Abandoned: Fund notional to work on the cosmos stack

abandoned because of threats from some Kerbal, ICF opacity. Not one alone, the combination. Change log • 2023-01-19 Created initial post target on chain date • 2023-01-26 Funding date range This is funding for maintainership of the variety described here for 365 days from the date of passage. Summary Fund Notional with 120,000 atoms for work across the cosmos stack: • Cosmos Hub • Cosmos SDK • Consensus • tm-db • cosmos-db • ibc-go • Relaying • IBC client update governance proposals • Pre-upgrade code reviews …including on security issues like the one that affected Quicksilver recently, which our team member Khanh Nguyen patched in fall of 2022. We cannot and will not disclose security items until they are fixed, so we will rely on teams like ICF, Informal, IG, Iqlusion, Strangelove and Binary Builders to confirm for the community that we are actively working in that space. Details Notion The AI workspace that works for you. | Notion A tool that connects everyday work into one space. It gives you and your teams AI tools—search, writing, note-taking—inside an all-in-one, flexible workspace. Above is…

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hi Jacob.

let’s say 1Atom is $30 in 2 years,

3.6 Million dollars. Woh.

let’s say it’s a 2 years (1 retro active - 1 incoming) work funding,

~$5000/day. Woh.

How many are you in the team ?

Not making any judgement, i’m way not enough aware of the hours of work involved/people involved etc.

I’m just considering re-learning how to code.

and btw thanks for your numerous contribs.

cheers

Please consider the possibility that the team that just rugged the consensus mechanism, chooses to rug atom holders, and price of atom dramatically drops.

And also please consider the generally high risk nature of this work, as well as opportunity costs.

It was an extremely intentional choice to have this priced in atoms and not dollars because we are not thinking about it as dollars .

One thing that I would like to do though is add a little bit more detail on our side about what we will be doing.

Also please know that we are making this proposal after reaching out to the ICF and having no response whatsoever and with zero guidance or facilitation from the ICF, bearing the entire administrative burden of this process ourselves.

I can understand the points you made.

But hey, Jacob, when we’re talking about ICF delegations for example, we’re talking in dollars. So why not here ? Everybody is reasoning in dollars - and will for years ! (sadly or not)

Still a huge amount to me but as i said, i’m not enough informed to say a hard no/yes.

In any case yep, more details would/will be nice for the community to make a fair decision.

extra point : considering a large part of this work is for the sdk/ibc and then is/will benefit to many cosmos chains in the space, don’t you think this funding request should be dispersed between said chains ?

(and again sorry for my poor english wording. can’t wait for a gpt-4 auto translation module x))

tom:

extra point : considering a large part of this work is for the sdk/ibc and then is/will benefit to many cosmos chains in the space, don’t you think this funding request should be dispersed between said chains ?

Yes. We feel that this is a fair ask for the hub’s share. Chains like:

• Osmosis
• Evmos
• Juno
• Stride
• Quicksilver
• Pylons
• Dig
• Craft
• Jackal
• Luna Classic

Have entered into arrangements with notional, paying either cash or tokens, in the present or past.

We are tremendously grateful for their support of our work.

jacobgadikian:

We are not Implying that only the cosmos hub should fund this work.

We will be asking other chains for funding, as well.

And we will be doing that on the same terms that we have done here.

tom:

But hey, Jacob, when we’re talking about ICF delegations for example, we’re talking in dollars. So why not here ? Everybody is reasoning in dollars - and will for years !

Why would we be discussing dollars? The ICF delegates atoms.

This proposal is a request for atoms and a commitment not to sell those atoms for at least two years.

We will not get dollars from this proposal.

jacobgadikian:

We are not Implying that only the cosmos hub should fund this work.

my bad, i missed that part.

then maybe it would be a good thing - as TendermintTimmy did for his request - to give the community an explicit description of the amounts you received/ask across the cosmos chains you mentionned.

