I would love to see more emphasis for Gov. reward allocation be put on expanding the ACE program (more schools/students) or directly rewarding projects/ideas coming out of the ACE program as opposed to continuing to push money towards DeFi/NFTs.
DeFi/NFTs are a well trodden ground not only for our past Gov. voting but for every other blockchain out there. Algorand is no where near cracking Ethereum, Solana, etc. and genuinely competing for the consumer market. We lost AlgoFi which was arguably the best team of devs- the liquidity and interest from new users is not currently there for these companies to sustain without
A.) outside investment
B.) new users
C.) Algo Foundatio subsidizing rewards/liquidity
It should be the responsibility of the teams building to do “A” and “B” and way less emphasis on the expectation of “C.” The person/team that is going to build a dominant DeFi/NFT marketplace on Algorand is going to WANT to do it regardless of the liquidity/interest and to continue subsidizing this sector seems silly.
The ACE program gives Algorand a shot at genuine ground up development with, hopefully, novel blockchain applications. Silvio, Chris Peikert, Jing Chen, etc…etc…etc… all come from academic backgrounds and their CVs open doors. We should be leveraging that to entice more students to build on Algorand.