[PROPOSAL #42][ACCEPTED] ZKValidator Community Spend Proposal: Privacy Events

Hub Proposals Community Spend
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Hey y’all.

As some of you know we (ZKValidator) are a mission driven validator with the goal to promote privacy and ZKP adoption on networks we validate on. As we are preparing for our upcoming Cosmos Privacy ZKP Showcase event on March 26th we want to get some initial feedback on our plan to put forward a Community Spend Proposal. The proposal is to spend 5k Atoms from the community pool and to deliver four quarterly privacy focussed events. Three of them online and the fourth will be in-person. We will also deliver blog posts and youtube videos to wrap the events up. The content of the event will be presentations, showcases, panels and Q&A sessions around privacy on Cosmos.

We have put together this draft for a formal proposal:

What do you guys think? Would such a proposal get backing by the community?

Edit: The proposal is up for vote now

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This is a nice idea. Although I do have minor questions after reading the proposal thoroughly.

  1. Is this your first time doing this kind of Privacy Event? If not, can you share to us the metrics and results of one or two previous privacy events.

  2. How can we say that we are effectively hitting our goal with these Privacy events? Do we have a definite estimate of the results that will emerge?

All in all,
This is the first time that I have seen a proposal like this. But this quite a nice idea considering most countries are still in lockdown.

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Hi PhillipM,

thanks so much for looking into our proposal.

Regarding your first question: we will do a similar event for Cosmos today you are welcome to join (see link above) :). We have also conducted comparable workshops for other blockchain communities like NEAR and Polkadot, you can read more about them in our blog.

Besides the ZeroKnowledge podcast Anna also organises the zkSessions and zkSummit event series and hosts the zkStudyClub, you can check that out on Youtube. The zkSummit is at least one of the most imporant events in the ZK community (in my opinion :)).

Regarding your second question: Success is indeed hard to measure. We will publish metrics about attendance, engagement and any community feedback in the blogpost after each event.

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I am definitely for promoting privacy on Cosmos. The proposal looks sound and acceptable to me.

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This seems like a waste of time, and it’s not good to do in person events during covid. Also why not use this money to focus on privacy software or a better ui for enabling privacy that can be used on cosmos instead of just spreading info about privacy. I did like the reports part but that is really the only thing. I would support developing actual privacy use cases that could go live in the future, but as it stands I don’t support this and see it as a waste of time and money.

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Privacy proposals are very necessary for Cosmos nowadays, and this approach from the validator side looks very interesting regarding validation services. I support it and I am looking forward to make use of it both as a user and validator.

I got a question though. How this intersect with Penumbra project?

PS: Considering the best way to reduce risks for everyone, I also support any physical Cosmos event even if we have to go with a level 5 hazmat. First Bitcoin and Ethereum meetings were the most worthwile on many aspects. Hoping the community is still small enough to allow some of this.

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Planning any in-person events seem futile under basically everyone’s current situation, unless you’re planning the event in Tanzania.

Since it also accounts for a large majority of this grant, instead cut that in-person event that likely won’t even be able to happen, and instead reduce the grant request for those 3 online events. That way the community can gauge the effectiveness of these events.

Albeit to be frank, these costs as is would appear to be trivial to you as a validator, considering you should be raking in around 50,000 ATOMs from your validator commission a year? Is that not self-sufficient monetary support to push your ZK mission for Cosmos?

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Thanks so much for your feedback here and elsewhere. We took critique into consideration but went ahead and published our proposal: Cosmos | Cosmos Hub 4 | ZKValidator Community Spend Proposal

We strongly believe that the event will help to bring more privacy related developer activity to the network. We also think that it will be possible to conduct the in-person event, which is planned for the first half of 2022.

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Would be great to have more details on reasoning for costs of each of these expected events. 3350 ATOM valued at 20$ means that it would be a $67,000 in person event a year out. Also, for an online stream $11,000 seems quite high.

It would be nice to see quotations from venues and estimates for those related costs like location, persons, food, etc. Perhaps closer to event dates.

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If it reaches quorum, it’s definitely one I’ll have to give a no(veto) vote for… considering concerns were ignored and it was just put up.

Funny thing you mention regarding the validators… I have begun undelegation process from any validators I’m with that voted Yes for this, and will do similar for that of some peers that I handle and for those peers whose delegations I don’t handle I’ll recommend they do the same.

For anyone else who wants to see if their validators voted YES, and are against it you can check the validators that voted so here: Big Dipper | Block Explorer by Forbole and then expand the YES tab.

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can’t believe we’re gonna spend $100k for zoom calls and a physical event in… 2022

Screenshot 2021-04-18 113919
Screenshot 2021-04-18 1139191279×428 35.2 KB

Validators, justify yourself

edit: after discussions on telegram/twitter, I think I have no way to correctly assess the value of this proposal. Outsiders like me seem against while people who are deeply into cosmos are all for it. Which makes me think the issue might be a an incomplete/poorly marketed proposal.Looks like it’s going to pass now, but still have access to metrics of the podcast and past events would be a big plus.

