Abandoned: Fund notional to work on the cosmos stack

[Cryptopital]

Hey Jacob, i do like what you do for The HUB and for the ecosystem in general.

When i look in your proposal and at different part of your answers i see that many chains already funded you right ?

So you should have a decent amount of tokens / money ( Even though you say its different , there is no difference between token or money, the only difference i can see is time and valuation).

If you already have a good amount of Tokens / Money , why do you need more ?
Your business should allow you to have a good amount of Money / Tokens as well.

The old way was that Validators prouved their work to have a better staking because people reward good builders / Educator.

If you are not looking for money, why do you ask for token then ?
Its very confusing to me because one way or another you are looking for money.

I can see your work, everyday, and surely you and Notional are very important to the community but here you come with a proposal without any way of counting.

How many hours of work does this represent? How many people?

We have always been paid for a job, right? Why 120,000 $ATOM? Where does this number come from?

I think we need a clear policy for this kind of proposal.
Here, we don’t know what we are going to pay and even who we are going to pay to work.

Far from saying that your work is not worth it, but 120,000 $ATOM today may be $12 million tomorrow, and we can’t give it away without knowing exactly why and without being able to quantify the work that it represents.

I try here to bring an objective point of view and my help because in this context I think that it will not be accepted, the community will never understood that and Notional can suffer from such a rejection.

With all my respect for your work.

[Aku]

Are we going to have each team writing proposals to finance themselves and asking for millions for their contributions now?

I’m sorry, but what is mentioned is that you would like to work on the Cosmos Hub, Cosmos SDK, Consensus, tm-db, cosmos-db, ibc-go, Relaying, IBC client update governance proposals, and pre-upgrade code reviews.

We already have dedicated teams that are sustainable and are doing great work on those parts. If you want to work on this stack, you should either join those teams or find a way to make your business sustainable. If you request funds from the community pool, the community should AT LEAST become a shareholder of Notional, because we will never give you millions for free, Jacob.

Regarding contributions, there is already a delegation program from the ICF that is ongoing. If your contributions are valuable, you will receive a delegation. If you need more, raise funds from founding entities.

This draft is just a politically correct way to show your ambition to become rich at the expense of the community.

[zaki_iqlusion]

I feel pretty strongly that this kind of proposal would be very good for the long term viability of the Cosmos Hub.

I think diversifying the economically aligned base of contributors is key.

This is exactly what ATOM holders should be funding to ensure a sustainable and relevant cosmos hub.

[tom]

If ICF is not re-opening grants program/releasing the new delegations policy, if AiB is just Jae’s political gun and private funding org,
If both of them are not funding the teams that make concrete contribs to the Cosmos stack (which benefits to a large part of the space’s chains),

Atom holders should. In a way or another.

If your goal with this amount is to self-stake and gain influence, as you said,

Why not that way then ?

@okwme

Once the gov module updates come in the Rho upgrade, the Cosmos Hub Community Pool can make delegations. That kind of delegation can be enforced with the governance module and I think should be the focus if you’re looking for enforceable delegations.

It could be reassuring for everybody, and enforcing alignment.

About the amount which represents your operations/team costs, i have no f clue if 120K Atom is fair or isn’t.
Would love to read teams that are involved in developing/maintaining gaia/ibc/db and which are currently funded about that topic.
Maybe with more transparency, the community can make wiser decisions. And DPS could slow down.

If that post is kind of stupid, tell me. i’ll be back with cool memes.

o/

[Sumit_Redhu]

@jacobgadikian
please clarify
how many individuals are dedicated for the development of the hub only or if they are working on more chain do mention that.

@Csandru

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?

Structure of your organisation. And the amount going to individuals.

And IMO the amount is high maybe the answer to above question make me understand it better.

[tom]

[ since i used to be critical (and sometimes tough ) about Jacob’s behaviour, i have to say Kerbal_case account is NOT my alt ]

[onivalidator]

This is a pretty unhinged retort. Oni has never claimed to be in the business of running a development house, nor are we the ones requested 120,000 ATOM - though we absolutely do push commits to projects developing in the space and make every effort to contribute to the development process and ensuring that user requests make it into the development cycle, as you are personally aware. Notional has done work informed by exactly that process.

Ultimately we are in the business of validating chains, and we assess service providers and funding requests seriously, and take that responsibility for our delegators very seriously. As such, we are in the business of ensuring community funds are spent wisely, and I have seen firsthand what happens when they are not. Learning from that mistake and choosing not to repeat it is important.

We have never said Notional should not receive a grant for it’s work - but that Notional should play on the same terms as everyone else. Asking for 120,000 ATOM with a generic pitch on core stack development and no specific service contracts is beyond silly, and finding a bug on Quicksilver is great, but by no means is that a magic pass to get a massive grant of 7% of the Community Pool.

I have not seen any of those other developers with similar contributions asking for such large sums, nor have I seen those amounts granted. It doesn’t make any sense for Notional to request such an amount, and we won’t vote in favor of such an arrangement with no one running the project or defining key deliverables - and that’s true of absolutely any vendor, not just Notional.

[tom]

hi,
nop, that’s not constructive here.

