This is the v3 instance of this proposal, with an amended budget, 6/6 team roster, and Q&A section!
Written by: Rabbi Jebediah (https://twitter.com/RabbiJebediah )
Co-Author: Mr.Baboon (https://twitter.com/Mr_Bab00n)
SUMMARY
This is a spending proposal for Q2 2023 that would fund an expanded L1 Task Force to work on LUNC and only LUNC, without wasting the community’s money on side-projects that extend beyond the scope of our blockchain. This proposal seeks to minimize the amount of “unnecessary fat” by trimming superfluous and unneeded expenditures (like “team managers”) while also removing dysfunctional elements (TGF staff) from the L1 development team. It also seeks to distance the L1 team away from Terra Grants Foundation’s umbrella given the latter’s problems like unsanctioned spending, incoming governmental audit, and lack of any grants (despite billing itself as a non-profit grants foundation).
MOTIVATION
With the passing of Q1, the amount of actual development work on the LUNC blockchain was done by a small group of hard-working people (Superman/InonMan, Frag, Vinh, Ed Kim). With Q2 staring us in the face we still don’t have parity with Luna 2; the last update that was deployed halted the LUNC chain for hours (forcing validators and Jared from TFL to deal with the issue); many Q1 deliverables remain unfinished and undeployed; the upcoming WASM upgrade is a catastrophe waiting to happen; and a host of chain exploits and risks that were reported by Jacob Gadikian of Notional were either ignored or barely acknowledged then brushed aside.
ADDITIONAL CONCERNS
Then there’s also the problem of “feature creep” which has slowly but surely wormed its way into the L1. The L1 Task Force was assembled to do core L1 work on LUNC, but its mission charter has morphed along the way into anything and everything that Tobias and the TGF want done, ranging from their pet projects like the Senate and legal protection for US citizen-affiliates, to side-chains being developed by Prof. Kim (by leveraging LUNC’s L1 team assistance), to pointless wastes of time like the “Coding Dojo” (basically a glorified wiki) and Terra Operator (both being pushed by Tobias himself while he takes LUNC money and does minor programming work on the actual chain that’s paying him to develop it). Neither should USTC repeg initiatives nor L2 work/developers be a part of the core L1 development process, nor should either of those come bundled with L1 spending proposals!
THE CURRENT L1 JTF PROPOSAL (Q2 2023)
Here is a list of expenditures submitted by the Terra Grants Foundation:
A major issue with the budget above is that TGF is currently falling apart:
- Superman (InonMan) is still missing, and has been for a number of weeks (IRL legal troubles)
- TGF’s proposal above includes Superman (InonMan) in the budget, despite his disappearance!
- interviewing for Tobias’s replacement will take weeks, during which their team will have no lead
- despite not having a single lead developer, the aforementioned vacancy is still being billed as full!
- the proposal omits the names of the “junior developers” despite billing the community for them!
- the prop bills a “manager” spot at $5000/month, with no guarantee more devs will be onboarded
- TGF is a non-profit operating as a for profit company, which is beyond the scope of its charter
- TGF itself is currently embroiled in legal issues which will soon result in disciplinary action(s)
- TGF attempted to bypass aforementioned legal issues by reforming in the Cayman Islands
- the L1JTF under the purview of the TGF has not finalized and completed the Q1 roadmap
- for all the reasons above, TGF’s/L1JTF’s Q2 spending proposal is null and void!
JUSTIFICATION FOR AN ALTERNATE L1 TEAM & STREAMLINED SPENDING PROPOSAL
LUNC’s treasury is impoverished, and we lack funding - as such, any money we have must be conserved and spent only on the most critical of work! Neither should LUNC be associated with the Terra Grants Foundation, given the latter is about to become legal contagion and could easily drag our blockchain into trouble with the law! Nor should the community be expected to foot thousands of dollars a month in payouts to people like Steve (LuncBurnArmy) so they can manage their “team” of only 2 junior devs!
Superman (InonMan) has been confirmed as missing, and it’s questionable if he’ll ever return!
As LUNC investors, let us fund and reward productive developers while trimming the fat and removing unproductive or outright harmful elements! With the recent departure of Ed Kim from the L1 team, all future L1 work needs to be focused exclusively on LUNC - this means no comingling of LUNC community pool funds for other side-projects, or lending out our remaining developers to non-LUNC initiatives!