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I would summarize the point of this proposal as .

  1. Zero Knowledge Proof specialists are a small community.
  2. The point of this proposal is to cooperate with the Zero Knowledge validator to leverage their existing community of ZKP specialist to make them aware of opportunities to build on top of Cosmos and IBC.
  3. IBC allows for opportunities for building ZKP technology that aren’t currently available on other platforms.
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Re: to your edit

Metrics on their current videos imho is quite poor, at least when looking for it in terms of bang for buck.
Socialblade lists their channel grade as C+ https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g and their recent videos barely break triple digits. Their daily video view average appears to be 158.

Another channel, that charges between $15-250 per published video, and easily gets thousands of viewers per video, has a B rank and averages 35,000 views a day.

I’m just looking to be purely pragmatic here… ~$100K for 4 extremely low activity videos and a maybe in-person event seems like a terrible deal. Compare that to the other channel… $100k with the most expensive option would yield 400 videos… on a channel with WAY more activity, viewership etc… basically orders of magnitude better ROI.

The irony here is this supposed to improve marketing for Cosmos, but has literally already had the opposite effect without even passing: https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmosnetwork/comments/mssdf8/reject_prop_42_zkvalidator_5000_atom_cash_grab

It seems that post has even been censored…

Some people I know already sold due to the apparent unanimity in voting YES for this proposal, albeit I tried to explain to them NOs aren’t really even necessary until quorum. However, at the same time it’s a bittersweet action for many of them since they sold at ATH, but that’s neither here nor there, mostly about the already negative impact of this play is my point here…

A 100k bounty for some actual projects may be better spend than some videos on a barely viewed channel, and again I mean no hate, but there’s really no way to sugarcoat it, and I’m frustrated it’s caused people to jump ship in fear of these community proposals just being for those in the good ol’ boys clubs. I think it’s moreso a case of validator ignorance to the proposals, and just voting for the sake of being active, and also not wanting to rock the ship by voting no.

Zaki, since you’re the head of Iqlusion and one of the validators that voted Yes, if you have some rationale for why you voted that way, it may alleviate some people’s fears and help them better understand, because to “most” outside these circles, this proposal does not seem to make sense in terms of value.

EDIT: Also to tone down some of the potential negativity of this post, which I am trying to keep to a minimum whilst keeping dialog to a maximum, I do wanna say that I do greatly appreciate all the videos they have already done regarding Cosmos etc… which benefits both them as a stakeholder in Cosmos and the wider community.

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Brian from Chorus One here. Some of our delegators questioned our “Yes” vote on this one so I reviewed the proposal again more thoroughly and also the discussion around it. I posted some comments on our Telegram group, but wanted to add them here as well.

I personally think the amounts are maybe somewhat on the high end, but not excessive. The amounts cited for the online events are around $4k each. That is totally okay. If you properly prepare them, promote them, edit videos, produce some content around it. This is not too high, in my view.

For the in-person event, they are quoting $70k. Organizing a conference, even a single day event is a huge amount of work. I have some experience both with organizing in-person events and online events and doing this well is a big effort.

I also know the ZK Validator team well and think highly of them. I went to a full-day conference that they organized in Berlin a few years ago and it was an outstanding event. They had excellent programming, a great quality of attendees and it was well organized. I remember various people saying at the time that it was one of their favorite events.

I think such an event focused on zero knowledge and privacy tech in Cosmos would be great and definitely worth $70k. So we continue supporting this proposal and won’t change our vote here.

I should also add that we are actually finalizing a deeper partnership with the ZK Validator team. This will be announced shortly. So we do have a conflict of interest here.

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Vasiliy from P2P Validator here. Developers and cryptographers in crypto are a rare breed, with one good person attracted bringing outsized returns for the ecosystem. Comparing 1000-views dev youtube channel with 100000 views general public one (to not use a harsher word) is not apples to apples. I think this can be a miss, sure, but if it has a decent chance of brining just a few more good zk researchers or developers into Cosmos, it’ll be more than worth it.

The expenses are reasonable and ZK Validator folks have the skills and the rep to pull it off, so we’re voting yes. If you think it’s on the high side or unreasonably high, consider how much demand there is right now for people with similar skillset and how much they would quote you to organize an event like this.

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Any information on milestone 1? It seems slated for Q2, which we have about 12 days left in, but I have not seen any information on it and I frequent many Cosmos/Crypto mediums.

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See the event here.

Please join @dalechuckechance

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The first event funded from this proposal will take place on 30th June, the link to sign up is here Privacy in Cosmos - Jun 30 | Hopin

Hope to see you all there!

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Hi all :), the first event funded through this proposal will take place this Wednesday, 30th June 15:30 - 17:30 UTC. You can sign up to the event here Privacy in Cosmos - Jun 30 | Hopin

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Hello everyone, the second event funded through this proposal will take place at the end of the month on Wednesday 29th September 15:30 - 17:30 UTC. You can sign up and view the event here. This time we are focusing on privacy in DeFi in the Cosmos Network, featuring Osmosis, Terra and a couple of other projects. I hope to see you all there!