Hi, in a few words: this is blackmailing. Cosmos Communities became a joke recently. Way too many people who choose on their own to speak out loud about Cosmos/Chains and unfortunately also ‘for’ Cosmos/Chains put themselve into an influencer status and think to ‘derserve’ more. There are mechanisms how work is founded, there are mechanisms how regular work is paid, there are mechanisms how additional revenue can be made and lean managment in your company to reduce costs. Look at Cosmos, look at who and how they seek milk from the Cosmos titts. Discusting. Notional and Jacob have a perverse way on providing work and blackmailing on the “not appreciated” results. Your words are nothing but tactics to cover blackmailing: if your “wishes” ar enot followed its always the same respond by you: “We tried in the background but nobody answered”…so we blackmail. Cosmos became a shitshow due to a few bad actors using their Twitter fame. Notional, do your work and be happy, try to do business. If your business model does not work, change or leave. There are many ways to put Notional in another position. If you define as validator, there are mechanisms for it, if you are…

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tom:

let’s say 1Atom is $30 in 2 years

jacobgadikian:

Note: we will not sell these atoms for a period of at least two years

The proposal says that the 120,000 ATOM would be sold in 2 years that’s in 2025. The next Bitcoin halving is in 2024. Usually, the peak of the bull market cycle is one year after each halving: 2017, 2021 and 2025. So the ATOM price at the peak of the next bull market could be much higher than $30 actually.

Happy to see a proposal like that, as it sets a precedent for other teams that contribute too.

I have to say Notional is a big contributor of the Cosmos ecosystem looking at the commits history of Jacob and other team members proves it: github dot com / faddat, catShaark, chillyvee (sorry links do not work but these are github username) etc…

However, AFAIK the ICF funds core development, why not go through the official process of requesting a delegation from ICF or submit a proposal to the ICF?

Other companies are as well active contributors to the ecosystem, such as Provenance, Agoric and Crypto dot com. If this proposal passes, what prevents them to as well submit a proposal for their work.

If every single team does that for core development, we won’t have an oversight of what happens as development. I feel like this was the role of the Tab, so that burden is not put on the community.

Another question, are those 120k atom used to fund future work? (if so could you name it, have a roadmap of your plan), or previous work (if so, could you as well list it)?

yes. was targeting lower to keep my mind healthy regarding this request.

Can we see a better plan for this proposal, what exactly you guys will do with the funds? A small amount and milestones should be included in the plan I definitely will vote for this if all the points are addressed.

The funds should be released gradually, based on your development and milestone progress.

Thanks for your proposition Jacob.

I agree on the fact that there is not many builders and maintainers in the ecosystem that work on the cosmos stack.

But in a way, this proposal seems more like a fundraising without diluating Notional valuation as a company.

By this, what we are trying to raise at attention is either:

• ICF /IAB to their job and delegate a reasonable amount that “fund” to the work done (also put at attention to the fact that they bootstrap Keplr back in the days, what about now?)
• Make a fundraise with VC’s because it’s actually the money is concerning a lot the growth of Notional as a company, not much working on the stack.

Would love to have your feedback on these comments.
Best, Jacob.

Will this ATOM’s be delegated? If it’s the case then it’s generating $
If it’s not, the 2 years commitment is just to raise more ATOM"s that the price they will have in 2 years as it’s the during team of the bear cycle.

In this case, I would have prefer the ATOM to be used directly and not in 2 years, because it’s clearly raising more ATOM than it should.

Hey Jacob, My primary concern here is that this ask is incredibly large, and very unspecific. Currently 120,000 ATOM is 6.78% of the entire Community Pool for Cosmos Hub to Fund Notional on a non-exclusive contract for general work on the stack. ~$1.4M is just way too much of an ask right now when that equates to nearly 7% of the entire CP to find a single validator - and the price of ATOM is likely to only increase over the coming two years. Every validator on the Cosmos Hub contributes. We are all cutting costs and doing whatever is necessary to survive through this bear market, but allocating nearly 7% of the entire Hub’s current Community Pool to Notional is a wild ask, particularly when this is non-exclusive work and knowing that Notional is going to every chain now to gather funding doesn’t make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy. 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. I agree that Notional should get funding for work on the core stack, as that’s valuable work - but…

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Can we explore alternative ways of coordinating or funding this work?

