J3 AG 01 Ashley Tyson + Josh Stark + Robbie Bent ETH Prize

good morning this is Sina from the Trueba team we're going to talk about the eath prize bounties project hi I'm Josh dark from L 4 and I Robbie ban from Tibet I'm Ashley Tyson I'm from Webb 3 foundation thank you all of you for joining us here today we appreciate your so the the four of us spend a lot of our time speaking with members of the community asking them about you know what their experience is building on top of aetherium some of the challenges that they're facing day to day we host a number of workshops we do a number of different phone calls and we spend a lot of our time listening and understanding the ecosystem and while we all believe clearly that aetherium and blockchain is the future we clearly know that there are issues building on top of it which leads us to our next point how can you afford to lambo and you can't afford the gas we realize that there are a number of issues around gas prices and languages and you know generally getting people to get to main net so what we decided to do was assembled a group of people and we would like to present today eighth prize so eath fries is a community initiative it was created based upon some feedback that we were getting out of the community and out of some interviews that the true--but team was doing with developers who said that they needed critical infrastructure in order to build the DAPs and the protocols that they were looking to create so we put together this community initiative and it's managed by a group of people and it's funded by a group of people and we're putting I think important funds and project management into the ecosystem so what is prized in practical terms the prize has basically two components first we actually find out what the challenges are what the problems are that developers are facing so the first part is a very large community driven research effort to interview more than a hundred DAP developers to actually find out what are the critical problems that they face every day what are the tools that they're missing what are their pain points what are their frustrations so that's part one is actually finding out what the problems are part two is addressing those problems by funding significant bounties that will be actively managed to actually produce results very quickly our goal if anything else is to actually get this stuff built and actually follow through these projects actually exist but they're in developers hands as soon as possible because the ecosystem can't wait for things that are being worked on only part time I'll probably screw up the clicker so what do we mean by big actively managed bounties the first component of this is that these bounties are large and the reason for this is frankly like I think we all feel it that the community can be sometimes too stingy there are so many opportunities out there for talented developers that have experience in this space and we need to pull them away from projects that are short-term profit driven to focus on things that have long-term extraordinary value for the whole ecosystem there are basic tools that every developers ecosystem needs every single day that don't exist yet even though there's so much capital already in this ecosystem so the question you have to ask is not what's an amount of a bounty that will allow some devs to or cover their costs but what is the opportunity cost of those developers working on open-source tooling for developers what is the actual value that this thing brings to the ecosystem as a whole so we think these boundaries should be large to attract great teams and to financially motivate them to actually get them done the second part of this is these bounties will be what we call actively managed when we started talking with this idea we asked a lot of people with a lot of experience with software bounties what works and what doesn't what are the problems with a bounty driven model and a consistent piece of feedback we received was that just putting some money available on a website and announcing it at a conference like we're doing now isn't always sufficient not enough developers and know about it not enough developers might have a point of contact with the project to actually find out what's required the spec might not have enough of detail and they might not be driven to actually complete the bounty in a timely fashion so every bounty that's part of Eve prize will have an advisor with some sort of stake or expertise in the project making multiple advisors who can help the teams direct them and respond to feedback they're going to have a recruiter whose sole job it is to go and find people who had the skills to work on this bounty and actually kind of like recruit them to say hey here's a great bounty it matches your skill sets do you want to work on this and every bounty will also have a project manager that can work with the developers help them get them pass any blockers get them passed their own pain points and make sure these projects actually get built because at the end of the day it's mainly about making sure these tools actually exist for the ecosystem I'm a pest of the Rocky so let's talk a bit about what we've done today we started off conducting so far 51 our interviews with developers across the ecosystem the process was super transparent we logged all the notes and we're gonna make report available for anyone who wants to understand what the current problems are developing on aetherium big thanks to Andy Cena the guys from hexyl and Paul in there for helping with the interviews it was a massive task spending 50 hours of time documenting this and the interviews had a specific art to them so you know it started out with some of the questions above trying to find out what developers pain points are what they're really frustrated on working on now and you know it started out with like transcripts and you know there was an art to really digging deep to find out what people