Zealy 2025 Program Q4

The current discussion can be found here.

The community-run Akash learn and earn program returned successfully for Q3 and will only get better from here.

The original discussion for Q3 can be found here: Zealy 2025 Program Q3

Report

After creating new and more roles within the same role budget, we can safely say that the productivity has improved. With the new roles and new contributors to the program, we were able to run the Zealy program smoothly and we hit all of our external and most of our internal goals of what it meant to keep operations running smooth. We were also able to spend a lot of time helping make contributions to the contributions program and help them review some work and help another Akash Insider judge hackathon projects on the Akash-sponsored HackOdisha hackathon. The program spent approximately 11,800 AKT during Q3, with payroll and requested funds for October being excluded from this report as this is outside of Q3.

After making it harder to become a verified user on Zealy by adding verification missions where users for example had to create a contribution before getting access to paid missions, we lowered the number of users to 46 at the time of writing but each user did something more than just learn this time around. In the first month even before any real collaboration was made with the Akash-Website Working Group (WG), the surge of activity in simpler pull requests of the Zealy users was brought up in a call by 0xBoldPanther. At the time of writing, over 50 contributions were made in the form of GitHub contributions, GitHub repos, articles written for AkashReport, and similar which is very similar to the Contributions Programs results for Q3. Additionally over 100 other missions were claimed, funneling people to various programs and resources within the community.

During the quarter, monthly updates were given in the SIG-community call and the updates ranged from simpler small updates to demos of the tech that was built for future contests. We are hoping to be finished with another tech demo for the next SIG-community call. Furthermore, a public tracker was built for the community to transparently see how the community pool funds were spent. When smaller questions related to the budget was asked, it was mentioned in the SIG-community call and voted on in the #wg-zealy Discord channel.

One thing that we wanted to experiment with was creating contests and other content outside of Zealy, in an effort to bring in new tenants and contributors to the network. A gamejam where game developers could learn about deploying game servers on Akash was planned to run on itch.io. For this gamejam, an Akash Insider was given the opportunity to create documentation, demos, images, and SDLs to make it possible for these users to learn this quickly. At the time of writing, the work was just completed and the game jam is ready to be published after the code and instructions has been verified by one of the reviewers.

Notable points

• Many smaller contributions were made by Zealy users to Akash Network repositores such as the documentation and website ones because of a XP-only mission that requested the users to create their first contribution to Akash.
  • Examples 1, 2, & 3
• 7 approved examples of data backup solutions to external cloud services (e.g. Storj & Filebase) were also created, some of which used the SHM feature to experiment using the feature. Many of these were added to awesome-akash.
• Multiple articles were written by Zealy users and approved and published to AkashReport. Some are approved but yet to be published.
• A bounty was given to an Akash Insider, Fenil Modi, to create a game client demo and a way to host custom game servers on Akash. This repo can be seen here and is to be used for the upcoming game jam contest planned to run in Q4.
• A base of a subscription platform with authentication is being built and will be open-sourced and shown as a demo soon, hopefully by the next SIG-community call. We are hoping that this can be used and expanded on by the contributions program to become a real app, or other community members who wants to use it.
  • In Q4, we are hoping to continue help building a version of it to fit the AkashVPN project built by the contributions program. This could give the AkashVPN app a business model by giving users, who have paid for different tiers, access to different features such as different VPN servers or their own deployed VPN servers.
• A public tracker for how the funds were spent was built and shared in a link after the first month of Q3 had passed. This will be added to the Akash Network Community Pool Spend Reporting page.

High-level proposal changes

• Budget changes:

  • We want to increase the monthly miscellaneous payments from $500 to $1,000
  • To keep the budget the same, we will also lower the mission rewards budget from $5,000 to $4,500.
  • The missions rewards budget will be able to be used on contests outside of Zealy, with one example being the planned game jam contest.

• Q4 Goals:

  • Hosting the game jam.
  • Open-sourcing the subscription platform demo.
  • Completing or starting work on the AkashVPN rebuild, using said demo.
  • Create a better brand identity, which includes creating SWAG and trying to include links to the program on more official pages.
  • Continuing the same goals as in Q3 which includes creating missions, paying rewards, collaborating with other programs and Akash Insiders, and other goals just as explained in discussion 943.

Monthly budget & total request

• Monthly request: $9,500 USD + fees
  • Roles: $4,000 USD
    • Program lead: $1,000 USD
    • Payroll & payments: $500 USD
    • Mission review: $1,250 USD
    • Mission create: $1,250 USD
  • Miscellaneous payments: $1,000 USD
  • Mission rewards: $4,500 USD

A 10% buffer will be added to the entire proposal. A 5% conversion fee will be added to payroll & payments that must occur in fiat, but does not change the funding request of the proposal.

The total budget consists of the Q4 Budget @ $28,500 USD. Since a buffer month was included last proposal and payroll for October has been paid, this budget will keep the program running during the first month of Q1 2026 as well.

Total request: $31,350 USD including the buffer. Only the difference from the operational wallet will be requested as the wallet still has funds, which at the time of writing amounts to roughly $7,250 USD.

Timeline

General details of this proposal was mentioned in the Steering Committee call on the 25th of September. If no major changes are requested by comments on this discussion, the proposal will go on-chain for voting in 1-2 weeks.