Abandoned: Fund notional to work on the cosmos stack

You should talk about what you will do Jacob, instead of what you have been doing.

The community is not responsible of the fact that you’ve done work without being funded by ICF or whoever.

The way you’re answering give me the feeling we should pay a posteriori something nobody ask for.
Things should not work that way.

None of these things currently exist, and we are not interested in waiting further to figure out the funding.

I want to repeat myself here, this grant is not for activities that village to validation. This grant is software development and infrastructure services which we are uniquely unpaid for.

What we’re going to do is continue doing what we have been doing, at greater scale.

There is a list of those activities in the proposal.

Do you have questions?

Because we write code, our optionality is much greater, and we are growing. One of the reasons we made this request is so that we can prioritize by revenue.

Our business is not the same as yours.

yep, 3 :

  1. who in the world is doing work for free, for years, and then ask “hey guys, look what we have done, now please pay us” ?

  2. don’t you think it would have been a good idea to wait and see what the new ICF delegation policy is, before doing this high amount request, if that’s stake you want, and not money ?

Hi stakelab!

This is not like raising VC money, as VC money is… Money. And then, the VC would want us to pursue profitable activities, which working on the hub… Is not.

We would like stake, not money, because we have money for our operations and wish to have more stake.

We don’t intend to turn our stake into money (ever) and we commit to not turning our stake into money for two years.

We are asking for payment for services, in the form of stake. Dollars are far more expensive to the community, since turning atoms into dollars reduces the value of the atoms held by everyone else.

We know that we have been high impact, I’m personally the one of the largest contributors to the hub codebase, and other validators do not really contribute. The only validators who contribute routinely are notional, informal, iqlusion and strangelove.

Thus, we are the only software developers on the hub codebase who make routine contributions and aren’t paid for it.

Like any business, we must prioritize the business activities that drive revenue.

No, the other chains, except for Juno, funded us privately.

I will get the Juno contract for you now.

Please note that the Juno grant is paused until vesting contracts in daodao 2.0 are going, and the feedback we received from core 1 was that our work has been excellent. The issue, according to core 1, was that grantees from trf, like loop, sold the full amount of Juno that they were granted and this had very negative effects on the price of Juno and community sentiment. Notional has accepted Juno’s offer of funding on the same terms/amount/scope.

Funding of our work by the osmosis grants program, is on their web site.

Other funding is not disclosable, per contract.

Once again I wish to repeat that the funding we are requesting has to do with software development work and not validation. If we only signed blocks, Notional would only need about 3 team members.

We have an engineering team of 20 and many of our engineers are highly advanced with the cosmos stack.

Learn more at:

Thanks for the precisions.

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The type of work that we have been doing does not have milestones.

We are not doing feature development, although I am going to add implementation of a couple of ADR’s to the scope and on those I would say that we complete them within the funding year.

Just for example, what is the milestone for discovering a security problem on the cosmos hub, before it is exploited, while assisting a cosmos hub team member with the usage of a script that you wrote?

The problem that I am describing is the issue that Quicksilver encountered, and The fact is that our team had patched it long ago and the hub team had failed to apply the patch. On December 7th I informed the Hub team of this. On December 24th, the ICA channel between the hub and Quicksilver was exploited.

This seems confusing, so you plan to sell the 120,000 ATOM in 2 years or never? If never, then are you planning to stake this 120,000 ATOM in your Cosmos Hub validator? This would then be like 120,000 ATOM delegation indefinitely at 100% commission, or 1.2M ATOM at 10% commission equivalent. You will also get corresponding large airdrops, etc.

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Thank you for your proposal. My takeaway is that the community should look to unite behind Notional to put pressure on the ICF to funding this work, as this is in their mandate. I do not blame Notional for seeking funding here, however, I do believe a political campaign by the community would be more beneficial and successful to the vitality of the Hub in the long-run and be a win-win scenario with respect to this work (and rather than setting divisive precedent). What can we do to help?

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I don’t plan to stop validating during the course of my natural life and have succession plans in place should I die

EG: We look at involvement with the hub as a permanent thing.

We also assert that all of our tokens are our property.

We can do with them what we please to.

In the case of these tokens, we will ensure that they don’t move about for 2 years.

And we do not intend to sell them. We want influence over the future institution that is the hub. We don’t want to lose vote power.