were frustrated with and we sort of asked the same question over and over you can see some of the questions above you know what is frustrating about building on eath walkthrough of the tools and libraries you use what is impossible with the current tools like anything to really get at the real pain points and like the results were really amazing so you know this was a massive open source full ecosystem involvement as you can see you know majority of the ecosystem is here so teams from Quan Stamp and Gollum and Zeppelin and polka dot and live pier and one protocol and remix and Aragon and what was really interesting was the amount of different people we spoke with so we spoke with security audit experts DAP developers people building layer 1 infrastructure people building tooling at the actual aetherium foundation so it really gave us a wide view of what different people were struggling with so what do we learn like the biggest most encouraging thing is that everybody is super enthusiastic about aetherium so even those that had problems with their day to day development we're willing to get on a one-hour call and talk about how they could help and the other thing we learned is that the ecosystem needs guidance so while people want to help a lot of people are unsure of like what is the best way what is the highest leverage impact and so as Josh said the goal of this is to really show developers that hey instead of doing an ICO you can make a lot of money by building key infrastructure that everybody needs so here are some tickets I'm not gonna go over all these but they're just you know some super interesting things that we're kind of surfaced so like one you know test nets or RF to actually deploy to robson sometimes you literally need to 51% attack the network people were complaining about getting test method testing that 'if you know everybody needs a debugger this was mentioned by like 90% of the people when we started this this was like a huge issue and over time truffle actually delivered a working debugger which was super awesome because like doing this really led to the need to launch a debugger it surfaced that which is cool you know the ecosystem is bursty so you see things like the web 3 library where development starts and then languages and this is like what we're trying to help with here as teams are siloed and they're working on tooling but then once that tooling is available maintaining it is often expensive and a lot of work and that's where balls are getting dropped so that's something that you know we're really going to try to help with gas and everything around it has actually said gas costs are high people often don't really understand gas super well so how does get us to make gas how much does a particular operation cost what does gas limits issued locally and truffle some more a lot it was around documentation so you know development environment setup is hard the idea environment is tough we thought it'd be interesting to have a nice topology map for beginners to kind of detail all the different tools and how they fit together another thing that we found is interesting was building a client so every team is working on this and none of the info is really shared so if you want to find out when you start to build your client what are the best practices there's no real way to do that without talking to individuals something else that came up you know in December that was really cool as these POA chains so a lot of adapts we're having issues with scaling and there was discussion like literally December January around how great it would be if it was easy to build side chains and we just came from a presentation in Barcelona called scaling now and this is effect we ready so you know in the midst of when we started this interview process you're starting to see some of these things getting built which is just a really good sign for the ecosystem that stuff gets done quickly when there's a focus on it the other thing that people talked about was like for the end-user and not the developer so like key management ya need to understand the difference between a private and public key new user education and also like anti-phishing so I was really surprised to see how many people are super passionate about protecting noobs from losing their funding so like there's guys that run a Skype anti-phishing group that like spend 24 hours a day trying to help people who losing money which is really awesome to see so you know ok let's dive into like what isn't working some of the stuff we talked about was developer tooling you know this seemed to be the major concern it's just how do you solve the tragedy of the Commons where infrastructure is needed for each team but there's no real incentive for a single team to build it so that's really what the goal of eath prize is some of the things we've identified so far we'll talk about more big bugger package manager and open source block explore the other item that we're going to tackle later is documentation everyone reference having a source of truth one source of truth where they can find updates and finally is duplication so the other thing we noticed a lot of stuff was being worked on in silos as we said and many tools trying to do the same thing so we think that like having identified these issues with a little bit of coordination there's like an opportunity for a huge impact so with that we're gonna talk a bit about the first two bounties and why they're useful in history all right thank you yeah so we did you know over 50 of these interviews talking to all these teams from across the space and now we're gonna kind of tell you the story of how two of these initial bounties came together so the first one is around a package manager for smart contracts which anyone who works with smart contracts will feel this pain so here are like three of the interviews that kind of brought this point brought this point home first was you know talking to Jack from auger who is actually