It is for all these reasons that we propose the following changes…
PROPOSAL
To fill the senior leadership gap left by the departure of Prof. Ed Kim and the removal of Mr. Tobias Andersen, we propose bringing in Bilbo Baggins (senior software engineer/architect) and Solid Snake (another senior engineer and systems architect), both of whom will serve as team co-leads. In addition to them, we propose adding another 3 senior developers to the team (NotJoshC, MangoChutney, ChopstickSensei) all of whom are seasoned developers with years of experience under their belts, and will have no trouble fitting into the group. Finally, we propose adding Jacob Gadikian (senior developer and CEO of Notional Labs) to this roster as a retainer, for the purpose of external collaboration and high-level overview (code review and Cosmos-specific implementation), as Jacob has already contributed much to the blockchain and his expertise will prove invaluable in helping us reach parity.
We need to scale up our L1 team if we are to prepare LUNC for the coming bull run!
Ergo, here is the proposed budget for Q2:
$7,500/month for Bilbo Baggins x 3 months = $22,500 overall for Q2
$7,500/month for SolidSnake x 3 months = $22,500 overall for Q2
$5,000/month for NotJoshC x 3 months = $15,000 overall for Q2
$5,000/month for MangoChutney x 3 months = $15,000 overall for Q2
$5,000/month for ChopstickSensei x 3 months = $15,000 overall for Q2
$5,000/month for Jacob Gadikian x 3 months = $15,000 overall for Q2
Total expenditure for Q2: $105,000, paid out in 2 installments!
(or 853,658,536.585365 LUNC at a conversion rate of 0.000123)
This money is to be paid out in 2 equal installments! If this proposal passes, the first installment would be released immediately upon the proposal’s passing so the work can commence. The second installment would be put up for a vote in its own prop after 8 weeks have passed, to allow the community to judge the work delivered over 2 months. This ensures the community pool is protected from a one-time drain, as well as incentivizes the developers with delayed payouts for completing their roadmap! This a much safer and more reliable solution than paying them 100% upfront (and allowing TGF to dictate what’s done with the money via their internal shenanigans where they send almost all of the funds to Kraken where the community can’t audit transaction flow)! Partial payment protects community funds, and will also keep the developers motivated to contribute good code and solid work throughout the quarter.
ROADMAP
The Q2 roadmap has been refined and pruned of unnecessary/non-L1 work…
Here are the outstanding items from L1 JTF Q1 scope of work that would still need completion in Q2 by the new L1 Team:
- Secure and deploy Oracle with sha256 to all validators.
- Impact analysis of upgrade to Cosmwasm v1.0.0 to assess effect on migrating L2 wasm contracts from 0.16.6.
- Augment the current WASM virtual machine to fit with Cosmwasm v1.0.0.
- Follow up on the Pebble DB / Badger DB speed improvements task and determine if it’ll be included into a future release or not.
- Give insight into why the transition to iavl fast node via iavl 0.19.4 has been deferred.
- Give insight into why Mev-Tendermint is no longer required.
- Implement and release software upgrade to enforce minimum 5% commission on all validators in accordance with the passing of Proposal 11322.
What the new L1 Team would need from the L1 JTF in order to be successful in Q2:
- Insight into what exactly is intended with the “Overhaul CI (continuous integrations) workflows” task.
- Knowledge transfer on the logic behind the current ordering of items that are included in releases, and why they are structured the way they are.
- Knowledge transfer from L1 JTF regarding any existing testnet, communication channels, and key stakeholders to be aware of.
- Knowledge transfer from L1 JTF in regards to any internal documents related to the parity upgrade, so those documents can be released to the community for review. We are particularly interested in getting an understanding of the potential impact to smart contracts that the L1 JTF has identified during their investigations of the chain upgrade, and determining what the expected blast radius is in terms of smart contract addresses and potential risk to funds held within those smart contracts.
- General knowledge transfer so the new L1 Team can review and update their own backlog in response to outstanding items currently on the L1 Team’s backlog.
