[PROPOSAL 819][APPROVED] Re-allocate Prop 72 funding from P2P to Neutron

Hub Proposals
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Change log

  • 2023-07-24 Created initial post

Summary

Re-allocate funding granted by the Cosmos Hub community for the development of Neutron via Prop 72 to the Neutron Foundation. This requires authorising P2P to transfer the 25K ATOM received as part of Proposal 72 proposal, and authorising the Funding Committee to transfer the remaining 25K to the relevant address.

Context

In July 2022, the Cosmos Hub community voted in favour of Prop 72, and allocated 150k ATOM to fund the development of consumer chains to be launched on Replicated Security of which 50k ATOM were earmarked for Neutron.

The first portion (50%) will be sent once the Funding Committee votes to support the project, and the second portion (50%) will be sent at a maximum 2 weeks after the project enables Interchain Security.

P2P received the first portion, 25 000 ATOM, in August last year. The transaction can be seen here. The second portion is pending transfer.

Past use of funds

As a validator, builder and investor, P2P.org has been committed to the success of the Cosmos Hub since genesis. As a result, instead of liquidating the tokens, P2P shouldered Neutron’s development cost, held and staked the 25 000 ATOM (as can be seen in this wallet).

Motivation

As a smart-contract platform and a consumer chain, Neutron’s success relies on its independence and ability to successfully bootstrap an ecosystem of users, applications and core developers.

To secure the long-term independence of the project, a dedicated Foundation has been incorporated with the mandate of supporting Neutron’s long-term development. The transfer would allow the Neutron Foundation to allocate the ATOM to the continued development of growth of Neutron and its ecosystem.

Proposal

P2P and the Neutron Foundation therefore jointly propose to re-allocate Proposal 72 funding to the Neutron Foundation. In the spirit of Proposal 72, and assuming the Cosmos community votes in favour of this proposal, the funds would continue to be earmarked for funding the development and growth of Neutron and its ecosystem.

The transition can be performed in two steps:

  1. Once authorised to do so by the Cosmos Community, P2P and Neutron related entities will enter an agreement to transfer the 25,000 ATOM received as part of Prop 72 to a multisig account controlled by the Neutron Foundation.
  2. The Neutron Foundation will communicate the multisig address approved by the Cosmos Hub community to the Prop 72 Committee to allow the remaining 25,000 ATOM to be sent directly to the Neutron Foundation once the network is launched.

FAQ

:bulb: This section will be updated throughout the review period based on the community’s questions and feedback.

What happens if this proposal is rejected?

P2P will not be able to transfer the 25,000 ATOM to the Foundation, and will receive the additional 25,000 ATOM as per the initial terms of Proposal 72.

Who are the signers of the Prop 72 multi-sig?

The composition of the Prop 72 Committee can be seen here:

  • Jelena Djuric (ex-Informal Systems, Noble)
  • Jack Zampolin (Strangelove Ventures)
  • Zaki Manian (Iqlusion)
  • David Feiock (Galileo Group)

Who are the signers of the Neutron Foundation multi-sig? What is the multisig’s address?

The Foundation’s Holding multisig is a cw3 smart-contract multisig on the Neutron network with the address neutron13zwlfzwqtegmuguczf3mvefupyfcvhp0df2u0wrk5ek0tr5zer4suj0g0u, a ⅗ signature scheme and the following signers:

  • Avril Dutheil (Neutron Foundation)
  • John Campbell Law (Neutron Foundation)
  • Bo Du (Polymer)
  • Sacha St-Leger (Cosmos Hub contributor)
  • JK (Apybara)

Governance votes

The following items summarise the voting options and their significance for this proposal:

  • YES - You authorise P2P to transfer 25 000 ATOM received as part of Proposal 72 to the Neutron Foundation to fund the development and growth of Neutron.
  • NO - You do not authorise the reallocation of the ATOM granted by Proposal 72 and wish P2P to receive the remaining 25 000 ATOM.
  • NO WITH VETO - You consider this proposal (1) to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.
  • ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.
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According to the original Prop 72: ‘2/3 of funds (100 000 ATOMs) will go towards CosmWasm and smart contract projects that either decide to launch on the DeFi Hub, or as their own appchain. The Managing Committee will vote on which projects to fund on a case by case basis.’

