# AMA about Subsquare

## 1. Why did you build Subsquare?

Subsquare is a product of OpenSquare. We believe more social collaborations will happen on blockchain, so We found OpenSquare for this. You can image we want to build a decentralized LinkedIn in the polkadot ecosystem. But when we are developing in the polkadot ecosystem. We met several problems:
1. It's too early to build collaboration platforms.
2. Polkadot's functionalities is too complex compared to ethereum that even experiend community members can not understand how it works.
3. Polkadot need more infrastructures to illustrate itself.

So we decided to build some tools helping people to undersand polkadot first. Then we build dotreasury, our first product for the community, to understand how treasury system works. We met several teams including acala, phala, interlay during our development and they were not so satisfied with governance platforms at that time. So after discussion with them, we decided to build subsquare for the community to better understand how polkadot governance works. I'm appreciated my team is trusted by these teams and subsquare is accepted quickly.

## 2. Why polkadot?

Yongfeng started his work in the polkadot ecosystem from late 2018 or early 2019, as a Dapp developer. He's more familar with tech stack of polkadot, and fortunately he got a grant from web3 foundation. This is how OpenSquare is started.

## 3. Who are you guys?

We're hiring more developers, but currently we only have 4 full time members including Yongfeng, 3 developers and 1 designer. We once had 8 members, but we now keep only developers and designers. All our members are experienced. Average work experience of each member is over 10 years. I believe our understanding about blockchain and polkadot can help the community.

## 4. What features are you developing?

- Whales data view including current and history ones. We can see their participation rate, win rate, history votes, votes power.
- Polkadot fellowship business support. Membership management, data view, salary system.
- Decentralized delegate announcenemtn(SIMA spec).
- Decentralized avatar settings(SIMA spec).
- Multisig wallet integrations, mimir and signet.


## 5. How subsquare differ from Polkassembly?

We're not very sure about polkassembly's plan. We mainly have 3 directions for subsquare.

1. Discussion data decentralization. We know that polkassembly, subsquare, polkadot forum, all these platform are centralized. It means people's comments are saved in each platform's database. These data is not auditable and easily been modified. Data syncing between different platforms is also a problem. We wrote [SIMA spec](https://github.com/opensquare-network/sima-spec) to solve this problem. People will sign their every actions, and we will upload signed data to IPFS, then put the data CID to blockchain by `system#remark`.
2. A comprehensive app. Subsquare is known as a governance platform, but it can be more. It will be a comprehensive dapp for polkadot, and you can see it a better polkadot.js apps with more richful features.
3. Visualize polkadot with other products like statescan, dotreasury. As I said polkadot is so complex that it's hard for community to understand it. In current stage we will focus on make more UIs for the community to understand polkadot. A example is subsquare profile page, and we can see various data including delegations, transfers, identity, votes, etc.

## 6. You challenges when building these products?

1. Breaking changes by runtime upgrades. We may be late adjusting our UIs for chain interface changes.
2. English. Haha.

## 7. Your opinions about polkadot governance?

We think there are some problems about polkadot governance.

1. We think gov1 maybe not fully utilized. For example, councilors were not changed so many.
2. Whales are playing too important roles.

We are exploring the possiblity of quadratic funding in the polkadot ecosystem.

## 9. Sustainability?

OpenSquare fund the development of subsquare for almost one year by ourselves before we seek fund from treasury. Currently our biggest fund is from polkadot and kusama treasury, and we also request hundreds of maintenance fee from para chain projects.

I think it's not a good answer that we define subsquare as a common good product and we will alwasys ask support from treasury. Actually it's a problem of all common good products. For long term plan, maybe we can monetize these products and airdrop tokens to DOT holders. If these products can make profit, we can buy-back these tokens.

## 10. Your plan about dotreasury, subsquare?

- Dotreasury. Dedicated to treasury, aggregate more ecosystem projects, classify treasury spends.
- Subsquare. See how subsquare differ from polakssembly section.