnect Argentina to onboard LatAm users at a time of great regional interest.

• Provide measurable, onchain activity that directly benefits the ecosystem and can be transparently tracked.

Regarding the cost of the deep-dive reports, we have reviewed and adjusted the pricing to $2,500 USD per report. Here’s the rationale:

• Each report requires over 50 hours of cumulative research, drafting, and validation to ensure technical accuracy and accessibility for the LatAm audience.

• Design and infographics: Each report includes around 5 hours of professional design work to create high-quality, visually engaging materials that aid understanding and increase shareability.

• Community review and iteration: We incorporate feedback from beta readers and ecosystem stakeholders, which adds to the production timeline but ensures the final product is both relevant and actionable.

[Ariiellus]

I just updated the draft, here are the general modifications:

Content creation

• Kagla Finance removed
• Neemo Finance removed temporally (we are going to wait a couple of weeks to see how the situation evolves)
• Bitfrost & Algem added, both from Soneium ecosystem
• 1 interview removed

Funding Requirement

• Modified from $15,655 to $11,922.75
• Removed IRL activities
• 16% reduction for deep dive reports
• Added a payout structure based on
  – Upfront payment
  – Milestone 1: Half of the deliverables
  – Milestone 2: Half of the deliverables

We keep the Onchain Quest as we think it’s a great opportunity to onboard new participants into the ecosystem. Not only by education or social posts but my real onchain activities. The $1,000 scholarship it’s a huge incentive to those who expect attend to Devconnect.

[Matt]

Thanks for sharing this proposal — it’s a solid, well-structured plan to support Astar and Soneium in Latam through education and community efforts.

One question: Will the reports and guides be available in both Spanish and English to reach a wider audience?

[you425]

Thank you for reconsidering.
I looked at the updated proposal, but the right side of the table was cut off, so please correct it.

@Ariiellus

Content creation

• Kagla Finance removed
• Neemo Finance removed temporally (we are going to wait a couple of weeks to see how the situation evolves)
• Bitfrost & Algem added, both from Soneium ecosystem
• 1 interview removed

Yes, I think this is fine.

@Ariiellus

We keep the Onchain Quest as we think it’s a great opportunity to onboard new participants into the ecosystem. Not only by education or social posts but my real onchain activities. The $1,000 scholarship it’s a huge incentive to those who expect attend to Devconnect.

I am not opposed to holding an on-chain quest, but I would like to know the specific details of the plan. You decided not to use Layer3 this time and switched to Notion, right?
I am concerned about how you will proceed and measure results when using Notion. Won’t it require too much effort?

[Ariiellus]

gm @you425 hope yoy had a great weekend

You can see the table correctly now, sorry for the misconfiguration

About the onchain quest:

Our plan is to guide users through a 6-week exploration of selected dApps, encouraging them to interact on-chain (e.g. swaps, lending/borrowing, NFT minting), along with off-chain actions like retweeting and liking our posts to boost reach and engagement.

We don’t have the specifics of each action yet, but the purpose is drive meaningful on-chain participation and introduce new users to the ecosystem. To track these metrics we are partnering with a Data Scientist running a project originally launched in Brazil. She’ll help us measure impact and expand outreach in the region

We will use notion to organize and display the different activities, but we all data will be tracked and visualized in a custom dashboard created by Stefi and will be publicly available at any time

If you have any idea on how we could maximize the impact of this quest please let us know!

[you425]

Thank you, I’ve reviewed it.

As for the data scientist you mentioned, I couldn’t find enough detailed information to evaluate them properly.

XYZ Data Science| Intelligence for Web3

At this point, even if we proceed with a quest, I think what we can do would still follow the contents of the current proposal.
The question now is whether the current budget can be justified in governance.

It’s hard to determine what a fair price would be, but from the perspective of someone who hasn’t seen clear achievements yet, the amount feels high.
For example, if the report costs $2,500 and we’ve listed the breakdown, it still doesn’t guarantee that it will generate results worth that cost.
We need to distinguish between the effort and the actual impact.

In that sense, I can understand why, as pitcoin mentioned, some may feel the “KPI is too low for the budget.”

[pitcoin777]

Thank you for listening to the feedback and adjusting the proposal — even though it was just a suggestion. I appreciate the openness.

That said, I still believe that $2,500 for an ecosystem report is extremely overpriced, and I wouldn’t personally approve such a payment if the decision were mine.

I’m also an independent content creator and have been part of several DAOs (such as WagMedia), where compensation for this type of work — even when delivered with exceptional quality — would typically be no more than $400–$500 per report.

Another important point: the Astar ecosystem is still in its early stages. We have only a handful of dApps that can be covered in-depth and generate meaningful engagement. Likewise, the ASTR ecosystem on Soneium is also very new.

Covering the entire Soneium ecosystem may not be the best use of the ASTR treasury, in my opinion. It might make more sense to focus specifically on the utility of ASTR within Soneium.

I’m not saying the amount your team considers fair, but for me, half of the requested budget would make sense. Beyond that, I find the price extremely out of line given the proposed KPIs.

[Audiarmis]

I’m truly glad to see the Kairos Research community turning their attention to the Astar & Soneium ecosystem. That alone is a sign that expansion in Latin America is happening — and without a doubt, much of that has been possible thanks to the constant efforts of @juminstock. Thank you for everything!

As a communicator, I know firsthand how much work goes into producing high-quality technical and educational content — from research and writing to design and validation. That’s why I deeply value proposals like this one, which aim to empower the region through knowledge.

That said, I do agree with the ambassadors on the points raised regarding metrics and budget expectations. It’s important that the projected results are measurable and aligned with community consensus.

I’ll be following the conversation closely. And regardless of the outcome of this proposal, I want to leave one clear message: it will always be valuable to keep exploring and building with Astar. Our region needs more teams committed to education and adoption.

Wishing you all the best!

[Ariiellus]

Hello everyone!

First of all, we’d like to thank you all for your valuable time and the interest in providing us with feedback. We’ve taken every comment you shared over the past two weeks into careful consideration.

After further analysis, we’ve reduced the cost of each report from $3,000 to $1,500, the minimum amount we can sustainably afford. This represents a ~37.25% reduction from our initial budget. We’d also like to highlight that the reports will be originally written in Spanish and then translated into English, making them available in both languages.

In addition, we would follow your suggestion in having a Milestone funding approach. We are dividing the proposal in two milestones with one upfront funding.

We just uploaded our proposal to the democracy in Subsquare and we would greatly appreciate your support in seconding it.

ps1: We also added the Stefi’s LinkedIn profile to our doc for more transparency. cc @you425

ps2: We want to thank for your comments @Audiarmis, we received guidance from @Juminstock before sharing the proposal here. We agree with you that our region needs more teams committed to adopt Astar. Either through education or through development. We expect to reach hundreds of builders and raise their interest into build in Astar.

[Juminstock]

The Kairos team has shown strong commitment to the Astar ecosystem by consistently receiving feedback and refining their proposal over the past two weeks based on the recommendations shared by the community. This speaks highly of them as a team.

I’m glad to see the process moving forward and that we’re using our onchain governance to involve the community in the final decision for this proposal.

Great job, @Ariiellus! Let’s make the Astar ecosystem shine! cc @Audiarmis