the first interview that we did in these bounty series and you know he was like we need a package manager we need to be able to see different versions of these contracts that exists Alex Miller from from grid plus wanted to share his trusted trustless real a set of contracts so that people could build on top of it but there was no wait no good way to do that and then more recently we were talking to Piper Miriam from the etherium foundation who's been working on a package manager called eath p.m. that would you know have a huge impact on the ecosystem and he was really saying that the spec is ready the design is like there and now we just need resources to pull it push it across the line so what do we mean by a package manager this is similar to node modules and NPM if you're using javascript gems if you're using Ruby you know pip packages if you're using Python it's basically a way to package code publish it to you know a public registry tie it to a version and be like this is v1 of my hashing library and then other people in the world can download that without having to copy paste the code or rebuild it themselves and just use it so yep so like Ashley Robbie and Josh were saying we're forming this as an active bounty so Piper who's been really pushing this forward is going to be the adviser and the truffle team is actually taking the role of developing this and what this will involve is three pieces three scopes of work the first is defining a standard manifest for what these packages what these smart contracts will look like so how you know the dependencies for a particular smart contract are shown the next piece is a standard spec for the registry which is really a public index of packages where you can find them and their version and because you know we're operating in this trustless decentralized environment we want this to be a spec where anyone can go and deploy their own registry and the final piece is tooling to really help developers publish packages download them and integrate them into their code so stuff in web 3j s web 2 pi and that proposed funding for this is 250 K which might seem a lot but if you kind of work backwards from the value that this gives to the ecosystem it's actually pretty great the next the next bounty that we're really going towards is an open-source block Explorer so like Robbie was saying side chains are one of the most practical ways to scale aetherium right now and there was this whole scaling now conference parody has the bridge chains grid plus is working on something POA work and but when you think about it one of the points that came up from Grif and from Grif at giveth and Jorge at Eragon was that you know it's all well and good if you move your transactions to us to a side chain but if you don't have a block explore to see what's happening who's sending money to who there's no visibility it's not usable so we need that and then Richard from Quan Stamp actually had kind of a creative idea which is if you have an open source block Explorer you can use that while you're developing locally to get more insight into what's going on and your test not working so this one's kind of more at a planning stage and it looks like POA network will be the team that really takes this forward and again around 250 K proposed funding to get the ball rolling and we're really proud to announce that we've gotten firm commitments for funding for these bounties from the etherion Community Fund from status from Toshi coinbase and from 0ax project and we're talking to a lot of other teams right now that are interested in funding this I'm gonna be raising and finally finalizing all the raise over the next couple of weeks and the other to note is that these are just the two first bounties the goal of these two is to kind of be like the MVP the alpha version of eath prize to show that this model of big bounties and actively managed bounties can produce results as the research has completed as more teams are interviewed we're gonna be adding new bounties to each prize also with significant rewards attached to them where we'll be looking for teams to work on those projects so if you're interested in getting involved in some way if you think you would want to work on a bounty if you want to be interviewed please get in touch nextslide and check out our website which will be on the internet very soon and email us find us on Twitter look for any of us individually at a conference or email us personally or on Twitter please get in touch we want to hear from you I think that's it any questions from the audience while we still have some time it sounds like right now the process to like participate is pretty like ad hoc basically we're getting touch with you guys and we figure out how we can participate and we'll go from there is there like do you guys have a plan or have a vision in how you want to like maybe apply a little structure around this process where you know more people can like go through this funnel and and be organized yeah definitely so one thing we've talked a lot about is using existing bounty platforms there are a lot of these out there like things like give a things like bounty drop Network things like get coin lots these exist already so we'd love to see eventually is having lots of these bounties as there are more of them both on our website to kind of like surface them and promote them and market them but also existing on these open platforms where anybody can kind of like apply I get in touch with the advisers and go from there it's kind of like hi touch right now because we just want to like get it working and get these products shipped and then expand the model over time as we have success yeah I think also scalability of a solution like this is important but now we're focusing on speed so it's how to actually get things fixed now so you know we're not focusing on larger goals like charting and scaling solutions but you know usability and dev tools and as you can see since we've started