Introduction
This is an update for Proposal #839 (Fund 2024 Hub development by Informal Systems and Hypha Worker Co-op). Informal Systems and Hypha met with the 2024 Oversight Committee last week and are now ready to present reports and grades.
The 2024 Oversight Committee consists of:
- Stride contributor: Aidan Salzmann
- Neutron contributor: Avril Dutheil
- Polkachu representative: Polkachu
- Jim Parillo at Figment Capital
- Shane Vitarana at Stargaze
- James Hinck, Product Manager at Circle
This is a summary of Informal Systems’ portion of our 2024 Q3 Wrap-Up/Q4 Kick-off meeting on October 16, 2024.
All oversight committee members have reviewed and approved this document before posting. Hypha has shared its report here.
Q3 Retrospective
Forge (ICS launchpad)
- 6 chains featured on the dashboard
- Only 2 consumer chains have joined at this point- more on this in the consumer chain section below.
- v0.5 permissioned version deployed in early August
- We shifted priorities to put our resources towards launching the full permissionless version.
- v1 full permissionless version launched alongside permissionless ICS by end of quarter
Permissionless ICS
- 3 new consumer chains launched permissionlessly
- Only one new consumer chain launched permissionlessly
- Code deployed to production in Gaia v20
Hydro
- 100k ATOM liquidity deployed
- 8 projects participating
- 10k lsmATOM locked in voting
- Deployment in August
- We did not deploy in August, but this was because the scope of the project had to expand greatly to conform with community feedback. Instead of allowing users to lock stATOM, we had to develop a lot more code to allow them to lock LSM shares, a much more complex undertaking both in the contract and the frontend.
ICS: Fault Resolutions
- Fault resolutions deployed to production in Gaia v20
- We have deployment on hold until there is more demand for the feature, and more clarity on what intersubjective offenses require slashing: Preventing intersubjective faults in ICS.
Growth: Marketing and Business Development
- Three current consumer chains fully live: Evmos, Elys, Comdex
- Comdex is ready to go live.
- Elys continues to face development delays due to an upgrade to Cosmos-SDK v.50 (nothing to do with ICS), but intends to launch in the next months. Elys is currently in their own sovereign testnet.
- Evmos is currently on hold for reasons having to do with turmoil at AADAO.
- Two additional consumer chains launched on ICS during Q3, for a total of six
- CryptoDungeon is live.
- Showdown is launching their own sovereign testnet shortly, with plans to join ICS when they are ready.
- Current Pipeline of upcoming consumer chains:
- Blockless - launching Q1 next year
- Sphinx - still in development
- Passage - waiting on community feedback
- Secret Network - waiting on community feedback
Gaia Releases
- v18 deployed
- v19 deployed
- v20 deployed
Financial Transparency Reporting
Now that the quarter has closed, we have reconciled our FTE headcount at 14 FTEs. This quarter, we will not transfer funds from our FTE allocations back to the community pool.
In Q3, our team leveraged the skills of a part-time Front-end Developer and received some minor assistance from a UX Designer to polish and improve both the Hydro and Forge front-ends prior to deployment.
Finally, we found our full-time Content Marketing Lead to support copywriting for Hydro, Forge, user documentation, and support go-to-market activities for Hydro, Forge, and Hub presence at upcoming events and on the official X account for the Cosmos Hub. She has already started leveling up the quality of content from the Cosmos Hub X account.
As of the end of Q3, Informal Systems has not received a bonus in 2024. All bonus funds have been returned to the CP each quarter. We will update this post when we process the Q3 return transaction.
The wallets are linked below:
- Budget vesting address: cosmos1r0t2zplulmfnuhx3de6wu4njg69yct0wv9383z 2
- Bonus vesting address: cosmos1rn5dpfpp20slrt0h3p79lspcpjpnhnlhtrlem9
Q4 Plan
Vision and Strategy
Our technical goals during Q4 are to maintain smooth operation of the Cosmos Hub, prepare for handoff to a new product team, and iterate on Hydro, Forge, and Permissionless ICS in response to user feedback.
Our business goals are to continue to support new chains joining ICS, and build momentum around Hydro.
We are planning to cut our team’s headcount by roughly 30% to ensure that we use the Hub’s resources effectively during this transition. The exact amount will be reported at the end of the quarter.
Hub maintenance
We will keep Gaia up to date during Q4, with a release candidate for Gaia v21 already out by the time of this report. Our team will be available to deal with any emergent situations, security problems, or emergency upgrades until the end of the year.