Some alternatives include:

• Hub funding-platform for this type of work (funded via community-pool and community-run)
• A single coalition of teams with proven track-records requesting funding
• A community-pool budgeting framework that allocates x ATOM for this type of work per year

I agree with what @onivalidator said about Notional deserving funding due to the work they put forward in the ecosystem, but I also believe we can come up with a better structure for funding this work than the current proposal.

All of the above are quick-suggestions, but the point is to get the ball rolling and explore alternatives. I’m sure we can come up with something reasonable for this crucial activity.

So that is absolutely possible. The opposite is also possible.

We are the only unfunded team a proven track record that has been consistently working on the hub.

Hi, The proposal that we put forth on Juno, is not vested. I do not think that it is appropriate to bring up Juno here but you have chosen to do so so I’m going to address your concerns. The core 1 dao informed notional, strange love, and confio that they could no longer pursue funding our teams in liquid JUNO, due to sell pressure caused by funding… Things like loop. Here’s the loop proposal that your team voted yes on, to ensure that loop was funded despite the decision of TRF signers to stop funding, and The prohibition on funding software that is not open source: mintscan.io Interchain Explorer by Cosmostation Interchain block explorer and data analytics for sovereign blockchain networks. See, the thing is that the open source work we do on key elements of the cosmos stack, is valuable. I do not think Loop, or closed source contracts are valuable. Notional awaits a vested funding arrangement via the DAOdao 2.0 contracts and at that time it will be possible to even know if we have a contract with Juno at this point. The only way that Juno is relevant here, is that Juno was subsidizing our work on the hub. This is not a…

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FYI,

Chillyvee has their own validator, and do amazing work, and aren’t a part of notional though we do collaborate on things at times.

I most certainly do endorse them.

Also, you’re looking in the right place, by looking on GitHub.

There are a very wide range of activities that Notional does that the majority of validators have no awareness of.

That is our software development business.

Thank you so much for your support of our work.

You should talk about what you will do Jacob, instead of what you have been doing.

The community is not responsible of the fact that you’ve done work without being funded by ICF or whoever.

The way you’re answering give me the feeling we should pay a posteriori something nobody ask for.
Things should not work that way.

ala.tusz.am:

• Hub funding-platform for this type of work (funded via community-pool and community-run)
• A single coalition of teams with proven track-records requesting funding
• A community-pool budgeting framework that allocates x ATOM for this type of work per year

None of these things currently exist, and we are not interested in waiting further to figure out the funding.

I want to repeat myself here, this grant is not for activities that village to validation. This grant is software development and infrastructure services which we are uniquely unpaid for.

What we’re going to do is continue doing what we have been doing, at greater scale.

There is a list of those activities in the proposal.

Do you have questions?

onivalidator:

Every validator on the Cosmos Hub contributes. We are all cutting costs and doing whatever is necessary to survive through this bear market

Because we write code, our optionality is much greater, and we are growing. One of the reasons we made this request is so that we can prioritize by revenue.

Our business is not the same as yours.

yep, 3 :

tom:

then maybe it would be a good thing - as TendermintTimmy did for his request - to give the community an explicit description of the amounts you received/ask across the cosmos chains you mentionned.

1. who in the world is doing work for free, for years, and then ask “hey guys, look what we have done, now please pay us” ?

2. don’t you think it would have been a good idea to wait and see what the new ICF delegation policy is, before doing this high amount request, if that’s stake you want, and not money ?

Hi stakelab!

This is not like raising VC money, as VC money is… Money. And then, the VC would want us to pursue profitable activities, which working on the hub… Is not.

We would like stake, not money, because we have money for our operations and wish to have more stake.

