[WITHDRAWN] Funding the Spellshape Developer Tooling

Hub Proposals Community Spend
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Letter to the Cosmos Hub Community

The Spellshape team is writing to inform the Cosmos hub community that we respectfully withdraw our proposal for the community’s consideration.

After careful evaluation and reflection, we believe that submitting more proposals for public works projects would detract from the urgent discussion and deliberation surrounding the lack of a standardized process for assessing public tools and services. We wish to avoid producing another review and consideration event that generates more stress, confusion, and disagreement – and one that bypasses fundamental conversations about how we decide which items to fund and the reasons why.

In the absence of a hub constitution, it is difficult to hold meaningful and informed discussions and agree on the necessary frameworks, rules, and procedures to facilitate the review process of proposals by the entire community.

Due to the absence of objective and well-defined evaluation criteria for proposals seeking community pool funding, consideration regarding such funding appears to be disorganized, inconsistent, and uneven in scope and concern. More simply, we do not want to add to or take away from this issue.

Therefore we choose to withdraw the proposal.

In addition to the above, the worst-kept secret of the Spellshape developer tooling proposal is that it’s an initiative of former members of the Ignite division at All in Bits.

Our ability to work on a community-owned and community-managed fork of (spellshape · GitHub) ignite/cli (GitHub - ignite/cli: Ignite CLI is the all-in-one platform to build, launch, and maintain any crypto application on a sovereign and secured blockchain) is riddled with friction caused by the abusive use of restrictive covenants. Such anti-competitive business practices have no place in the Cosmos innovation story (https://twitter.com/fadeev/status/1628689276870303748?s=20).

Since this proposal has been brought to the forum, our head of operations has also been the target of relentless trolling and intimidation attacks, including phone calls to her residence. We implore those who have participated in slanderous and intimidating activities to cease immediately. Please stop.

We strongly urge the community to use proper channels and refrain from engaging in personal attacks while discussing proposals. We must keep in mind that thoughtful and civil discourse is our aim, and it’s in our collective reputational interest that these basic and best practices are adhered to in an effort to reduce the excessive toxicity of the hub governance system and culture. Let us prove that we are better than this.

In proving that we are better than this, we plead for support from All in Bits, Inc., and the Interchain Foundation. We need the founding leaders and their organizations to set a model example for tone and communication. We ask that your personal channels, your organizations’ channels, and your employees’ personal and work channels exemplify respectful conversations essential for the social life of the Cosmos network.

Finally, the forum has been a valuable resource for exchanging communication and ideas. This period has sparked conversations with stakeholders, enhancing our understanding of the optimal tooling for Cosmos SDK developers — our primary developer-user segment.

In doing so, we now realize that rather than a fork of ignite/cli, what the developer ecosystem requires is a ground-up rewrite of the ignite/cli source code with an architectural direction that is more compatible with the IBC narrative for sovereign and consumer appchains.

We express gratitude to the community for their considered assessment and are especially moved by the public voice of support from ecosystem stakeholders for our new endeavor. In particular, we feel both indebted and inspired to have the support of Greg Osuri, Jake Hartnell and Provalidator.

Let’s continue to spell the shape of Cosmos together…rather than a statement of disbelief – the foregoing is a statement of belief we are not too broken as a community to fix this.

Yours,

Spellshape Team

Summary

Spellshape is a community fork of the Ignite CLI & chain and an open-source public goods project with a mission to continuously improve the developer experience of building with Cosmos SDK. Github: spellshape.

The main components of the Spellshape project:

  • Spellshape CLI: an all-in-one tool for creating and extending Cosmos SDK blockchains.
  • Spellshape Chain: a blockchain for coordinated launches of new sovereign Cosmos blockchains.
  • Cosmos SDK tutorials for onboarding developers to the ecosystem
  • Developer outreach: technical support for developers on Discord, promoting the Cosmos ecosystem at conferences and hackathons.