During this time we will also work to improve testing libraries to make sure that working on Gaia is as easy as possible.
KPIs
- Improve testing
- Work towards enabling fuzing for ICS. Basically, this entails adding IBC support to the Cosmos SDK simulation.
- Improve ICS e2e testing to reduce the cost of maintenance. For example, remove complexity when not needed and cleanup existing tests.
- Keep Gaia up to date by having regular releases — 1-2 releases, v21 and potentially v22.
Forge/ICS
We will continue to refine Forge according to user demand, as well as possibly adding some small additional power shaping features to ICS.
We will be focused on collecting user feedback and improving features based on needs of our key user groups below. We will hold 1:1 user feedback sessions as well as conduct focus groups with key audiences for this platform.
At the moment, we are looking at the following user needs as priority for these user groups:
- Delegators
- Interested in seeking information on new and existing ICS chains for staking opportunities
- Want to compare potential rewards across different chains
- Need to check if their current validators are participating in specific ICS chains
- Want to see if there are airdrops available with new ICS chains
- Validators
- Looking for information on upcoming and popular ICS chains to validate
- Needing to understand the requirements and rewards for validating ICS chains
- Wanting to attract more delegations by participating in sought-after projects
- Developers
- Needing to understand the process of launching an ICS chain
- Requiring access to tools and documentation for chain development
- Wanting to easily submit their chain for inclusion in the ICS ecosystem
Hydro
We will work towards Hydro v2 features, revising and improving the front-end and UX based on user feedback.
Additionally, we will be working with the Hydro Committee to issue several RFPs for features like:
- Vote Aggregators / Optimizers
- PoL analytics and tracking tools
- Delta-neutral LP strategy development
We will be evaluating the timing to move the Hydro contract and DAO DAO to the Cosmos Hub, and have a long list of features for V2, V3 and onwards that we will prioritize based on user need and feedback.
We may change priorities but here are some initial features from our product backlog (in no particular order):
| Hydro governance | Hydro users can vote on governance proposals to define all of the protocol parameters and elect the Hydro committee. |
|---|---|
| Slashing & revenue sharing | A portion of the users’ locked capital gets slashed when a project underperforms. Voters get a portion of the PoL yield distribution. |
| Custom bid duration | Projects are able to set their own export duration and voters are therefore able to lock-in a fixed APR over several rounds without having to vote every time. |
| Funding rate | End-of-round value transfer to guarantee parity of return for voters of “low-yield high-tribute” project and voters of “high-yield” low-tribute” projects. |
| Staking interface | Hydro users can stake, delegate, re-delegate, claim & compound rewards directly from the Hydro interface. |
BD & Marketing
- Hydro support & several rounds of evolution
- Kicking off the Hydro Pilot Rounds for the Q4. The goal of the pilot rounds is to identify and fix bugs, gather user feedback, refine the auction process and establish a baseline. It can be considered as a soft launch.
- Future development on Hydro V2 with new features and larger liquidity buckets, expecting more projects to participate and start utilizing the entire clawed-back liquidity (2,5M ATOM)
- We will start conversations related to exporting ATOM to other ecosystems
- Solana via Picasso
- Avalanche via Landslide
- Ethereum via Union
- Arbitrum / Optimism via Polymer
- Continuing ICS onboarding support
- With a launch of Forge (new era of permissionless ICS) we expect to attract more upcoming new projects to the ICS family and expand our current pipeline
- We will continue developing and expanding a more targeted top-of-funnel approach with primary audiences being:
- early projects evaluating ecosystems
- early projects using the Cosmos SDK (shared with us via partner organizations)
- development studios
- investment partners (VCs, etc)
- tooling and service providers
- Continue promoting Cosmos Hub as the best place to launch a chain, now that we have user/project facing product (Forge) we expect to establish a more prominent presence in Web3 space as a go-to solution for appchains.
- As part of our partnership with Babylon, we will likely support their hacker house at Devcon - introducing new teams to ICS, Forge and onboarding them to Cosmos.
Oversight committee grades
This quarter, the oversight committee did not provide a document with comments regarding their grades. The committee provided the following grades for Informal Systems in Q3:
| Category | Grade |
|---|---|
| Execution | Needs Improvement |
| Direction | Needs Improvement |
| Feedback | Meets Expectations |
| Smoothness | Meets Expectations |
| Overall | Needs Improvement |