We don’t intend to turn our stake into money (ever) and we commit to not turning our stake into money for two years.

We are asking for payment for services, in the form of stake. Dollars are far more expensive to the community, since turning atoms into dollars reduces the value of the atoms held by everyone else.

We know that we have been high impact, I’m personally the one of the largest contributors to the hub codebase, and other validators do not really contribute. The only validators who contribute routinely are notional, informal, iqlusion and strangelove.

Thus, we are the only software developers on the hub codebase who make routine contributions and aren’t paid for it.

Like any business, we must prioritize the business activities that drive revenue.

No, the other chains, except for Juno, funded us privately. I will get the Juno contract for you now. daodao.zone Core Root | Dev Grants (Sepember 23rd, 2022) These grants are funding individuals who have been doing core development, community, and much needed adminstrative work to take Juno to the next level. We are nothing without our people, these award Please note that the Juno grant is paused until vesting contracts in daodao 2.0 are going, and the feedback we received from core 1 was that our work has been excellent. The issue, according to core 1, was that grantees from trf, like loop, sold the full amount of Juno that they were granted and this had very negative effects on the price of Juno and community sentiment. Notional has accepted Juno’s offer of funding on the same terms/amount/scope. Funding of our work by the osmosis grants program, is on their web site. Other funding is not disclosable, per contract. Once again I wish to repeat that the funding we are requesting has to do with software development work and not validation. If we only signed blocks, Notional would only need about 3 team members. We have an…

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Thanks for the precisions.

The type of work that we have been doing does not have milestones.

We are not doing feature development, although I am going to add implementation of a couple of ADR’s to the scope and on those I would say that we complete them within the funding year.

Just for example, what is the milestone for discovering a security problem on the cosmos hub, before it is exploited, while assisting a cosmos hub team member with the usage of a script that you wrote?

The problem that I am describing is the issue that Quicksilver encountered, and The fact is that our team had patched it long ago and the hub team had failed to apply the patch. On December 7th I informed the Hub team of this. On December 24th, the ICA channel between the hub and Quicksilver was exploited.

jacobgadikian:

We don’t intend to turn our stake into money (ever) and we commit to not turning our stake into money for two years.

This seems confusing, so you plan to sell the 120,000 ATOM in 2 years or never? If never, then are you planning to stake this 120,000 ATOM in your Cosmos Hub validator? This would then be like 120,000 ATOM delegation indefinitely at 100% commission, or 1.2M ATOM at 10% commission equivalent. You will also get corresponding large airdrops, etc.

Thank you for your proposal. My takeaway is that the community should look to unite behind Notional to put pressure on the ICF to funding this work, as this is in their mandate. I do not blame Notional for seeking funding here, however, I do believe a political campaign by the community would be more beneficial and successful to the vitality of the Hub in the long-run and be a win-win scenario with respect to this work (and rather than setting divisive precedent). What can we do to help?

I don’t plan to stop validating during the course of my natural life and have succession plans in place should I die

EG: We look at involvement with the hub as a permanent thing.

We also assert that all of our tokens are our property.

We can do with them what we please to.

In the case of these tokens, we will ensure that they don’t move about for 2 years.

And we do not intend to sell them. We want influence over the future institution that is the hub. We don’t want to lose vote power.

Out of curiosity, why are you thinking in dollars? Do you not see the hub as a permanent thing?

Well I do think that community pressure is the only thing that will get the ICF moving, however please understand when I say that I have zero interest in relying on the ICF. They have proven to be highly unreliable.

PaulEdward:

Thank you for your proposal. My takeaway is that the community should look to unite behind Notional to put pressure on the ICF to funding this work, as this is in their mandate. I do not blame Notional for seeking funding here, however, I do believe a political campaign by the community would be more beneficial and successful to the vitality of the Hub in the long-run and be a win-win scenario with respect to this work (and rather than setting divisive precedent). What can we do to help?