Development focused revised L1 JTF Q2 scope of work:
- Finalize pre-release testing of Core v2.0.0 on testnet and bump to “release”
- Finalize pre-release testing of Oracle-Feeder v2.0.4 on testnet and bump to “release”
- Prepare Terra.js v2.0.0 pre-release & ensure peer review
- Bump Terra.js v2.0.0 to “release” state and push changes upstream to TFL so they can prepare new NPM packages
- Prepare Terra.proto v2.0.0 pre-release & ensure peer review
- Bump Terra.proto v2.0.0 to “release” and coordinate NPM packages with TVC
- Work with TCV to patch GUI assets (Station, extension, mobile) with new Terra.js v2.0.0 NPM package
- Work with existing validators to expand the testnet to a targeted 30% of the validator set.
- All existing validators are requested to keep an identical configuration of their production instance available for scheduled “release testing” on the testnet.
- Schedule v2.0.0 upgrade on mainnet and provide on-call support during scheduled chain-halt.
- Integrate FeeShare module from Juno for release in v2.1.0
- Finalize CosmWasm upgrade and prepare “migration documentation” for L2 developers.
- Finalize pre-release testing of Core v2.1.0 on testnet and bump to “release”
- Schedule v2.1.0 upgrade on mainnet and provide on-call support during scheduled chain-halt.
Moved tasks from original L1 JTF Q2 scope of work:
Moved: Review and update product backlog for L1 team
Notes: This will have to happen as a result of knowledge transfer for the new L1 Team anyways, so it has been moved under that list.
Removed tasks from original L1 JTF Q2 scope of work:
Removed: Renew “community oversight committee” for L1 team, going out to vote for new committee members.
Reason: The community is the oversight committee.
Removed: Establish experimental network to host daily release for “vNext” (main branch)-Investigate the addition of Interchain Accounts (ICA part of IBC) module
Reason: Parity first. The time to explore ICA is not quite yet. Let’s look at this again in Q3.
Removed: Provide technical advisory services/L1 development for “Project Ziggy”
Reason: Based on current events, it looks like “Project Ziggy” is going to be a non-starter, and we also aren’t ready for it yet even if there was something viable to the current iteration of “Project Ziggy”.
Removed: Finalize L1 Dojo - Path of the Journeyman
Reason: Irrelevant and not needed. Better learning materials by an order of magnitude already exist at: Chapter Overview - Cosmos, its Ecosystem, and ATOM | Developer Portal
Removed: Finalize L1 Dojo - Path of the Journeyman
Reason: Irrelevant and not needed. Better learning materials by an order of magnitude already exist at: Chapter Overview - Cosmos, its Ecosystem, and ATOM | Developer Portal
Removed: Establish IBC to Kujira
Reason: The name of the game for Q2 is parity. If we are able to get this in for Q2, by all means that’d be great, but for now this is looking more like something we’ll do very early on Q3, or after we’ve achieved parity and have confirmed success of the upgrade.
Removed: Develop a two-year high-level technology roadmap for Terra Classic (Q3 2023 => Q3 2025)
Reason: The community should be involved in this, and it feels like a discussion best suited for Q3. There are things we’d love to do for the chain once we achieve parity as well, but those discussions can happen with the community in Q3.
Removed: Finalize L1 Dojo - Path of the Expert
Reason: Reason: Irrelevant and not needed. Better learning materials by an order of magnitude already exist at: Chapter Overview - Cosmos, its Ecosystem, and ATOM | Developer Portal
Removed: Assess migration path for Tendermint => CometBFT
Reason: One big change at a time. We can certainly assess this after we achieve parity.
Removed: Review on-ramp technologies for Classic Station and develop proof-of-concept
Reason: The community should be involved in whether they find this to be a valuable feature or not. If it is indeed deemed valuable after discussion, we can look at implementation of it in Q3.
Removed: Finalize Q2 work and avoid voting on Q3 funding
Reason: These types of statements are exactly why the current L1 JTF (with the exception of members who have contributed tangible valuable development work) is seeking to be replaced by this proposal. Not only is this statement irrelevant and not needed as a task line item, it is exceedingly disrespectful to the very community that has paid for the L1 JTF and reeks of hubris.
Removed: Prepare Q3 budget and agora proposals
Reason: This isn’t a development line item. This is administrivia and is not relevant to the development task list. It’s just additional bloat.
Q&A SECTION
Q: Where did you manage to find all these extra L1 developers on such short notice?
A: We saw this coming, and had a team prepared for when it inevitably happened.
Q: Shouldn’t you try to get Ed to return to LUNC? He’s the one who founded TGF after all!
A: Professor Kim has expressed a desire to work on his own chain. We should respect that.
Q: What about Zaradar? Surely there’s something we can do to get him back! Maybe pay him more?
