[PROPOSAL][LAST CALL 2023-02-15] Confio Public Goods Funding

Change log • 2023-02-06 Created initial post and linked IPFS document • 2023-02-10 Update post and IPFS doc with information on how the money will be spent. You can read the additional sections in my latest comment • 2023-02-13 Convert PDF draft to a community spend proposal (not signalling). Left the post here the same, as that was text people were commenting on. Please read the updated proposal • 2023-02-15 Final version of on-chain proposal uploaded to IPFS We are collecting feedback now, with the intent to go on-chain with a proposal on Feb 15th Summary This is a signaling proposal. If it passes, it indicates the community’s willingness to raise a community pool spend proposal to support the Confio team in their stewardship of CosmWasm, CosmJS with the ATOM equivalent of $2.5M dispersed in two payments, in accordance with the process outlined below. Purpose Strengthening the ATOM Economic Zone through support and Public Goods. Confio is the team responsible for the stewardship and development of a huge number of libraries fundamental to many developers in the Cosmos. The best known are the CosmJS & CosmWasm libraries, two key components of the Cosmos…

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This is a no-brainer Yes, of course.

Out of curiosity:

• What other chains are you planning to ask for funding from?
• How much total funding do you need for sustainable operations for the next few years?
• Have you considered other ways to monetize your operations going forward so you’re not quite as reliant on grant funding?

Just wondering. Cosmwasm, and Cosmos adoption as a whole seems to be accelerating, so probably not a stretch to imagine that you will need to expand your workforce to keep up with demand.

This would be an easy yes indeed.

If we are thinking about limiting the impact on the ATOM price, would it be adviseable to spread the sales over various exchanges? We have various routes for ATOM to be sold towards funding Confio, so that might already spread the impact on the liquidity of ATOM and thus the price.

It can also be determined that it should be a daily sale of ATOM via a sort of bot or alike, to even spread the impact even more. At a spend of 83k ATOM per 6 months (roughly) we are looking at 470 ATOM per day or so. Which is quite a small amount if spread over a couple of exchanges.

Yes, I am in favor and support this! Only wish we had about 10 more Confio’s!

Happy to see this happening!

I would love to see some more details on what exactly this would fund. Are there any concrete plans for the funds, or would it be to just continue development in whatever way Confio sees fit (except for “Prioritize the needs of the Cosmos Hub (and consumers) in our backlog and roadmap”, which is a little hard to make sense of, especially if you will seek funding from multiple places).

I guess what I would love to see is an actual detailed budget of what the money would go to and what the expected outcomes would be.

what % allocation of the community fund/year is appropriate for the hub to spend on public goods funding like this? if we use a format like the one below to distribute a % of the community pool on a quarterly basis, we can distribute funds to contributors like Confio and create competition for regularly/predictably distributed funds. Instead of paying people to decide how the remaining grants money is spent, we vote to distribute 588k ATOM to grantees for the 1st half of the year by introducing a proposal submission deadline for teams to submit grants proposals to funding tiers like $1k, $5k, $10k, 100k, etc. then pay a large dev dominated review panel for 1 month instead of 9 to review the grant submissions. the panel makes recommendations to exclude proposals for being spam or frivolous and the like, hopefully leaving a field of 20 or 50 or however many proposals each funding tier and use governance for ranked choice voting to fund half or 1/3 of the proposals in each tier until the tier funds are depleted. The voting doesnt determine whether or not to fund one thing over another or is it to much funding. the money is going to be spent and the voting is for what the community…

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Hi Gjermund and thanks for the questions.

As a first part, we are maintaining the following repos which is quite a significant amount of work and a large portion of the need for Public Goods funding. “Maintaining” for me means not just updating dependencies and bugfixes, but also addressing user issues, adding features requested by the community, reviewing PRs, etc.

But you are right. In addition to that, we should define some of the larger features we would like to build out in 2023. I will work on such a document and link it to this post.

Furthermore, we would concretely work with Neutron and Informal to get a clear list of needs of how we can support the Cosmos Hub and consumer chains. It is vague in a proposal, as I do not know what their needs will be in 6 months. But the purpose is to have 1 or 2 point people to give us feedback and let us know their needs.

Is this about our proposal? Or more about Proposal 95 ?

I think everyone would benefit from a well-run grants program on the Cosmos Hub, and we would love to be able to apply to it in the future. I fully support the discussion of general funding of public goods, but think it is out of scope of this proposal. Happy to engage in twitter or another forum post if you wish though.

That sounds great, and I totally get that it is hard to be a lot more concrete - but even just specifying where things are vague, why and what the plan is could be useful for people to see (at least it makes things a lot clearer for me)

Easy yes. Confio is absolutely essential to a functioning Cosmos ecosystem. The only thing I don’t see on here is ICS-23. It looks like at least some of that repo was absorbed into the IBC-go repo after Dragonberry, however if there is any remaining maintenance/handoff work, I would make sure that’s accounted for and the grant amount is increased appropriately.

I am in support of funding contributors like Confio, and apologize for spamming your proposal with my response heavily bleeding into a critique of prop95, but i feel a certain level of urgency to begin discussion on more efficient methods of distributing community pool funds that dont require 20% overhead for labor expense. given how pervasive scams are within the crypto space and how unenforceable consequences are, I believe it is unreasonable to ask a community to trust a self-appointed council to fairly and transparently administer funds.

