[WITHDRAWN] Funding the Spellshape Developer Tooling

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.…

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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.

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

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Hey Abra! These are insightful and reasonable questions
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.

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.

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.

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

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…

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Personally I don’t understand why the Cosmos Hub community pool should fund this.
How ATOM holders are beneficing from the Spellshape, this does not add utility to the Comos Hub.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How so? Do you have examples?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I agree, but I share my concerns that the team is anon (look at the person that has changed the codeowners on GitHub), and we are not sure if its Dennis and his colleagues taking over the project (I would prefer that than a random anon team).

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.

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

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…

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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.

I have to admit, I was a bit puzzled by the Spellshape chain and saw it as unnecessary overhead, but given this type of feedback, it seems useful.

My biggest issue with this proposal as it stands is coordination & product refinement. If we can get that sorted, I would be hugely in favor of it.

Here are some points I’d love to see addressed via calls with key stakeholders maintaining these areas:

• coordination & collaboration around the points @marbar mentioned above
• better product compatibility with ICS offerings, particularly in regards to the challenges and areas @lexa has pointed out here. If you can alleviate pain points that consumer chains and validators will have in regards to running replicated security, this would be invaluable.

My humble ask is to please not bring this to a vote before the above are concretely addressed with relevant stakeholders.

Thank you for your feedback. The purpose of bringing a draft to forum is to optimize 1) coordination 2) product refinement w relevant stakeholders. Guidance from, and coordination of CLI development w SDK devs is a top priority – and we’re in touch to ensure our next version reflects inputs from stakeholder teams. We take this phase of synthesizing inputs seriously. We will integrate valuable insights and perspectives expressed by contributors and community at large. To this end, we’ll share a revised version here before the proposal goes on chain (and also allow for sufficient time for revised proposal to be reviewed). While Spellshape CLI simplifies the development /extensibility of cosmos sdk chains, the logistics related to launching a new chain are (woefully) laden w inefficient comms and administratively complex processes. To address what is largely a coordination issue, we designed Spellshape network commands to supoort the preparation and launch of sovereign Cosmos blockchains via interactions with the Spellshape Chain. You can read more about the chain features via supporting docs provided at spellshape github org. Ive also pinned links to these documents in…

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As a developer, CLI was my entry point to Cosmos, and I do agree with @gjermundgaraba, without CLI it would have taken me a lot more time and effort to get started.

I support this proposal, CLI helps the community so I think the community pool is typically made to fund this kind of project.

I am 100% on board with the Hub funding Spellshape, it is a fantastic intro to Cosmos chain development and with more work it could easily be the defacto standard for building ICS chains which directly benefit the hub. My only confusion is the Spellshape chain, I keep seeing that it will help other chains built with Spellshape launch but I really am struggling to see how? How does having another chain help builders with their own launch?

Thank you for your support. Spellshape chain is indeed a chain that facilitates the launch of new chains with the overall launch process during the coordination, preparation and launch phases. One of the features of the chain is that it helps with the coordination process which is needed to launch a chain. The Spellshape chain stores the launch information used to generate the genesis file. The genesis file is what the chain coordinator and validators use to start the chain. When the new chain is ready to be launched, the genesis file is generated by calling a genesis generation algorithm that uses the launch information stored on the Spellshape chain.

If you would like to learn more or are curious on the technical side, we invite you to check out the details in the documentation (https://docs.spellshape.com/network/chain). We’ve also pinned it in our telegram community chat (Telegram: Contact @spellshape).

Had a read through the docs, and as someone who has previously launched a Cosmos chain, the Spellshape chain seems like it adds complexity onto an existing process rather than streamlining it. I’m in agreement that the launching process needs documented and work to improve it but I’m not sold on this being the way. It feels like decentralizing for the point of decentralizing rather than using decentralization to solve a problem. Me, the party launching the chain, still needs to organize the validator set and adjust all the parameters, why is storing that data on chain and dealing with block times & tokens to make changes to my genesis any better than just editing a json file and distributing it?

Hi @proto, it’s not a random anon team.

A group of randoms would not be able to coordinate support from Greg Osuri, Jake Hartnell or Provalidator (multisigs).
Multisigs for the proposed project have also been made github owners of the new org, and there’s broad support from long time eco contributors – and they’re members of the new org.

A notable attainment of Ignite CLI (Spellshape team) was a large and diversified stack of validators on the board, that provided an effective proof of legitimacy and could supply the new projects with the following, and supportive to the shared JSON, validators. Potentially it’s a huge and untapped mechanic, to facilate the chain bootstraping and solve a pain points of initiall security building.