That’s the main point. Notional’s work on the cosmos stack should be funded by both ICF (and ghost AiB ?). Even if the retroactive thing is… doubtful to me.
Instead of by the CP, imho.

When the new icf delegations policy @catdotfish ? x)

ps : i’ve already talked too much give you all some air from now

Hey Tom, I appreciate your getting into the conversation, and probably this stuff should be funded by the ICF, but I should make something clear: Absent a super huge delegation, this work likely can’t be funded by an ICF delegation. And the guidelines expressed by the ICF don’t account for exponential differentials between validators code contributions, and I’m not sure that would be fair to other validators. Still, the most positive course that the ICF could take with regard to delegations, is to take action on what they told the community that they would do. The most positive course that the ICF could take with regard to funding, is the same – they should do what they said they should do, and release a transparency report. Absent that, no one knows what they pay anyone for anything. That is contrary to what they told the community they would do. Just had a brief chat with @jtremback regarding scope, and will have (separate) calls with both him and @catdotfish tomorrow. I just got home, and I’ll tell you what I told Jehan: • At this time, nothing is set in stone – pricing, scope, vesting, etc • I do not believe anything the ICF says. I only believe what they do,…

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Hello,

Thank you for the proposal.

What would happen if let says your proposal is getting rejected by ICF and Cosmos Hub governance? Are you going to stop all the work that you’ve been doing? What would be the risk for the ecosystem if you do so?

I think that you have made a wonderful contribution to the ecosystem, and you deserve to be paid for it. And I would like to learn if there are other options available to get you funded/getting paid for your work.

Cheers,

I am not sure yet.

Please understand that we have spoken with people at the ICF, and cannot even get a straight answer on whether or not they are making grants at all.

it’s important for us as a business to prioritize our business activities by revenue. Businesses that do not prioritize profits eventually fail.

Please know that another way to support notional, is to delegate to notional, and to ask your friends to delegate to notional. We believe that we provide the best value for money that exists in the cosmos ecosystem.

We are currently mapping out what our options look like, and trying to arrive at a strategic direction for the next year.

We have no desire to discontinue this work, because we believe that it is valuable, and we are told by our colleagues, very consistently, that it is valuable. With that said, if it is not valued then it would make sense for us to focus energies where we are valued.

developer:

However, AFAIK the ICF funds core development, why not go through the official process of requesting a delegation from ICF or submit a proposal to the ICF?

Because they say that they have paused all grant activity. Well, some of them say that, some of the time.

Certainly there is no longer a grant application on their website, and we do not know how to apply for a grant from them. Certainly, before putting this proposal on this forum, we have attempted to discuss these matters with them and they have been non-responsive.

Will ICF make delegations?

idk

Does ICF make grants?

idk

Who is ICF currently paying for what, how much and why?

idk

The ICF is past its self imposed deadline for delegations.

The ICF is past its self imposed deadline for transparency reporting.

I made this proposal assuming that the hub cannot rely on the ICF for anything because the ICF is not reliable.

At this point we have to fundamentally change the grants process, I have a fundamental problem with a proposal like this and other proposals which got passed before.

You can’t just evaluate the work done, you also have to evaluate the efficiency and return on the money. So what makes it worth to spend that much money for notional? Do we know how they operate? Do we know their salaries? How do we know that they don’t massively overspend for their business?

You can spend 1 mil on a google dev or you can spend 250k on a startup dev, both get the job done, but you pay 4 times as much for the first dev.

Without a detailed report what the expenses are and why you need this amount of money for this amount of work, we just can’t pass a proposal like this.

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?

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…

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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.

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.

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 ? ICF validator endorsement policy 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…

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@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.

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

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…

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hi,
nop, that’s not constructive here.

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,…

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

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.

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.

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.

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 )

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.

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.

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.

Do you have any actionable suggestions on this?

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.

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…

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

This is the exact same thing for other teams, they greatly benefit from the work the hub devs do. As I said multiple times already, provide the hard data points with a detailled bill for the costs and the work done, otherwise we just talk in a circle.