A: Tobias was obviously unhappy with his position and payment. We wish him luck at his new job!
Q: So who’s going to lead the team, now that we don’t have a single senior lead developer?
A: We have multiple! But Bilbo & Snake will be co-leading the team (both are software architects).
Q: Why are all these supposedly high-level super-developers agreeing to work for so little money?
A: Because they want to prove themselves to the community, and become a part of LUNC’s revival.
Q: What about community outreach? Who will keep the LUNC community up to date on L1 work?
A: Bilbo Baggins has volunteered to handle this… and he won’t charge us $7000/month for it!
A: Solid Snake will also split these tasks with Bilbo, so both can remain at peak coding efficiency.
Q: So are the developers going to work full-time or part-time? How will the L1 team split tasks?
A: Part-time, but the newcomers all want to prove themselves, and will put in a lot of extra work.
Q: Do we really want Jacob Gadikian working on LUNC again? Tobias didn’t get along with him!
A: Jacob is an elite Cosmos developer. With Tobias gone, Jacob will do what he does best - dev!
Q: Would this team be willing to work alongside Superman, Frag, and Vinh at a later date?
A: Sure, why not! This spending prop covers our 6/6, but collaborations could be undertaken.
Q: What about parity? What about a USTC repeg? What about all the other stuff promised in Q1?
A: It’s all a part of the new L1 team’s plan. They’ve been working out the details in private for a while.
Q: How do we know these new devs won’t take the money and run as soon as they get it?
A: The payout plan is structured to protect the community pool and investors from malfeasance.
Q: What guarantee do we have that this L1 team is going to deliver what the chain needs?
A: None. Words are cheap… but if they want to keep getting paid, they’ll have to produce results!
Q: Can you guarantee this team will work only on L1 initiatives, without any side-projects (Ziggy, AI)?
A: Yes! We have nothing against other projects, but they have to submit their own spending props.
Q: So you have a 6/6 team ready to go? Everyone’s on board? No one will quit if the prop passes?
A: Everyone’s ready to go, yes. They’re committed to helping us revive LUNC and grow the chain!
Q: Rabbi, will you be managing this team? Are you now the Product Manager or coordinator?
A: No, I just write props. Bilbo & Snake will co-manage… honestly, I’d just get in their way!
Q: We want the old L1 team back! They didn’t finish the Q1 roadmap but we still want them back!
A: That’s impossible since Tobias & Ed are gone, and TGF is about to disband due to legal violations.
Q: What about Steve (LuncBurnArmy)? He did a good job in Q1! Why are you not including him?
A: He’s welcome to provide his services pro bono, but the chain is better served hiring developers.
Q: What happens if we vote against this proposal and it doesn’t pass governance?
A: Then development on LUNC will stall. Right now, the chain does not have an L1 team!
Q: If this proposal passes, won’t it empty the community pool? What if we want other projects?
A: There’s currently $250,000+ in the CP, and this prop requires a total of $105,000 over 3 months.
Q: I still have reservations about this proposal and the technical skillset of the suggested devs.
A: That’s fine, post your questions down below and the devs will do their best to answer them.
CLOSING REMARKS
Here is the Code of Conduct our developers will adhere to, courtesy of @Pholuna:
Contractors must conduct themselves in a professional manner! This means whether commenting on personal social media or not, you are the faces of our community! As such, the following will not be tolerated: theft, bribery, gross negligence, f-raud, misrepresenting factual information, harassment of other organizations or individuals, bullying, aggressive or intimidating behaviour, threats of violence, etc. You are to represent the LUNC community to the best of your ability, and to uphold the interests of its investors while treating everyone with respect and dignity!
Vote YES if you agree with the proposed Q2 spending plan for the LUNC L1 team!
Vote NO if you disagree with the proposed Q2 spending plan for the LUNC L1 team!
Thank you for reading, and let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!
Signed by: Rabbi Jebediah, Mr. Baboon
Special thanks: to all our wonderful Frens!
v3 changelog:
- removed Frag & Vinh from the roster (they graciously declined our offer)
- rebalanced the budget to account for the finalized team roster (6/6)
- added Pholuna’s Code of Conduct for our development team
- added the pruned Q2 Roadmap to the main post body
- edited the main section to account for new information
- expanded the Q&A section with a couple more lines
- fixed some typos and grammar, improved formatting