The Synced citizen-science platform is already live and has an app for citizen data-collection with real-time map-based dashboards, integrated collaboration functionalities such as chat and multi-user collaboration. Synced apps are free and dashboards are provided free for public good projects. 

Through our previous SCF grant, we’ve added a unique “wanted poster” workflow to make requests for specific data, and demonstrated the ability to pay bounties to incentivise data collection. These features are key to overcoming shortcomings in citizen science, and enabling the generation of datasets that are timely, detailed and affordable. We’re paying bounties in USDC on Stellar, allowing us to pay anyone arbitrary amounts globally, and for them to be able to off-ramp bounties via Moneygram without needing blockchain knowledge.

During this project we’re developing the bounty system for full capability and large-scale use in real-time sargassum monitoring. Blooms of pelagic sargassum (seaweed) have drastically increased in the tropical Atlantic since 2011, in large part caused by human factors. Upon reaching the shore they engulf beaches, leading to decomposition that devastates ecosystems. Communities and the fishing and tourist economies that depend on a healthy ecosystem have suffered as a result. And by July, 2025 has already become a record-breaking year for sargassum blooms.

Maybe in the future, but not in this submission

$78.4K

Success criteria will be based on our impact in assisting the Sargassum Group and local communities to deliver real-time sargassum monitoring. We expect an increase in the geographic coverage per region and timeliness of citizen-science submissions, and we will be able to demonstrate this with a statistical comparison to the prior dataset of submissions collected.

Trackable community engagement KPIs include the number of views of the live sargassum dashboard. Community engagement and sentiment can similarly be tracked. We will also perform interviews with local citizen scientists and other community stakeholders over the course of the trial to ascertain their perception.

Synced apps are free and dashboards are provided free for public good projects. 

Our sargassum monitoring project will be the first large-scale use of our platform and is the first major step in our go to market strategy. It’s an issue that affects a lot of people and helping make a demonstrable impact will validate our approach to other potential partners.

One component of our revenue model involves a fee on successful bounties on the platform. The major component  is based on providing enterprise versions of Synced (in development, due 2025) for organizations to perform their own internal field studies and augmenting their data with crowdsourced data.

Synced has an existing userbase both viewing and marking data. The number of marks submitted so far in 2025 has grown 55% when compared to the corresponding period in 2024. We also ran an initial mainnet demo of the bounty concept at Meridian 2024, and participants marked relevant sites in exchange for USDC bounties. Here’s an example of someone marking the GMT Prime Meridian during Meridian in exchange for a bounty: 

https://synced.to/mark/51z4ipMRaJzc

We’re now starting a collaboration with the Sargassum Group. They are responsible for one of the largest citizen-science programmes for sargassum monitoring in the Americas. Since inception in 2019 they’ve generated over 11,000 observations from South Florida and the Mexican Caribbean to create a crowdsourced map of affected locations. They are now expanding to Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad & Tobago and Brazil. We will support them in delivering real-time sargassum monitoring, using the Synced platform and bounties to ensure all regions are regularly monitored.

[Deliverable 1]: Modify Stellar muxed account integrations so they are tied to wanted-posters and not to datasets like they were before

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 2]: Explicitly tie data collected to the wanted-posters and data feeds that requested it. Establishes a supply chain for every dataset from bounty to data collected to dataset, enabling the bounty payer to further annotate data collected if necessary.

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 3]: Finer grained specification of bounty geographical regions

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 5 days: $2,375

[Deliverable 4]: Bounties can specify custom fields with client side validation

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 5]: Bounty guidance for citizen-scientists

• Adding indicators like bounty payout rate, interest from other bounty collectors, bounties remaining

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 5 days: $2,375

[Deliverable 6]: Develop bounty mechanism so two people aren’t competing for the same bounty (important, particularly for remote/high value bounties and offline collection)

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 20 days: $9,500

[Deliverable 7]: Offline bounty collection capability - users should be able to collect data from no signal areas and have it uploaded when next online and it still be eligible for a bounty

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 8]: Add recurring bounties for field survey manager to set and forget - survey manager shouldn’t need to manually need to keep re-issuing bounties to the same location for repeated measuring

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 10 days: $4,750

[Deliverable 9]: Trial setup with citizen-scientists. We have been informed by our partner that Synced integration for the sargassum monitoring trial will take up to two months of on the ground preparation for good results. To ensure the trial goes well and we have great outcomes and also great feedback to help guide development and build tools people actually like using we’re allocating funds to our collaborator to help with this step. We feel strongly that this constitutes development costs as we have an opportunity here to build directly to user needs during this trial.

• Via trial project dashboard

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 10]: Continuous evaluation of bounty mechanism by collaborator performing trial

• Via trial project dashboard and evaluation document

• 15 days: $7,125

[Deliverable 11]: Modifications to bounty features as a result of evaluation

• Via live demonstration of changes & response document

• 10 days: $4,750

[Deliverable 12]: Upgrade on ramps for bounty funders to pay with trad-fi methods and for payments to go as UDSC to relevant muxed accounts

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 10 days: $4,750

[Deliverable 13]: Develop crowdfunding capabilities so multiple stakeholders can fund a project/dashboard and its bounties.

• Via live demonstration of feature

• 15 days: $7,125