For any blockchain startup, validators play a key role in ensuring the robust
infrastructure. To date, the engagement and resource of validators has reached a level
where they are capable to provide solutions to a wide range of tasks that go beyond
network validation, and the proper use of these talents can be incredibly productive.
From this perspective, by creating a chain as a hub of validators (verifier) and developing this hub in various sub-directions, Spellshape can build an incredibly valuable and sought-after resource in the Cosmos.

I understand that validators are helpful to new projects, building a validator set can be a challenge. I strongly disagree that building a Spellshape chain will help with that process any more than a list of validators that would be willing to help out would. It feels like a chain for the sake of a chain with no real vision backing it. What you told me here is “the chain is a good thing because validators” without addressing any of the concerns I made in the post you’re responding to.

The UX of launching a chain gets simplified to the point where it requires only a few commands from a coordinator and a few commands from validators (see https://docs.spellshape.com/network/introduction). The CLI takes care of all the work of initializing a node and submitting a gentx. This is similar to the process of coordinating on Github.

Coordinating a launch on-chain, however, offers advantages that are hard to replicate using Github or a centralized solution. For example, incentivized testnets where you reward validators with vouchers representing the token of your future mainnet are possible with the Spellshape chain. Reward information is transferred from testnets back to Spellshape through IBC. What used to be very difficult to organize and nearly impossible to do in a decentralized fashion becomes rather easy with Spellshape.

This really doesn’t need to happen on a blockchain. There’s no real problem you solve by having any of this happen in a decentralized manner. In the Builders Program we’re working with a huge amount of teams in various stages of development. This concern has never really been brought up. All of these issues are easy to solve off-chain.

I see many projects create a chain / token for the purpose of generating liquidity. Those often don’t find product market fit. Don’t let this tarnish the name of the otherwise super useful and desirable tool. If you do go ahead and launch a chain, I think it would be in your best interest to run it under a separate name imo.

Edit: that being said, at the Builders Program we help teams with these kind of decisions. Sometimes we even come out quite strong like my comment above, but often times this helps shape the product in a better direction. If you are in need of any help on this topic, I’d be happy to set up a call to discuss this further. We have a lot of experience working with teams and the exact pain points you’re describing. If that sounds useful at all to you, please feel free to reach out on Twitter or wherever.

We are part of the builders program, and it is true that we haven’t told you this, but it is a real problem: My experience is that launching a network is a pain in the ass and takes so so much time I would rather spend on other things. It’s a ton of social coordination, technical coordination (getting genesis correctly seems to be a common area of issue we see as validators on other chains too) and knowhow. Add to that incentivized testnets, funding rounds and then distributing supply. It’s a ton of work.

I’m sure all of this could be done on a web2 like service too. Most things in Cosmos can technically be done on web2, just more centralized and requires a level of trust I would prefer to avoid if I can.

I can also easily imagine upgrades, which are not exactly easy to coordinate either, could be helped using a tool like this.

In my mind, solving what is essentially a coordination problem with a blockchain doesn’t seem outlandish.

There are validators out there that specialize in solving these problems for new chains. Which is good for them, but I would prefer a better solution that actually lets builders solve this themselves.

What is the advantage of this being its chain, instead of a module, on say, the Cosmos Hub, which will already help bootstraping app chains with ICS.
If there is demands and the hub funds it, it should live IMO on the hub, otherwise the value does not go back to ATOM holder, but to whatever token distribution has been decided by the team.

That is a legitimate question. I suppose it could be on the hub, and be even more connected to ICS that way. As with anything on the hub: how fast can it really develop there vs a separate appchain?
It’s maybe also a question of how much functionality we want on the hub vs separate consumer app chain.

Perhaps this, as well as token distribution, could be described in the prop more clearly how it can benefit the ATOM holders?

(Btw: I have no monetary interests in this prop (besides being a very minor ATOM holder), the chain or the team. I simply like the goals and vision and want to see it succeed)

Appreciate you saying this! And I do recognize this being a difficult part of launching, but I still don’t really see how moving this on-chain v.s. web2 style solves a big problem. But then again, I’ve never been one to be in favor of decentralization just for the sake of decentralization. Only if it really solves a problem imo. Perhaps I’m not seeing the value-add here. I’d be happy for someone to change my mind.

But more so, I have doubts that there would be a sustainable economical model associated with this as part of a dedicated chain. I just don’t see the demand being significant enough and I fear token supply side would just crush the economics in the long term.

Interesting project I support all the community for here developer to approve this Proposals.

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 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…

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