Yeah actually that’s helpful but I hope that you do not mind if I don’t use dollar prices, I can’t get dollars from a governance proposal.

The only way I can do that is to get atoms and then dump them. Let me share a rap video with you that may help you to understand the situation better.

Grin Spickett

Okay so in my original video, which I will post next, I also discussed why DK was wrong but frankly we want alignment.

You can always replace dollars by $atom if you like to.
Yep i’ll be glad to see the video.
You can Dm me here or on twitter if you like.

Here’s my original video, not the rap: twitter.com Jacob Gadikian @gadikian In recent days, @blockpane , @The_BendyOne , @Rarma_ , @JakeHartnell , @JDLorax , myself and others in @notionaldao community have discussed "the hellscape", which I attempt to summarize below. https://t.co/xUodK2OMOp 10:05 AM - 7 Jan 2023 37 5 We have gone to really great lengths to make sure that we can hold the governance tokens that we earn. I won’t be updating the proposal until later today. It looks like I may cut scope down to just the cosmos hub but I need to make clear that if I do that then it reduces our ability to encounter and address issues like the one faced by Quicksilver. That issue involved multiple pieces of the cosmos stack and that’s why I scoped this the way that I did. To everybody who’s talking dollars, please just tell me, how do I get dollars from hub governance? Right it’s impossible (without dumping on holders), the hub has atoms. Moments after posting this proposal, a fresh Twitter account was created and they immediately contacted my family, discuss my location, and contacted…

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I honestly never understood why we gave so much money to Loop.
To be completely honest my interest in JUNO went dramatically down at that point.

The part about your family is really sad… I’m sorry for you.

Oh well there’s a singular and solitary reason that we gave so much money to loop: @onivalidator

Loop wasn’t real honest.

I initially supported Loop too.

When I realized what they were doing, taking community money to build closed source contracts, I immediately withdrew all support.

In fact, loop is the reason for the governance proposals that say that We must fund open source only from the community pool.

So loop partially at fault for loop because I didn’t realize that they were just straight up lying about everything until they had already been fairly significantly funded.

I hope that my gentle readers will understand that a project with no purpose and no lasting value has a lot of time to prepare a governance proposal and scammy documents.

That’s because they don’t do anything else.

Finally I’m at fault again, I taught @onivalidator how to operate a validator.

Although I highly value the work Notional is doing and think funding longer term deals with “external” developer teams is a good way to decentralize and improve the hub, I cannot support the size of this proposal under the current provided details. Things i think that can be done to improve this proposal: • Provide more details about the funding/delegations that Notional is or is not getting from core Cosmos-hub organizations like the ICF and reasoning as to why that is the current state of affairs. • Removal of statements around a-posterior funding as it does not relate to this current hub proposal. • Shortening of the funding period to a maximum of 1/2 year to alleviate “bear market funding” concerns and bring in oversight by having to come to the chain a 2nd time to fulfill the full grant. • Clear indications of cost and time to be spend on the mentioned code-libraries and development areas. This might lead to a reassessment of the requested funding as it is a very very large amount. • Information about Notional, their business, the amount of dedicated developers and other important info to asses the health and (potential) contributions of notional. The above…

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Just so you know, retroactive funding, I figure that only the ICF can provide it and I wanted to be clear that we would ask for it

I can remove it from the proposal but I still think we’ve delivered a lot of value

Our proposal also eliminates bear market funding concerns entirely.

That’s why we are seeking only atoms, and we will not sell them for a period of 2 years.

I think this is an important proposal for the cosmos ecosystem. It’s hard to draw a line on if this complete amount is retroactive or where it is split. Could we break the proposal into two tranches, one for retroactive and one for future development?

As someone working on the stack daily and has been for 4 years, funding open source contributions is important, if they are consistent. Notional has been contributing for a while. We should aim to find a path forward to show support.

I would even love to explore the possibility of a bounty program funded by chains and coordinated with stack engineers. Even a bounty module for the Hub and other chains that is fed from the community pool every x weeks/months.

