Developer Governance DAO Call – March 14, 2023

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:04

   welcome everybody to the near developer governance call my name is Ori and I'm a moderator from the devgov team and I'm excited for all of us to come together today to discuss the near live clienting typescript proposals and decision before we jump in I just wanted to go over the agenda so first I will provide a little bit of context about developer governance and discuss the purpose for our call today next we'll do some brief introductions then we'll get into the main discussion

2. 0:35

   looking at both proposals and inviting each team to to quickly speak about their proposal and why they think they are the best fit and then we'll look at the various options uh that we have to move forward from there we'll discuss the decision and next steps and we'll open it up to q a if anyone joins uh also just an FYI we are recording this call and we'll post it uh you know for

3. 0:59

   transparency uh so please just be mindful don't say anything you don't want to be shared publicly um and with that let's go ahead and get started so first let's talk about the purpose so just to give a little bit of context about the near developer governance so this is an initiative that brings together people and organizations to build a decentralized developer ecosystem and developer governance plays a role in facilitating technical projects and empowering anyone to to

4. 1:29

   contribute from idea to code and we've been bucketing most of the developer community activities into these four buckets ideation implementation review and support and given that there's a lot of time effort resources that go into these these activities developer governance has financial means to compensate for some of these activities and we've been using the gigs board as you all are familiar with at this point as our main platform for connecting near ecosystem projects with funding sponsors

5. 2:02

   including the dev gov Dao and we're still building this platform out but anyone is welcome to share their ideas submit Solutions get feedback or at the Stations from recognized experts as well as apply for funding and there's a blog post on our website that goes into more detail on all the ways that you can get engaged but uh going into today's call so basically uh we received two proposals on the gigs board for developing a typescript uh live client for near one

6. 2:34

   is from Niger uh and he represents the live chain team and then the other is from Austin Abel and both of these proposals went through a rigorous review and a evaluation by various working groups and the goal for our meeting today is to discuss the feedback and like I said arrive at a final decision I before we jump in I also just want to acknowledge the effort and time that both teams invested into the proposals as well as the reviewers we we really appreciated and are excited to have an

7. 3:05

   open discussion with all of you and ensure that we arrive at the best decision so with that I'd love to do introductions and get everyone's proper names so uh without further Ado let's hand it over first to the lime chain team uh for you to introduce yourselves cool cool let me start uh with myself so my name is Raichu I'm part of the business development team here at lime chain uh the company itself is obviously a blockchain software development company we've been doing the heavy

8. 3:35

   lifting site since uh 2017 and web 3 is what we what we specialize in particular maybe Victor can continue okay hey guys my name is Victor and man demetero code or this one chain pose yeah and now we're both uh in architect roles here so we are kind of responsible for altering the report or uh answering the questions and take it up from here from technical perspective so yes that's why we're here my name is Dimitar that's pronounce it

9. 4:13

   that's okay all right awesome it's great to meet all of you and yeah put all your names to your faces so very cool all right so next I'd like to introduce the the author of the other proposal hello Austin hey yeah so my name is Austin um I used to work for uh used to work at UH Pagoda do working on like tool stuff um and before that I just did like protocol level development within like the ethereum cosmos and final coin ecosystems

10. 4:50

    um and for the past couple months just been doing open source stuff and working primarily within like the zero knowledge uh space but yeah kind of just touching a lot of different things and and uh yeah that's pretty much uh pretty much awesome and next I'd like to introduce the devgov moderators who are on this call so hey Max heyron I'm Max um I've been an Old Timer here at near actually was the first employee at at whatever you can call near and uh

11. 5:24

    yeah today I'm just helping developer ecosystem to to get a bootstrapped and running hey folks I'm Vlad uh you may see me around as the handle troll uh on different Medias I joined here also like query early on four years ago and I'm playing a huge role in the in the community ecosystem of developers helping to navigate through all the unknowns and I was also leading teams working on different uh tooling for the

12. 6:00

    near on behalf of the Pagoda teams um so now I'm helping developer Gardens to bootstrap together with Max Nori already cool hello again yeah I have Ori again and I also play at the moderator role as I mentioned and super excited to be here and to help bootstrap this together all right so uh it's time for the main topic the actual proposals I do want to make sure that we actually have time to discuss them so I wanted to give a a

13. 6:33

    quick slide for each proposal and maybe just really really briefly if you want to just say you know introduce the anything that you want to add about the proposal uh and why you think you're the best fit if you want uh but then we'll move into the actual discussion so I'll hand it over back to the launching team cool someone from you guys want to get over here so um we we are you know what's near almost proposed like we know that your idea is to extend this blockchain space with