The team behind the Spellshape project has been a core contributor to the ecosystem since 2020, onboarding thousands of developers and helping dozens of blockchains to progress from idea to mainnet.

The goal of this proposal is to fund the development of Spellshape for a year with 127K ATOM. This will allow the team to add new features to the CLI, keep up to date with Cosmos SDK, and launch the Spellshape chain (either as a consumer chain to increase the value of ATOM or as a sovereign chain, the community will decide). Spellshape chain DAO (once live) will be steering the direction of the project.

History

The team behind Spellshape started working on open-source tooling for Cosmos SDK in early 2020 with the goal to improve the developer experience of building with Cosmos.

The CLI tool for creating new blockchains was released in July 2020. The CLI featured a simple UX and offered the functionality to create and launch locally new Cosmos SDK blockchains with a simple web frontend. The tool quickly gained popularity among developers thanks to its user-friendly interface and quick onboarding flow.

The CLI has been used in many hackathons, including:

  • HackAtom India
  • HackAtom V
  • HackAtom Russia
  • HackAtom HCMC
  • HackAtom VI

The CLI has been featured in many events:

  • Liquidity 2020: demo of the first-ever IBC connection and token transfer between two newly created Cosmos blockchains.
  • Interchain Conversations: demo of a proof of concept of a blockchain for launching blockchains
  • Cosmos IBC Launch Party: demo of creating a blockchain, sending tokens from a newly created blockchain to Cosmos Hub using a browser-based IBC relayer.
  • Cosmoverse 2022
  • Istanbul Blockchain Week 2022
  • Blockchain Life 2021

3 of the top 10 videos on the Cosmos Network YouTube channel feature the CLI.

The Spellshape team has contributed to the tutorials on building with Cosmos SDK: from the simple “Hello, World!” and “Voter” tutorials released in 2020 to the comprehensive Interchain Exchange tutorial.

The Spellshape team has been instrumental in the growth of the Cosmos developer ecosystem by supporting developers on Discord. Thousands of questions have been answered and solutions provided.

Github stats show that the CLI project is used within over 790 repositories, and over 100 packages. Making it widely used both as a standalone developer tool, and Software Development Kit (SDK).

In a 2021 paper by B9Lab, it was reported that the founder of the Spellshape project has been responsible for the majority of technical answers on the Cosmos Discord server.

Projects using the CLI

Interchain Developer Academy, Stride, Neutron, Lava, Celestia, Dymension, Wormhole, Mediblock, Source Protocol, Cudos, Kujira, Coreum, Kyve, Sonr, and dozens of others.

Team

  • Grace Yu, Head of Operations, twitter: YuTangClan_
  • Scott Carter, Head of Design, twitter: scottcarterco
  • Developer Relations Engineer
  • Software Engineer
  • Software Engineer
  • Software Engineer
  • Frontend Engineer
  • Designer

Funding and budget

The funding request is the equivalent of $1,660,000 in ATOM (currently, 127K ATOM).

The primary expense is salary for 8 team members for one year.

Expenses Amount
Team salary & wages $1,440,000
Accounting $40,000
Legal $100,000
Operations / Administrative (tools, subscriptions, licenses, etc.) $80,000

Roadmap for 2023

  • CLI support for Cosmos SDK v0.47.x and upcoming versions
  • Cosmos SDK module installation system
  • Support for scaffolding of CosmWasm and EVM-based chains
  • Integration with other Cosmos open-source projects through the plugin system
  • Spellshape chain launch (ICS consumer or a sovereign chain, the community will decide)
  • Use the Spellshape chain as a DAO to steer the direction of the project
  • Spellshape’s branding will belong to the community
  • Provide technical support for developers on Discord

Recipient

A multisig wallet:

  • Jake Hartnell (Stargaze, Juno, DA0 DA0)
  • Greg Osuri (Akash)
  • Joon Park (Provalidator)
  • Grace Yu (Spellshape)
  • Scott Carter (Spellshape)

Oversight & Reporting

Head of Operations will generate quarterly and annual progress and performance reports.