Idk here’s some notes from a call I just had with the ICF

Jacob Gadikian

The issue with bounties is that they do not incentivize the kind of consistency that we provide.

I think the best move here is for ICF to become fact driven.

It isn’t a transparent organization.

It wasted the validators time with making work reports.

It is insanely difficult to work with any counterparty unable or unwilling to be consistently fact driven.

So sad I’m the only one saying this.

Then again these words are costly.

I don’t mind the intention of getting paid for work. That makes perfect sense for me.

What I wish to see here is a lot more concrete outline of what the community gets. Past work show you are capable, but in this case I would prefer something along the lines of: “Notional will dedicate X resources with Y hours for period Z to do the following…”.

I don’t think asking for money to just do whatever you want to do is fair. Most people need to be beholden to whoever they get funding from. This feels too much like a blank check (with just a few concrete items).

Notional does a lot of great work, but I don’t particularly like this way of funding things. Funding should be concrete, measurable and have a specific value for the funding party. It’s just too hard to tell if you get what you need out of it. I guess a lot of this skepticism also comes from other utterly failed funding schemes in the space. While an amazing track-record is a great start, it doesn’t cover the need for a specific budget and outcomes.

If you can clean it up to show this in a very clear way I will probably be a lot more supportive, because your team’s track record has a lot of good stuff in it

Well just for the record here’s a little more information

Jacob Gadikian

I’m having a slightly hard time understanding where this request exactly comes from. I very much do believe that contributors to projects should be rewarded properly; being either communication, development or anything else. And I do believe that the Cosmos ecosystem still has to mature A LOT to get to that point. Where I struggle however, is that you state that projects are already paying Notional as a company. In another chat you transparently state that at this stage you earn $6k a month, which for western standard is not a lot for a developer with proven track record (note: I don’t have a clue what you can get for $6k in Vietnam). Can you elaborate a bit on how you get to the 120.000 ATOM and where it is expected to be reserved for? I mean, you state it will not be sold in the coming 2 years; which is I guess a good thing. But apparently it is not needed to have Notional as a company to stay afloat. You are even not selling commission, but keep stacking that. What I want to avoid is that we end up with entities which have too big of an influence (and I am aware that we will never ever be able to stop that completely) in the long run, which is a risk for the ecosystem as…

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Meh. Hub isn’t worth the risk to my family.

You don’t need to worry about this one anymore.

Jacob Gadikian

May or may not make another proposal.

Repeat request for transparency from ICF for the millionth time.

Condemn consensus rugging by AIB for the millionth time.

@LeonoorsCryptoman the atoms are for profits, our shareholders like profits. That is normal in business. Following profits is a good idea in business. But the hub causes harm and loss.

We believe in the long-term future of the hub including atom value appreciation. We are a business. We can’t bet everything on it.

@jacobgadikian Summary : • you should propose 15,000 ATOM proposals every quarter for the next 8 quarters (or some variation thereof) • the community pool will grow by 1,050,000 atom per quarter. notional’s share of this would be 1.5%. • the hub would spend 1.5% of community pool replenishment on notional’s services. that’s worthwhile • this approach is more sustainable and mitigates risks • this approach sets positive precedent via a long-term view of responsibly managing the commons longer text why not make a community pool-spend proposal every quarter for the next two years, at around 15,000 atom a proposal? That way the Hub community doesn’t incur opportunity cost, the community pool has time to replenish, and you can still get compensated for your work. If the community pool is expected to grow by 4.2M ATOM over the next year, that means that notional will be allocated a bit over 1% of the quarterly replenishment rate (4,200,000 ATOM / 4 quarters = 1,050,000 ATOM per quarter) & (15,000 per month for notional / 1,050,000 ATOM = ~.015). This sets a strong precedent for a long-term outlook and sustainable contributor support. I strongly believe that some…

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Because when I make these spend proposals I’m threatened.

Why would I bother?