14. 7:06

    more people and actually to to move it to be more pleasant friendly to wear to people and that's why we figured that obviously for us to help here is to help with the development of Life requirements now the whole thing or the whole four Milestones did not appear right away we just started with the you know the personal information it would be our verification uh kind of Step but we we kind of also think that this is something very successful and this is why we actually put more more things and more milestones

15. 7:40

    in the attack issue we believe this is something that is going to to help the community not necessarily in this you know region not necessarily in these four Milestones but as a as a something that's extensible is something that is um growing more towards having more things happening in the browser for the airport and all what we basically discussed mainly is uh we didn't go too much into details except for the second one which is the um local execution verification

16. 8:12

    so so this is at least how I see building a great workout we started with what's in front of us and we focus on it and we if we see and depending on how we see it and rolls we can actually change whatever steps comes after that so yeah the conversation here is basically the right hands um so I I think it's great for us to actually Define what the end goals should be um or at least what the first step should be so I noticed there was another discussion about Milestone three I mean

17. 8:45

    about willing play the independently inside of the electronic whatever you want it on it's a lot of discussion about the fourth step which many people think is not feasible I don't think we should argue about that I mean the problem right however I do believe that um aside from from the paper verification part many more things can be more comfortable office after we kind of start doing it

18. 9:09

    as for why my launching well our goal here is to actually bring more people to the new ecosystem and this is what they actually are proficient that we are creating teams that are focused on different aspects of working space we already did that with polka dots so writer can speak more about it in that part obviously our goal here is to actually uh onboard more people to to the activity yeah or yeah sorry did I our ultimate goal is essentially to

19. 9:40

    um we're like the core development partner of their autograph for several years already uh we are expanded to polka dots ecosystem for quite some time uh now and being developing runtimes uh on go right now uh we're also implementing a few other proposals in the next let's say weeks to come um the thing is that we want to be active within the different ecosystems near is obviously one of them and the

20. 10:05

    Milestones that we derived are actually more longer term oriented so that we can be active contributors to the ecosystem the same way we do for Pokemon for example uh hedera and we also have some Cosmos knowledge and projects within lime chain that um further stranger our capabilities across different Networks this is pretty much what we we look into we saw a lot of potential protocol that's why we try to pitch I think very cool yeah well thank you we it's again it's

21. 10:40

    really good to to actually see everyone's faces because I know we've been interacting online for for quite a while so it's very cool so yeah awesome uh I'd like to also invite Austin to speak briefly and then we'll get into the actual uh discussion and decision so hey Austin again um so yeah I think I don't really have too much to add outside of the proposal like all the information should be there um think just in in summary like obviously

22. 11:07

    this is a very straightforward Milestone um like the main work is just around like API design and then like the testing and verification uh like framework around this um and the only thing I'll note that I I guess I didn't know within um or I might have noted within the The Proposal but basically like the API design is is obviously going to be favored towards um being you know future proofs for uh

23. 11:32

    you know the work that's been being done for the you know the zero knowledge like client um just so that there's you know less changes in the future uh but everything else is in the in the document I won't I won't you know uh I won't repeat any of these cool awesome thank you Austin all right so now let's move over to the actual um decision discussion stage and as you all mentioned um there were there were several conversations you know with

24. 12:01

    various working groups as well as uh the moderators and you know based on the proposals and the discussions it seems like there are multiple paths to consider uh I think I tried outlining some of the combinations I don't know if I covered all of them but you know basically we could choose one proposal or or another we could try to choose you know both or kind of create a new combination uh for a new Option

25. 12:25

    um so I'd like to invite uh the dead God moderators to kind of present their review and sort of how they're leaning and open it up for any questions that they might have so max or Vlad would either one of you like to go there you go cool yeah so um I want to say like the both uh proposals are quite high quality and um it is uh like a difficult decision because it has a binary decision we don't want to really like sponsor uh uh

26. 12:59

    both teams um because it's not like we have like money to uh to do like 2X and 3X hedging um so uh I I want to like uh speak to the strength and the specific specificity of which of the teams and how the strengths play uh to the tasks at hand right so it it did come across uh about the first first about the launch and did come across that line chain has its strength in the infrastructure building I think the scope of the Milestone one