  • End of year fiscal report
  • Quarterly progress and performance reports; including both expense-related data and qualitative information about project’s progress.

Contact & Discussions

Spellshape Community Chat, Telegram: spellshape
Head of Operations, Grace Yu, Telegram: GYunit
Head of Design, Scott Carter, Telegram: scottcarterco

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I fully support this. This tool is very important for new developers as it creates a smooth on-ramp to get something running quickly.
In the past the cli has struggled to stay relevant for chains after initial scaffolding and development, but this has largely already been remedied, and seems to be top-of-mind looking at the roadmap too.

If Cosmos is going to stay a relevant place for developers to come to, I think this is an easy YES.

4 Likes
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This seems like a meaningful initiative for a useful tool, but there are many outstanding questions in its current form.

  1. How does this affect the community pool balances given other proposals that have recently passed and are going on-chain soon? All pool spends should be in context of longer-term planning, or at the very least – relative amounts. This proposal alone will leave the Cosmos Hub on track to spend around ~10% of the current amount in the community pool. The confio proposal is for a similar amount, as is the Notional proposal. Together, these three outstanding proposals will account for 342,697 ATOM, which, on top of the 588,000 ATOM already spent by the pool on the accelerator DAO, leads to a proposed spend of 930,000 ATOM or nearly 44% of the current community pool balance (a dollar amount of ~$12,000,000) in the first two months of the new year. This is a hard pill to swallow.
    • There is very much an unresolved issue of how the Cosmos Hub community should manage the community pool. This is a core problem, and the recently passed grants program is integral to it. We must find out how funding initiatives relate to each other, or else we are crawling around in a dark cave.
  2. How does this relate to the mandate of the ATOM accelerator DAO? (cc: @Youssef @Better_Future )
    • This question is likely to keep popping up and it would be great to have some more information about this.
  3. Can you provide any more information about the software engineer positions? Are those positions already filled? If so, who is filling them and what is their experience?
    • What is the relationship of spellshape to the tweet by Dennis which speaks of a similar fork of Ignite CLI?
  4. Can you say more about the Spellshape chain? I don’t quite understand the value proposition in its current form.
  5. Have you coordinated with others working on developer outreach in Cosmos?
  6. How will ATOM sales be managed?
  7. How will receiving ATOM before a legal entity is formulated affect tax liability?
  8. Can you provide more information about the responsibilities of the team members?
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Hey Abra! These are insightful and reasonable questions :clap:
IMO, the assessment of the feasibility of a particular proposal under the prism of past proposals does not look balanced, in this case, we blur the value by shifting emphasis and generalizing. Each initiative is unique and should be judged primarily by its potential value to the ecosystem.

The Spellshape has nothing to do with the novel ATOM accelerator, it is a self-sustained initiative aimed at continuing the work of Denis and his practiced team. The main purpose of the fork is the provision of thriving operations with subsequent growth in the accessibility of the Cosmos SDK environment and optimization of the entry threshold to the ecosystem for new cosmo-builders.
Afaik, the product has warm support and recognition among many well-known and competent contributors, essentially this can be judged by, those who signed the FreeDenis petition.

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Even if ICF was a better fit, they are 1: not giving out grants right now, and 2: not shown to be very easy to work with for public good funding (hence why Confio is also asking the hub for a grant).

How ATOM holders are beneficing from the Spellshape, this does not add utility to the Comos Hub.

If the hub is to house chains under ICS, they need to be developed. Just like Confio’s CosmWasm proposal is about supporting those who build on the hub, so is this.

The other is the spellshape chain which could be spun up as an ICS chain (the prop mentions this), which would bring a lot of value to the hub.

Is there not a team of Dev Rel at the ICF doing already that? I know the Cosmos Developer Portal was created by @Noam @Thomas_Interchain. This seems to overlaps.

While true, I can tell you from experience that we need more.