This draft proposal is about 1/3 of the funds (50k ATOM) from Prop 72, but what about the other 2/3 (100k ATOM)? So this means that 100k ATOM were to fund projects building on Neutron or launching as consumer chains (Stride, Duality). Is there any transparency about this? @zaki_iqlusion have you funded Stride, Duality or other projects with this 100k? Wouldn’t this also overlap with the proposed Neutron grants program since these funds are to fund projects building on Neutron?

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I believe the remaining 100K were used to fund other consumer chain projects. As far as I know, no Prop 72 ATOM was used to fund applications on Neutron. I’ve asked the committee members to confirm.

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Hi @cosmic_validator

Jelena here, who was previously part of the Prop 72 committee. As Im no longer employed with Informal Systems, I am no longer part of the committee, as my role on the committee was tied to my employment at Informal and advancing the goals of ICS / Cosmos Hub. However, I’m sharing some relevant historical information as it pertains to your question:

As you note, the intention of Prop72 was to use 1/3 of the funds to fund Neutron. We transferred half of the grant upfront, 50K ATOM and the committee will be transferring the remaining half, 50K ATOMs, to the team, as per the governance proposal.

The remainder 2/3 of the funds (100K) was earmarked towards supporting other projects that want to launch as a consumer chain of the Cosmos Hub. The only other project that the committee has formally voted on has been Fairblock. The Fairblock team made their case as to why they should launch as a consumer chain on the forum. As such, the committee transferred their initial grant and since then, the team has been leveraging the funds to build out the Fairblock infrastructure and to explore using ICS. If Fairblock decides to launch as a consumer chain, their remaining grant will be dispersed to them.

The rest of the funds have not been allocated and the rest of the Prop 72 committee has been discussing whether to send those funds back to the community pool or not. Those members are Zaki Manian, Jack Zampolin and David Feiock. As previously mentioned, I am no longer part of the Prop 72 committee as I no longer work for Informal Systems and my role is no longer as “Cosmos Hub Business Lead”. I am no longer in possession of my keys as part of the Prop 72 multisig and have no authority over the dispersement of funds as of Dec 31 2022.

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Half of Neutron’s grant: Interchain Explorer by Cosmostation

Half of Fairblock’s grant: Interchain Explorer by Cosmostation

Fairblocks case to be consumer chain: Fairblock: A Consumer Chain of the Cosmos Hub

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Hey, Peyman from Fairblock here:

also please check this:

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Thanks for the update, according to this update you mention: “While our current library works fine for up to 50 validators, we are not sure that it will work fine for ~150+ validators of the hub. Due to the design of ICS, we don’t have the option to run it with top 50 Cosmos hub validators and we should make sure that it’s possible before making the final call (we are going to test and optimize for this soon). We were not aware of this limitation at the time of the announcement and there was no clear documentation about this; however, we think that we can still make it work with ICS.”

It seems that you should have researched about this limitation preventing you to launch as a consumer chain before asking for, and receiving a $400k grant in ATOM from Prop 72 funds as funding to build and launch a consumer chain? Moreover, Jelena mentions that ‘The Fairblock team made their case as to why they should launch as a consumer chain on the forum. As such, the committee transferred their initial grant’, shouldn’t the committee also had done due diligence to realize as well about that limitation before awarding the grant?

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Thanks for the comment, there are a few things to consider.

  • First of all, we haven’t received 400K, we received 16250 atoms (50% of the grant) which was valued at ~160000 at the time of payment (payment was delayed hence the article is out-dated)
  • It’s not a theoretical limitation, it’s an engineering challenge that needs more research and optimization basically like all of the scalability challenges for ZK projects, or even Ethereum. We haven’t been told about the fact that we can’t use a subset of validators, and there was no decent documentation at the time of application.