27. 13:35

    like strongly reflected it it was like a very approached as an infrastructure project which I think will be valuable for the subsequent Milestones so Milestone 2 and Milestone three are a special Milestone 3 will be in very infrastructure focused right network is not a hermetic um like thing to focus on so I think that's where the the strength will play out the best um and as a lion chain mentioned their background uh they have like uh like

28. 14:07

    other like a portfolio that have a lot of experience uh when I was reviewing their proposal uh I did think about the first Milestone as more of a like a hermetic well like encapsulated uh almost like borderline mathematical task you know just like take this back write this back and type script that was the the idea and so my recommendations to Lime chain about narrowing down the scope was around that which not that I would think

29. 14:39

    that Limestone would be able to do it is that I thought that wouldn't be the right way of using the talents of the line chain to ask them to you know start digging into different storage types and like other things that I mentioned that I think should fall outside the scope of the Milestone one and so um that scope you know if we were to accept the limestone a bit um would you know would I would ask them to also like narrow down the timeline because I would ask them to narrow down the scope drastically too

30. 15:10

    um however uh like I think the Milestone one if we think of it in a way that I think about the scope that it just you know like take like really retrace this the the solidity implementation of Aurora or like the spec you know add enough tests I think um it's just not uh it just might be too small of a scope and not the right project to focus for launching on uh because I think the the Milestone two and Milestone 3 might actually be better

31. 15:43

    projects uh to focus on and this is like my recommendation there that I recommended uh for lime chain to can you maybe start on the Milestone too I mean that will unfortunately require from you writing another uh like several paragraph explanation of like how would you approach Milestone to but I think that actually is the the right skill fit there it's an infrastructure project also Milestone two you can think of it

32. 16:09

    as a structure project because the work there is about you know like extracting the right it's sort of refactor and just like how do you cut out the right the piece of rust code from our repo and situator you can compile to wasm um like how do you run it in inside the um different Watson virtual machine which is in a browser and so on so it's it's a lot of just you know like connecting tissue there uh moving around

33. 16:34

    and um a lot less of less of the math uh Mass Spec up there um and so that's uh yeah and that's you know transitioning to like what Austin's proposal I think um it is on a conservative side in terms of the scope it has mostly focused around the testing which is like how I would uh prefer it to be that it's it's really just around implementing the spec and you know adding whatever tests

34. 17:03

    necessary the way he described us I think is the right way to approach it so I think maybe there is some subject matter expertise showing because I mean he's been building for the protocol so he the way he proposed to write us that's exactly how I think they should be written for the first milestone uh I might be biased here because I implemented the a lot of stuff for the Aurora Bridge actually probably most of this like business logic and this so it

35. 17:27

    might feel to me that why can't you do it faster kind of thing so I would ask uh like Austin to think whether he can do it you know in four to five weeks instead of like six weeks the same scope and you know readjust the the total cost appropriately without you know while keeping the same hourly rate um so you know uh like well maybe maybe it was some reduction it's a bit of a

36. 17:52

    difficult call here with an hourly rate because um it's definitely not like long-term engagement so when it's a short-term engagement and you see it yourself as more like a short-term contractor which is you know by the way illegally you're not like a short-term contractual developer governance uh dialogue just to clarify things up I mean there is a markup happening you know and the markup can be it's a wide range you know from

37. 18:16

    30 to like 80 percent um yeah so it's it's really hard to argue when it comes to short time short-term projects you know what is the right markup over the let's say full-time com full-time engineer comp that would have been hired in the company so I just kind of like a little bit eyeballed and suggested like can you do it in like let's say four weeks or 31k so that was my proposal to Austin

38. 18:39

    um so the other thing I think why Austin might be uh a good fit for uh for the Milestone one is that um he also works on uh like in zero knowledge area right now is exploring it for the veneer and as he said himself he will try to make it future proof with respect to the zero knowledge Lite client that we would introduce so I think um you know making Austin Focus not on the infra but on the uh spec implementation and you know integration

39. 19:11

    with like things like zero knowledge like clients back is uh the right way to utilize their sources here um you know again adjust it uh for um the uh smaller time frame you know like four weeks and 31k and I would uh yeah and I would suggest to Lime chain to just you know like go after a bigger infra kind of projects like Milestone 2 Milestone three as you said milestone for I mean there

40. 19:44

    is a debate on like whether it's feasible whether it's needed but this is where we as moderators need to step in and kind of aggregate the uh the reviews of the work individual work groups because you know when validators come and say that uh there is no need for uh in browser while there it's the question is is there is this action on something that we need or is is this is just like the way it is viewed right now by the current validators right so um