In the end, the value I see from this is crucial tooling to onboard developers. I’ve seen countless developers come into this ecosystem and if it wasn’t for an easy-to-use tooling like this, they would never in a million years be able to get started. The same goes for myself.

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There is no direct benefit for $ATOM holders, as in most other proposals tbh. However there is a good for developers, building on Cosmos, which in turn brings broad benefits to the entire ecosystem. Their work was used in absolute majority of the SDK projects, that we love. Need to support such a sought-after endeavour.

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Perhaps, but I am not sure it is strictly necessary give that this has been the case for a while now. Both organizations have created content. The cli already has a lot of documentation that is perhaps more focused on the cli itself, and the developer portal more holistic. But yes, I am sure both are keen on making sure that there is no double work and they can leverage the work of each other! And that can probably be done without there being any overarching organization - just a cooperation between two entities that has a lot of the same goals :slight_smile:

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How does this relate to the mandate of the ATOM accelerator DAO? (cc: @Youssef @Better_Future ) This question is likely to keep popping up and it would be great to have some more information about this.

Although the ATOM accelerator DAO is a commendable initiative, we are not fully in sync with their timeline as it will take some time for it to become operational.

Can you provide any more information about the software engineer positions? Are those positions already filled? If so, who is filling them and what is their experience?

The positions haven’t been filled yet, but we’ve come to know highly qualified candidates who would love to join and work on Spellshape full-time. Engineers working on Spellshape will have strong proficiency in Go (which is our primary language of development) and experience working with Cosmos SDK.

Can you say more about the Spellshape chain? I don’t quite understand the value proposition in its current form.

The Spellshape chain can assist builders in coordinating chain launches with validators. By “publishing” your blockchain project on Spellshape as a chain builder, you can increase your visibility to potential validators. These validators can then apply to become part of your initial validator set. Once you have assembled the necessary validator set, you can launch your sovereign chain. For further information on the Spellshape chain, please refer to the documentation at https://docs.spellshape.com/network/chain.

Have you coordinated with others working on developer outreach in Cosmos?

Spellshape is focused on creating developer tooling for Cosmos, which are complementary to the efforts of other initiatives. For example, the Interchain Developer Academy uses the CLI throughout its learning course. Many projects have their developer outreach efforts rely on the CLI as well, for example, Celestia with the Wordle tutorial and Dymension, which also uses the CLI.

How will ATOM sales be managed?

ATOM will be sold on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to cover the expenses.

How will receiving ATOM before a legal entity is formulated affect tax liability?

A new legal entity has already been created for the purposes of this project.

Can you provide more information about the responsibilities of the team members?

Engineers will be focused on maintaining and improving the CLI and implementing the features outlined in the roadmap. They will also be contributing to the Spellshape blockchain. Designers will be focused on the UX/UI of the Spellshape blockchain, visual assets (website, documentation, branding), and improving the developer experience of the CLI. The frontend engineer will work on the implementation of the UI for the blockchain as well as frontend components of the CLI (templates, code generation). Developer relations engineer will be working on the documentation, technical support of users, screencasts, and organizing community calls. The Head of Operations will be responsible for all organizational aspects of running a team (legal entity, contracts, salaries).

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There are two benefits two ATOM holders:

  • Improvements in developer tooling will attract more developers and will lead to more projects being built or migrated to Cosmos to launch with Cosmos Hub’s Interchain security.
  • If the community decides so, the Spellshape chain itself might be launched with Interchain security, thus increasing the utility of ATOM.
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Spellshape is focused on creating tools for Cosmos developers, which are used by other Dev Rel initiatives like the Interchain Developer Academy (which uses the CLI throughout the course). Spellshape’s work is complementary to that of other Dev Rel initiatives.

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I am wary of the Hub funding core development work that does not directly benefit ATOM. The CosmWasm proposal has my blessing because it directly benefits Neutron and likely other ICS chains that need this critical piece of software to continue being maintained. (edit: although ideally I’d see support from multiple chains)

Starport / Ignite CLI / Spellshape is great, and much needed for the Cosmos developer community, but for the Hub I consider it very much a nice to have, and not critical to it’s success.