We haven’t told that we are not doing it anymore, we just mentioned some of the technical challenges that may make it harder. It’s still in our roadmap and we will try our best to make it work.

  • A grant doesn’t mean that there is 0 risk for that project, it means that the project is supported to conduct research, explore and do their best to implement it. Many big projects in the blockchain industry are trying to do the impossible, or have already done that after years of experimenting, we wouldn’t have many of them if VCs or grant committees only fund the next easy and guaranteed project.

While we really appreciate your feedback, we think it’s also important that the community values honest efforts, transparency, research, and development patiently.

Thank you.

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If you are applying for a large grant from Prop 72 to build and launch a consumer chain in the Cosmos hub, it would be expected that you would do research to understand what is a consumer chain, and what is replicated security, opt-in security and mesh security? I mean even the name says ‘replicated’ meaning consumer chains benefit from the same security of the Cosms hub which is the total value staked in all validators (the soft opt-out only affects liveness, not safety: ‘It is important to note that the small validators who are not being slashed will still be present in the validator set of the consumer chain. In other words, we are sacrificing liveness, not safety. The economic security of the consumer chain is the same, but it may be more likely to halt.’). I think saying that ‘you were not told that you couldn’t launch your consumer chain with replicated security with 50 validators instead of 150’ is not a valid excuse, I assume the committee was expecting you to understand how replicated security works if you apply for a grant to build a consumer chain leveraging replicated security?

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  • We are still planning to use replicated security as it makes a lot of sense for us and we are currently testing/experimenting with our DKG library. We think it’s possible and we need to implement some optimization techniques. We think we have a complex architecture so it’s important to test and ship each part carefully. We are closely working with the Informal team and the community to discuss the best approach and possible solutions to address these problems and are actively making an effort to onboard as an ICS consumer chain.
  • It is not possible to guess any engineering challenge before actually implementing it (in our case implementing cryptography libraries, building the chain etc) and testing it. So no one could predict any numbers just based on papers and ideas. Also, the details of mesh security, opt-in security, and replicated security, opt-in are all new, and evolving; and there was no documentation or implementation for researching them other than the high-level idea. You are defining the term “replicated” but it was not used at that moment it was ICS. The opt-out for 10% of the validators and the details were discussed later and so it wouldn’t be possible to research it at that moment but it may make things easier for us and the validators.
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This doesn’t seem like fair criticism to me, given the timeline.

When Prop 72 happened (in May last year), ICS was not built out to the point that an incoming project could possibly know that we were going to do ‘replicated’ security and that the engineering challenges they would face would be so significant. Soft opt-out certainly didn’t exist at the time. That’s an incredibly recent development.

“We weren’t told” is more like…“There literally wasn’t any information about this because it didn’t exist yet”. Hard to blame a team for not being able to see the future :sweat_smile:

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Fairblock’s case to be a consumer chain in the Cosmos Hub forum, as @Spaydh indicated with the link above, was in October 2022, not May 2022 (although Prop 72 passed in July not May, not sure why you mentioned that it happened in May) and this case presented in the forum as Jelena indicated was used to decide the funding allocation by the committee. October 2022 was after Sunny’s talk in Cosmoverse Medellin for example about Mesh Security (ICS v3) where he clearly described and explained ICS v1 (replicated security) and ICS v2 (Opt-in security) and compared them to Mesh security. The soft opt-out is not related to Fairblock’s limitation of not being able to launch with the full Cosmos Hub validator set but only with up to 50 validators

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Thank you all for the feedback to this proposal. Since no strong objection was raised, we propose to prepare the signalling proposal to be published on-chain soon.

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Aren’t Neutron and P2P closely tied together? Could you elaborate a bit more on why this is necessary? Is it because development will move faster if the proposed multisig is in charge? How many people in the new multisig have the same amount of influence when the funds were going to P2P?

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They are. One was launched by the other (cutting some bureaucratically edged here)

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Proposal 819 has been approved by governance.
https://www.mintscan.io/cosmos/proposals/819

The Foundation will verify the mutlisig’s integrity and collaborate with P2P and the Prop 72 committee to re-allocate the tokens.

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