[system]

I’m going to have to say no to this relative to the asking amount. 120k atoms ($1.4m current in USD) for cleanup, testing, and CI is far too much. Bull or bear market.
While I agree this type of work needs funding, this ask is way too large. As I see, a majority this work could easily be done by a single Junior developers for 8-10k per month. not 60k.

Like onivalidator mentioned,
“You guys are being funded with vested funds on Juno as well and this makes me feel like your work will now be spread out across every chain, diluting the value and time commitments of your existing arrangements by seeking broad funding”

In Notional’s IPFS Juno document found in the Core-1 DAO (public) proposal A13 it states:
“Notional will provide four full-time developers contributing to Juno’s code.”, yet as someone who has worked on said project for many months now. There are no full time developers. 3 Part time (really more like 2).

How can you guarantee the hub will get any more work when past contracts are yet to still be fulfilled?

including a patch that would have prevented the issues encountered by Quicksilver

Feel this is very misleading given it was merely a version bump, which automated tooling can and does do. The security issue was not found by Notional based off the way you have worded things here.

We fixed entirely non-functional pieces of the continuous integration systems of…

This is simple, just some YAML and a little googling

Does the Hub need $1.4m of CI/CD and cleanup over the next 2 years? There is only so much to lint and CI. If this is the value of cleanup work, what would a new features development contract look like, $5m+?
Just trying to be realistic here…

[jacobgadikian]

So you’d like to let the hub be a freeloader?

[jacobgadikian]

Hey there you have been saying in the governance chat that you know all the validators are hurting and all the validators commissions are down and commissions are a small part of what we make at notional.

Our businesses aren’t the same and you shouldn’t compare them because they’re completely different fields of endeavor.

It’s not unhinged to say that. It is factual.

[jacobgadikian]

Hi there Kerbal,

On Twitter, you cited my location, tagged my father, tagged nearly every member of my team, and have generally been engaging in harassing behavior.

You don’t like the proposal that’s fine but what you’re doing is not fine.

I’ve reported your behavior to the admins of this forum and I’m making a report on Twitter now.

[jacobgadikian]

@tom

Would love to read teams that are involved in developing/maintaining gaia/ibc/db and which are currently funded about that topic.

There’s no ICF transparency report. All of what you’d love to read, they don’t release. They promise to release it but they don’t release it.

I spoke to the ICF first. I didn’t get any response.

[tom]

hi Jacob,
yeah i know that. there is no transparency from many entities in crypto lol.

the teams could talk as well. that was my point -

what i’m curious about is :

why icf didn’t fund you in the first place ?
why you did the job if not funded ?
how can we be sure that this CP funding will not be used for something else like Eve dev or whatever since your business is multi faceted ?
why not asking a direct delegation from the CP as i mentionned earlier ( if the tools are there for it - i doubt about that )

[jacobgadikian]

Hey Tom,

Just so you know most of the work that we do is designed to be used for other things.

That’s the point of building open source infrastructure, it is reusable.

The community pool cannot delegate to us because we are not updating the hub to SDK 46.

[Cryptopital]

This is not the purpose of my message at all.

I think that indeed your work deserves compensation but that this compensation must be measurable.

[Wunderbernd]

So you’d like to let the hub be a freeloader?

WTF is this logic? Did you pay the HUB and the devs for using their work, their tech stack etc.? No, I guess you were a freeloader too? I certainly see a pattern of rules for thee but not for me

So far you haven’t provided a single point of hard data why the HUB should fund the grant. Imagine if a mechanic does some work for you and he just charges you 50 k afterwards without giving you a detailed calculation about the costs. This would be riddiculous.

[jacobgadikian]

Do you have any actionable suggestions on this?

[jacobgadikian]

@Wunderbernd

WTF is this logic? Did you pay the HUB and the devs for using their work, their tech stack etc.? No, I guess you were a freeloader too? I certainly see a pattern of rules for thee but not for me

The hub benefits greatly from work that other teams pay for right now.

I don’t think that’s right and a lot of this proposal is about prioritization for notional for upcoming years.

We absolutely need to prioritize chains where our work is valued.

[Cryptopital]

@jacobgadikian

Do you have any actionable suggestions on this?

Yes sure.

It is necessary to quantify the work.
There are many ways to imagine and present it to the community, but here is mine:

• Quantify the size of the team, define its members, give their names / Functions, type of contract (Full time / Part time)
• Quantify the number of hours spent and the estimated number of hours to come (which may vary, you will understand why at the end of the message)
• From the number of hours already spent, launch a first proposal to request a volume $ATOM corresponding to this work by proving what was done (members involved / effective hours)
• Concerning the work to come, it is certain that it is difficult to quantify, define a team and an average number of hours (probably quite easy from the work already done) based on an average salary
• Make a monthly proposal (variable) with metrics attesting to the work and the number of hours performed (since you don’t work only for the HUB) and ask for the compensation each month

I will structure the proposal like this:

• First Proposal : For our past work (with proof) we ask 40k $ATOM (random number probably not relevant)
• Second Proposal : For our future work we are asking for 80k $ATOM credit which we will release each month by providing proof of our work over a period of one year.
• If it turns out that our work does not correspond to the estimated monthly amount, we will receive less, if it turns out that we have worked more then we will receive more.

I use a google sheet file for that and i will be happy to give you this sheet to start building your proposal or simply explain it to you if you need to.

I hope my point of view seems clearer to you.