Out of curiosity, why are you thinking in dollars? Do you not see the hub as a permanent thing?

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Well I do think that community pressure is the only thing that will get the ICF moving, however please understand when I say that I have zero interest in relying on the ICF. They have proven to be highly unreliable.

That’s the main point. Notional’s work on the cosmos stack should be funded by both ICF (and ghost AiB ?). Even if the retroactive thing is… doubtful to me.
Instead of by the CP, imho.

When the new icf delegations policy @catdotfish ? x)

ps : i’ve already talked too much :smiley: give you all some air from now

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Hey Tom,

I appreciate your getting into the conversation, and probably this stuff should be funded by the ICF, but I should make something clear:

Absent a super huge delegation, this work likely can’t be funded by an ICF delegation. And the guidelines expressed by the ICF don’t account for exponential differentials between validators code contributions, and I’m not sure that would be fair to other validators.

Still, the most positive course that the ICF could take with regard to delegations, is to take action on what they told the community that they would do.

The most positive course that the ICF could take with regard to funding, is the same – they should do what they said they should do, and release a transparency report. Absent that, no one knows what they pay anyone for anything. That is contrary to what they told the community they would do.

Just had a brief chat with @jtremback regarding scope, and will have (separate) calls with both him and @catdotfish tomorrow.

I just got home, and I’ll tell you what I told Jehan:

  • At this time, nothing is set in stone – pricing, scope, vesting, etc
  • I do not believe anything the ICF says. I only believe what they do, because they say things that later prove to be untrue.
  • I can’t even get clarity on weather or not the icf is currently making grants. Different people say different things.
  • Many orgs treat retroactive grants as standard. certainly the Osmosis Grants Program loves them.
  • As a CEO making firm commitments to a customer (the cosmos hub) – I’m unable to consider only the bull scenario for ATOM. When accepting payment in ATOM I must consider the possibility that it drops by 90%, even if my gut feeling sentiment is quite bullish.
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Hello,

Thank you for the proposal.

What would happen if let says your proposal is getting rejected by ICF and Cosmos Hub governance? Are you going to stop all the work that you’ve been doing? What would be the risk for the ecosystem if you do so?

I think that you have made a wonderful contribution to the ecosystem, and you deserve to be paid for it. And I would like to learn if there are other options available to get you funded/getting paid for your work.

Cheers,

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I am not sure yet.

Please understand that we have spoken with people at the ICF, and cannot even get a straight answer on whether or not they are making grants at all.

it’s important for us as a business to prioritize our business activities by revenue. Businesses that do not prioritize profits eventually fail.

Please know that another way to support notional, is to delegate to notional, and to ask your friends to delegate to notional. We believe that we provide the best value for money that exists in the cosmos ecosystem.

We are currently mapping out what our options look like, and trying to arrive at a strategic direction for the next year.

We have no desire to discontinue this work, because we believe that it is valuable, and we are told by our colleagues, very consistently, that it is valuable. With that said, if it is not valued then it would make sense for us to focus energies where we are valued.

:heart:

Because they say that they have paused all grant activity. Well, some of them say that, some of the time.

Certainly there is no longer a grant application on their website, and we do not know how to apply for a grant from them. Certainly, before putting this proposal on this forum, we have attempted to discuss these matters with them and they have been non-responsive.

Will ICF make delegations?

idk

Does ICF make grants?

idk

Who is ICF currently paying for what, how much and why?

idk

The ICF is past its self imposed deadline for delegations.

The ICF is past its self imposed deadline for transparency reporting.

I made this proposal assuming that the hub cannot rely on the ICF for anything because the ICF is not reliable.

At this point we have to fundamentally change the grants process, I have a fundamental problem with a proposal like this and other proposals which got passed before.

You can’t just evaluate the work done, you also have to evaluate the efficiency and return on the money. So what makes it worth to spend that much money for notional? Do we know how they operate? Do we know their salaries? How do we know that they don’t massively overspend for their business?

You can spend 1 mil on a google dev or you can spend 250k on a startup dev, both get the job done, but you pay 4 times as much for the first dev.

Without a detailed report what the expenses are and why you need this amount of money for this amount of work, we just can’t pass a proposal like this.

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Can I ask a stupid question, who owns Notional? In case that the community agrees to pay (maybe not so much)for your team’s work will all the hard working devs get their share, or you run the business, assume the risk and get the rewards?