41. 20:15

    that's basically where we as like moderators of the Dao might be able to adjust um basically the conclusions that the word groups made on the milestone for but we are far from the milestones for right now and there and everyone agreed that there is a value in Milestone to a Milestone 3 or at least not everyone but like some poor group so I I would suggest yeah the lime chain to focus on Milestone too right another like couple of paragraphs

42. 20:45

    explainer how they would do it uh and uh yeah and uh Austin to focus on Austin one um and Austin might even like um you know in the free time you know not in whatever free time you you choose to even advise maybe uh lime chain on how to go about Milestone 2 because masterton is I think familiar with the code of the of the runtime and he can tell you where to carve it's just he might not do the carving I think

43. 21:18

    um yeah so that's uh that's uh yeah that's what I think about this whole thing yeah thanks for uh for the thoughts yeah I I I I actually want to Second Max uh thoughts I I Thanks Max for laying out all the possible outcomes and how we can make the best um out of what we have uh one thing that I want us to just be aware of is uh from what I've seen and what what I observe uh working on different projects out

44. 21:59

    there that we probably will need to account for like two timelines one is billable sort of what how much time would it take to implement things but at the same time we'll have probably some extended timeline uh for the expectations when things will be released because of different uh review processes taking a bit longer to to get into near apigs for example and then to cut the release of near Pages it will support this feature so and only at that

45. 22:30

    time we can say well this feature is actually live and available to the users and this is something that I just wanted to um get us aware and because there is also a bigger factoring happening on the api.js side which will probably delay some of the things but you should start working on uh the the pull requested version of the changes and it shouldn't take you know not get you blocked at least in terms of like implementation but might

46. 23:00

    get blocked whoever will take the implementation parts from presenting it as a as a life feature um yeah that's uh all comments I actually have everything else is pretty much aligned with what Max said and I I had the same feeling of of the teams and the strengths of both proposals uh and there's Max Lori said like it's it's really hard to to make the decision when we have uh two uh a very strong proposals out there

47. 23:38

    or do you want to add anything here yeah I think you all stated uh everything that I wanted to say so um yeah I I agree uh with all your statements and I guess I would like to uh now invite you know both uh teams to maybe respond to to the to the thoughts and yeah once you go first yeah we can go first um something that I can start with is um obviously Disney's like a more thorough discussion within lime chain to have some kind of a final decision on

48. 24:20

    how we can proceed further with next steps I believe that's visible what you guys just uh suggested um we need to summarize right yeah yeah into uh your image yes while we we can decide to focus on either one last one or one deliverable with both the local execution and the peer-to-peer plugin game or breaking down and you have more flavor or more meat to the bone on those specific kind of next tests and they're

49. 24:52

    also going to be based on what's uh also going to deliver in terms of verification right well I would say um like I I think like questions uh plan with test and it's quite exhaustive for the for the light client itself so I think the best usage of your time would be the like the the Milestone turn Milestone 3 which is like you can do you can focus on peer-to-peer Network you know allow near api.js to not depend on

50. 25:22

    the RPC providers or you can um the the Milestone 2 would actually be a pretty big deal uh where uh we don't need to do the vehicles on the Node side but instead inside inside the client but as I outlined in one of my responses I mean that requires um it's a difficult right so it's both infrastructure problem and also like an engineering test the speculative fashion of the state it's like you know it's it's an engineering task it's a pretty big one so I would focus on that

51. 25:55

    um yeah I wouldn't try to like augment the number one and I think I left somewhere in the comment about like different types of storages I would address it when when we started getting like the feedback from developers to the users that they need that like they say all right well I don't like that I have only one option I don't like that I can I cannot control what story should we use and when once we hear that you know as a feedback then you know we start

52. 26:17

    implementing it like I wouldn't do it um I wouldn't do it for active that would be more reactive here because we first need to start seeing projects actually using it um yeah so that's um that's what I was recommending so we use memory for the beginning or uh well I mean Austin will use whichever I mean you can try to like communicate to him like influence him he can choose whatever uh like whatever story she uses

53. 26:48

    for the near rpiags uh patching of the headers um I mean that might not be actually too large I mean 27 kilobytes for Life uh per light light header I don't know um yeah so so yeah I mean I mean you you need to make a call here together with us enough like what what the what the first storage type you you he would be using for the for the uh for the for the light uh client but I mean again if you if you take his work right and you start using it for like second milestone on the

