We have voted "abstain" to Proposal 34 on Cosmos Hub.

Forbole as an active validator, blockchain developer and $atom hodler

Amongst all the networks we have participated, we have spent most of our effort on Cosmos Hub and Cosmos ecosystem. Big Dipper started as a Cosmos explorer. Desmos is built with Cosmos SDK. We are not a participant of the public fundraiser of atom in 2017. But after nearly two years of validator works and buying from the market, atom has become one of the largest holdings in our portfolio.

Forbole as an experienced marketer

Kwun and Terence, the cofounders of Forbole, have been running a digital marketing agency in Hong Kong together since 2009 (which was founded by Kwun in 2005) called Creativeworks, which was once a Google Partner. Kwun was the adjunct lecturer in the University of Hong Kong taught digital marketing.  Terence is a content creator wrote about various digital marketing concepts such as social media marketing and SEM/SEO.

Our vote on Proposal 34: Abstain

Below are the major factors we have considered which involve pros and cons. The net effect cannot give us a strong yes or no and hence we voted abstain.

1. We are comfortable with the current $atom price. Even though we strongly believe $atom is underpriced, we can wait. This is a long game. We believe the potential of the project will be unveiled by the market in the future if not now. The stagnant $atom price will give us more time to accumulate the token.
2. We have also thought that the core team (i.e. Tendermint) and ICF have not spent reasonable effort to raise the awareness of the market since the inception of Cosmos project.
3. We are not familiar with all the committee members of this proposal but we are convinced that Zaki Manian and Jack Zampolin will act in good faith and make sure the budget is well spent.
4. The proposed amount is quite large when compared with the current community pool. But this is not that large when consider the fund size of ICF. We are quite sure this size of marketing budget is far smaller than most other crypto projects.
5. We agreed with the concern raised by Stakefish. But we think the risks involved can be mitigated.

Here is our conclusion: we don't think we need to boost the awareness of Cosmos urgently. But if there is other community members who want to do it under the community oversight, we think there is no harm of doing so.

We concern more the depletion of community fund pool after the approval of this proposal. We think the community, no matter for or against this proposal, have done a majority part of the works which we suppose ICF should do. After a series of community pool spent proposals, we believe the community has proven themselves are more efficient than ICF to make quick and necessary decision in some grant applications.

We would like to discuss a "petition proposal" to earnestly request ICF to inject most (if not all) of the fund requested by Proposal 34 to the community pool so that the pool has enough resources to provide support to grow the ecosystem.