I am very sorry to hear this is occurring. There is a faction of people that act like this, but it’s in no way representative of all of us, and we shouldn’t let people like this deter us from contributing because they are both a minority and an insult to the crucial role the Hub can play in the interchain. I think we can make a proposal that can pave the way for the Hub to grow the agency and sustainability of its contributor base. See above. I am happy to assist with any part of the process of making proposals repeatedly in order to reduce the governance burden of it. I believe it’s worthwhile.

I’ll help you make the spend proposals. I would also like to brainstorm and find a way we can deter that kind of behavior from people in our community.

Well just so you know the hub has these problems, osmosis doesn’t have these problems.

Juno does not have these problems.

Akash does not have these problems.

Evmos does not have these problems.

Lunc does not have these problems.

the problems are compounded by the founding organizations simply not doing their job.

No one at the ICF is willing to make an official statement confirming facts.

AIB just going to rug consensus.

Yeah the Hub has a lot of problems, no doubt. That’s why we should fix them.

The Hub is a unique gem, we can’t give up on it because it has problems.

I really really appreciate your offer of help and maybe I’ll speak with you a little bit about it tomorrow.

The trouble is that we all have a limited amount of time in our lives. That means spending the time that we have on stuff that is enjoyable, with people who treat us right.

We are very poorly ranked on the hub and I strongly believe that the fact that we needed to hold the interchain foundation accountable – as well as aib – has caused us harm here.

Countless people have become upset with me because I’ve spoken plain facts about the cosmos hub.

But another countless people appreciate the work that you’ve done. And many would like to see that work continue.

We can continue to talk. But maybe the suggestions above will help make a more successful proposal and set a positive precedent.

I’ll consider putting it back up when the ICF makes an official statement on the status of grants. It wouldn’t be the same but the real trouble here is It isn’t my role. I shouldn’t need to. They recognize this in private and do nothing in public and I believe that given that there has been no public statement made people are right to ask questions about why this didn’t go through the ICF. So I don’t know it’s not only the threats it’s that it’s incredibly clear that the ICF does not see my time as valuable and that AIB has abandoned the project and I don’t think there’s any sense in going against the grain. So it is a combination of factors, that I explain here: twitter.com Jacob Gadikian @gadikian @SyndicateMike @jelenaaa____ @cosmos @TendermintTimmy Yeah so I'm going to put this on pause because: 1) threats 2) it is harmful to @notionaldao to need to call out @interchain_io 3) better to spend time anywhere else on things that are productive 4) my well being I'll think some more about it in the morning. 5:01 PM - 20 Jan 2023 1 They are the two largest stakeholders. Who am I to tell them what to do?…

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You should work on how you communicate your message. Sometimes reframing way to say it, it’s better.

Reframe a proposal this

Blockquote * you should propose 15,000 ATOM proposals every quarter for the next 8 quarters (or some variation thereof)

should be much better.

With a better explaining task and how many people are needed.

I might try something like that

I really value all the feedback from various community members and stakeholders.

likewise we value you thanks for your time and look forward to the revised proposal!

• Certainly the reason Loop got funded is not solely because of us. The entire DAO voted for their funding, at the same time that you were also very heavily in support of them. You are blaming people for things you did as well - at a time you were supporting their project openly as well. You can’t cherry pick the timeline to support your arguments like everyone else has access to a time machine. ( https://twitter.com/GoldenStaking/status/1616448269273505793 ) • Loop’s final funding tranche was voted upon by the entire community and passed. We were the validator who wrote to them during the CW period and asked them to commit to open-sourcing their contracts as part of that proposal, which they agreed to. • For the sake of canon here - I’d like to state for the record that Jacob definitely didn’t “teach us how to operate our validator”. Though Notional has been helpful on validator-centric questions at times, this is far too much credit to take. We have also equally assisted you guys with your infrastructure questions at times. Much love to Golden Ratio, Joe Abbey, Lavender.Five and many others who contributed to our technical proficiency in the early days validating.…

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