Many people asked for more clear information on how the money would be spent. I have uploaded a new IPFS document with a few more sections on how the money will be used. Attached here in text form: Security and Maintenance The main point of this grant is to provide Confio funding to resume their Public Goods work . Key among this is ensuring the security and stability of the entire software stack they maintain. Keeping all repositories updated with the latest dependencies (like upcoming Cosmos SDK and Wasmer releases) and actively monitoring potential security issues requires significant resources. Engaging with the community, adding minor features and bugfixes as needed, and reviewing incoming PRs, requires even more resources. Confio now maintains at least 20 significant open-source repositories critical for the functionality and security of many blockchains. The increasing work to support all of these as a desired level of security and stability is often unseen or brushed under other milestones, but this in fact was the largest source of concern when we announced we would halt Public Goods work – that many blockchains are potentially at risk of attack due to unmaintained…

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We are happy to support this initiative @ethanfrey

Fully in support of this proposal. CosmWasm is essential not just to the Interchain, but specifically to the Hub via ICS chains as well.

I wholeheartedly support this proposal - CosmWasm is a critical piece of the Cosmos stack. Easiest ever YES vote from me.

Glad to see this coming together! If anyone has outstanding questions definitely weigh in before it goes on chain!
And for those that just want more info on this situation in general, as well as some insight into what confio has done for the ecosystem, continues to do, and wants to do going forward, tune in to our Twitter spaces with them on monday! link here - https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqKDoAVoQOxV?s=20

We’ll absolutely cover any community questions that arent already addressed by the time we fire up the spaces too! So feel free to DM me, or leave questions here or on twitter!

In order to be able to continue our Public Good efforts as soon as possible and given the positive feedback from the community, we decided to change to a Community Spend proposal directly. We also had legal issues routing the payment through the Neutron Foundation and will organize the payment directly to multi-sig GmbH multisig account. The rest of the proposal remains fundamentally unchanged, modulo minor details, like the time period we will sell over in order to minimize price impact.

Given these changes, we will delay posting this on-chain until Wednesday, Feb 15 (which is still 2 weeks earlier than we would have posted a Community Spend proposal had we made a signalling proposal first). This time is to collect feedback from the community on the final draft.

We invite everyone to attend the AMA today at 20:00 UTC https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqKDoAVoQOxV?s=20 or our AMA with CryptoCito Wednesday at 11:00 UTC for any questions or comments on this proposal.

Read the updated proposal

its a yes from citizen cosmos for 103

NO! This is double spending. This is directly within the scope/mandate of ICF. From their website…

"About

As stewards of the interchain, we fund and advance the creation of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem.

Ecosystem

Our core teams maintain the protocols and applications Cosmos Hub, Cosmos SDK, CosmWasm, CosmJS, IBC, and CometBFT. Learn about our ecosystem and the Cosmos tech stack."

@PaulEdward You’re mistaken; Confio haven’t received funding from ICF in nearly half a year - there is no ‘double spending’ since there hasn’t been any spending in a while.

Thats not what I meant by double spending. I understand coinfio hasn’t received funding for this work. My point is that the mandate/scope to fund this is under ICF and if this work is funded by the community pool, will be earmarked twice. Funds need to come from ICF for this work.

The scope of work of coinfio is the cosmos ecology
Public Goods.

The ICF should be responsible for funding coinfio’s work.

Remind ICF again, ICF should be responsible for funding coinfio’s work.

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.

Why should the cosmos HUB fund the entire development of CosmWasm? Aren’t it many other communities that use cosmwasm and benefit most of it?
Juno, Osmosis, Stargaze, and many more have cosmwasm enabled. Imho they should carry part of the expenses for the development too. Also what is with the ICF? They should be paying such development.

Look, I’m all for funding confio to develop CosmWasm, it’s crucial for cosmos, and thus important to the HUB too. But the HUB community should only fund A PART of the cost, not all of it. It’s not fair if ATOM stakers have to pay the entire bill and all others benefit for free!

Nobody wants the Hub to fund the entire development of CosmWasm. They are actively seeking out funds from other chains as well. If that’s successful (which I believe is very likely considering how essential CosmWasm is), Confio can extend their survival time by much longer.

We have to take into account the current situation CosmWasm is facing. Development work has been entirely dropped due to lack of funds. I see this specific proposal as a stop-gap measure to make sure critical bugs continue to be squashed and essential features keep coming.

Lastly, I think this also puts CosmWasm chains using ICS, like Neutron, in a very favorable position as they will be able to have their feature requests prioritized on the roadmap, which inevitably empowers the Hub as a result.

Nice. Good for you, Confio!

ICF has posted some clarity on their CW/Confio funding:

Interchain Foundation

Given that ICF released a statement that they have a new contract for this work for $1.6M for the remainder of the year, will confio withdraw this proposal that currently has widespread support?

These situations are precisely why proposals that fall within the ICF scope/mandate should be swiftly rejected.

Sharing my personal view on the proposal in this thread, including why I think that the relation between the different funding sources of Confio and the Hub should be complementary

Catdotfish 🐾

I think it would be great if Confio could provide a reply on the recent announcement from the ICF, and I have no doubt that they are already working on this. But while that is hopefully underway, my 2 cents: I see three reasons for voting yes on prop 103: • Afaik, the ICF’s scope is to fund core development of the software, meaning CosmWasm, CosmJS and other related tech. What’s not in scope is things that fall under the “growth” category, such as the CosmWasm Academy, the upcoming AwesomeWasm event and any other activities that are key to developer adoption. Imo this is just as vital as the tech itself, especially considering the early stage CosmWasm is still in. If it wants to compete with Solidity & draw in more users, there’s a lot of work to be done on the educational & evangelism side of things, as well as better tooling. We need to decrease the barrier to entry of developing on Cosmos. • Confio needs more runway than one year. From my experience having collaborated with the ICF on several funding proposals in 2022 and speaking with some of the companies that rely on these funds, it remains incredibly difficult to establish a sustainable business if you’re…

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I’m sorry. Maybe I am missing something here but this seems like a cash grab? Please educate me on how this benefits holders, investors, stakers, validators or Atom/Cosmos