I think alternative paths like a multi-chain superdao or some other funding entity need to be explored to continue funding work outside of the ICF scope. If this somehow manifests with broad community support, I’d be in favor of a “tax” through the emission schedule or a one time payment to fund this entity, so long as other chains equally contribute.

That being said, if this proposal does pass, I’d love to see some collaboration with the Developer Portal teams to make sure the platform stays up to date with the latest and most used fork.

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The CLI is used by the Interchain Developer Academy throughout its learning course. Celestia is using the CLI for their Wordle tutorial. Dymension’s tutorials are also using the CLI as the go to way to create new Cosmos SDK chains.

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It worth to join the official community group and get to know everyone better :upside_down_face: Telegram: Contact @spellshape

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This seems like an initiative for the recently funded ATOM Accelerator DAO rather than a spend from the community pool. While the mandate wasn’t clear this does seem like a grant worthy proposal @Youssef @BendyOne @0xave @neshtedle y’all should consider syncing up to discuss timelines, a concern of compatibility mentioned above. If it doesn’t suit the Accelerator program mandate you could/should also explain why.

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The ATOM Accelerator DAO is not ready yet to deliver grants and it seems @spellshape needs a faster path to funding as they mentioned above.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing the areas of funding we will be focusing on as a grant focused DAO. This doesn’t mean we will exclusively be funding those stated categories but it does mean priority will be given to them.

Please keep in mind the ATOM Accelerator is mostly focused on the Hub and the ATOM token and our funding decisions should reflect this.

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In the community pool of COSMOS HUB, 90% should focus on the direct interests of ATOM itself, and 10% should focus on the indirect interests of ATOM.

For multi-chain and COSMOS ecological infrastructure construction, you should apply to ICF, Ignite, etc.

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The team is not anonymous. Both Grace and myself, as well as all the members of the multi-sig wallet use their real names. We know all the contributors personally, and if some of them decide to remain anonymous, it is their choice. As a crypto community, I believe we should be accepting of that. Even your account, which was created just yesterday, is anonymous.

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Apologies if im getting this wrong, but you need 1.5 million USD for a years salaries, is that right?

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Hey, Marko from the sdk team here. I think there are a few things missing from the proposal. There is already ongoing work for tutorials, it would be good to understand how this work wont overlap or how a collaboration between teams will evolve. Secondly, Id like to see how spellshape/ignite cli will collaborate with the sdk team. Over the past few years our recommendations have been ignored and caused problems for users. I personally have been recommending teams to use ignite cli to scaffold a module but then to stop using the tool for everything else, how could we fix this issue? This was articulated to the team a few times without much acknowledgement.

We opened our doors to support the team, we invited them to the community call and offered a stage to display what is possible with ignite cli, the team never took the opportunity.

For the developer outreach, will this be in its own discord server like ignite cli was? I feel this caused fragmentation of users more than anything.

Im in support of something like this getting funded, but there are lots of gaps in the proposal that for me are crucial to evolving the ecosystem and not paying double for work.

EDIT: is AiB stopping work on ignite cli that is why this is needed? For clarity I heard that this is not the case, so im wondering what new/different is being funded here?

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Thank you @youssef for clarifying.

We have explored all known and emergent constructs for financing ongoing development of CLI –

Timeframes were not compatible with Atom Accelerator DAO, as our need to bootstrap experienced team is more time sensitive and urgent.

As stated by others, will confirm ICF has halted its grant program – and thus this is also not an option for us.

The work on ignite/cli has pretty much halted since the dismissal of 6 core members of former Ignite team on 1/11/23.

The release of v.o.26.1 made on 1/25/23 was the work of former team leads. Until 2/5, almost 0 commits, and I do not have confidence in @ilgooz as product manager for CLI-- github tells the story.

2 Likes