discussion you know boa is now working on a black Explorer sidechains are almost ready the debugger was completed so you know finding near-term solutions quickly is sort of a really important goal that we focused on awesome presentation thanks guys can you talk a little bit about how the list of bounties will be collected and curated like people propose things like is there some committee or some group of people or some way in which you know the community decides which projects are worth funding and who gets the who gets assigned to work on a particular project yeah for now the goal is just to speak with 100 developers and the interview process has been completely open anyone who has something to say can reach out we just started with our personal networks and in every interview we asked you know who would you recommend speaking with and based on what people said we just took the even most important things and got those funded going forward there'll be the ability to apply it directly but for now it's been like really really clear what needs to be worked on I think we've reached out to you know if you're in foundation and all the other funds that have come together to fund bounties to also support but we're in the process of you know figuring out what the best way to do that would be anything to add to that like Robbie said we're gonna be making all of the interviews available so it might be worthwhile in the interim if you're interested to take a look at what some of the developers are citing as their challenges one of the other goals is that we'll put together kind of an infographic or some sort of like more packaged data analysis of the insights that we got out of these interviews and then you know feel free to propose things as well and be proactive for you know what you might see as a hole in the ecosystem you know and we might be able to to work with it that way while we always scale for something a little bit more like long term yeah I think also the major goal is to notify developers that there's actually a lot of money who've made helping ecosystem versus running an ICO and so collating all these interviews into a report and making it available if you're new to the space you can see oh wow these are things that actually need to get worked on and this is what people working on all the projects are asking for so really hoping that setting up this report is going to have a lot of impact sorry to add one more quick comment which is I think there's massive value just in knowing who's working on what like as someone who's you know the developer who's gotten to this ecosystem recently if I'm thinking of working on an open source block Explorer or something and knowing that there's this team or that team working on it I mean huge value in depth of ecosystem Thanks hey what's what's like the process so once once say like this package manager first my contracts is built what's the process for like maintaining in continuous funding of those hoping so his projects I'm not too familiar with like managing open source support actually not familiar at all but but like how do you is it easier when something is built to get people to make small contributions I think definitely once was actually like a finished product there or like you know a finished enough version that is workable and has feature full it's a lot easier to build an open source community around that project once I mean there are users of this project once many many teams across the ecosystem are actually using it in daily basis that is your contributor base to supporting that product over time because they have an incentive to keep working on it I mean another thing and this is very much still like we want your feedback and we want to learn as we go and improve this model so another option would be to have some kind of continued funding model it support projects if we think that's necessary that's absolutely a thing that as a whole as cap what we think it's going to work that's the thing we could organize I'll just add to that so that the activation energy for taking a tool that you have within your team and making it an open source project that other people can use is quite high so a lot of these teams that we talked to you know have their own testing testing suite deployment pipelines various you know hand-built custom tooling but they they don't have the resources to really you know write out the documentation and make it modular pull out all their own you know custom code so an effort like this for taking things to that stage will already be a big value add and yeah like Josh said I think we as a whole like in this base are thinking a lot about how public funding and opens incentivization of open source on a continuous basis would work so I think this is actually a really good project for experimenting with different models and you know it's all it's all experimental Piper's point sorry it's your Parker's point similar names to Parker's point about um about bootstrapping versus maintenance I think it is important to separate the two and I think it's it's it's an awesome initiative sometimes you need these big sticks or sometimes maybe even seven-figure sums to get some of these projects going and the happy couple main maintaining projects once they're done though like I don't know you guys know open collective there's this really cool initiative called open collective which is sort of exist in the Fiat world today but they're looking at maybe moving into the crypto etherium world as well and the idea is that users of open-source projects like the react ecosystem is a number of project webpack etc that run this way right can contribute a very small amount of money a bit like a patreon like a dollar here three dollars they're like micro payments and collectively there's enough money then to pay a developer team on an ongoing basis to maintain it so that would be really cool to kind of see that become a part of this maybe in the future sweet thank you all