54. 27:25

    third Milestone and um and and you feel like his his choice is not sufficient or like suboptimal and then you say okay we're blocked here we need to have another type of the storage as an option that's where you you know you come in and start implementing it and you say well we need to expand the storage options and then you argue why um yeah two different class writers that do have the previous year in the team and it's actually problems

55. 27:55

    yeah we'll make sure that we we take the final decision as soon as possible so but uh sounds like reasonable next steps and like reasonable suggestions from from you which we appreciate um and thanks for all the feedback that you you've just given us guidance and help so far we we do appreciate it foreign what about you yeah so uh from my end uh just to I guess follow up on what Max said at the last um when he was talking about the

56. 28:35

    proposals um as far as the other work on kind of isolating the virtual machine how do you compound The Watch this is definitely something I'm I'm more than happy to help with this is something I I thought had a lot of value for things outside of just this as well um but I just never really had the bandwidth to be able to you know go into the near court code to make it to change it to make it possible

57. 28:58

    um so yeah more than happy to help on that or just like take suggestions about you know either API design on this stuff or or whatever else and if there's any any information uh you guys would like for me just let me know and I'm I'm more than happy to help um I don't think I had uh comments or thoughts from from the statement I guess the only other thing was yeah but on the timeline and stuff like that I I just put it like kind of like a um a little bit of a conservative estimate also just to make sure that I

58. 29:31

    you know was spending enough time to make sure that all these things were like very thoroughly tested uh and verified um but yeah a shorter timeline totally totally doable I mean there's nothing that's it this stuff is just spending as much time is is is really as as you guys want for for testing I don't really have an opinion on that and uh as a lot of said already like keep in mind that it

59. 29:57

    also includes productionization all that code so including into the near api.js not just like developing it on the side but actual put it into the library um yeah but I mean there are things that you can reuse I mean there's like a code for the Aurora Bridge that was written that fetches the headers to actually do what the thing uh that you want to do to fetch the headers and run the verification on them as a light client so you can and it's

60. 30:27

    actually JavaScript so you can just repurpose it as is um yeah okay so it seems like there's General consensus from what I can hear um from the discussion uh based on Max's recommendation so just to summarize that is um you know Austin would proceed with Mauston Juan would obviously send like the revised timeline cost um you know incorporate any suggestions but then uh and then lime chain would uh propose uh another bid for for Milestones two and

61. 31:06

    three with a question mark on four I don't know what we decided for four but did I miss anything from the from the summary are we all is there anything else I guess that's accurate yeah okay cool so yeah I guess um do we want to do like a formal voting Max and Vlad like or no I mean we were just everyone everyone is obviously on board so let's proceed okay cool and by the way like this is you know this is one of our first calls that we're having to kind of talk through a proposal on

62. 31:41

    the gigs board so we greatly appreciate everyone's flexibility and patience as we build this out but yeah very glad that we we got to have a conversation and hear from everyone and yeah we're excited for everyone to contribute in some way so yeah I guess just in terms of next steps so uh Austin will you be able to post a follow-up just with like your kind of like updated sort of uh bid

63. 32:06

    based on on the feedback yeah sure and I can just like ask someone after this call what kind of format you're you're looking for because I'm not 100 sure what you mean by that but yeah that's totally cool to do that okay and then obviously for for lime chain you will be posting I guess a new uh post uh for from all Stones uh uh two and three right yeah do we uh like need to make a

64. 32:34

    new post can we post it within the current polls like what is the preferred way whichever you like um I mean if you if you edit the current post just like mentioned somewhere like at the top that it was updated on yeah the date and what was what has changed uh yeah and you don't need to do both Milestone two and three I think like Milestone two is pretty massive on and so on I think it that one will have the

65. 32:59

    biggest impact uh because I've been working very closely with RPC team I mean we're serving like 15 000 uh RPC requests per second it's a pretty massive traffic and most of it vehicles and if we can offload it from the centralized service to the uh all this competition to be inside the browser so the users who open the tabs and um that will be a pretty pretty massive impact for our entire ecosystem but it's

66. 33:27

    also Milestone to it's pretty challenging so I think Milestone 2 is like enough enough for this stuff to focus on in the near future uh but of course if you have like huge appetite or Milestone three I mean feel free to describe it too I just don't think it needs to be focused on now okay cool sounds sounds cool Perfect all right uh are there any questions or feedback from anyone okay happy to give everyone 20 minutes

67. 34:04

    back then thank you all so much and we look forward to continuing uh the conversation