Committee Grant #015 - Spritely Institute Agency Project, Phase 3 Extended Grant Request

Full Grant Size $250,000

Project Name Spritely Institute Agency Project, Phase 3 Extended Grant Request

Champion Dan Finlay

Project Description The Agency – Secure Capability-based Social Application Environment in the Browser. Spritely Networked Communities Institute is initially applied for and was granted $500,000 in the form of two consecutive $250,000 grants (6 months apart) to develop a browser enabled, Scheme-on-WASM implementation of a capabilities-powered secure distributed object programming environment called The Agency, built with Spritely Goblins as its core, and additional features as detailed below. When completed, the Institute will demonstrate social applications (chat, blog, etc.) that are completely host-less and in the browser. This work has been 100% open source (Apache License 2.0) and will always be free for all to use and extend.

Project Goals

TLDR; Our original plan to get Guile Scheme into Wasm/browsers (Hoot) has taken longer than we'd hoped and so we're requesting a third and hopefully final (6-month) grant of $250,000 to complete The Agency - aka Goblins in the browser! This includes full support for the emerging OCAPN object capability protocol standard, which will connect [via Snaps] enabling MetaMask interoperability – making OcapN compatible objects (users, games, threads, etc.) accessible to the MM wallet’s assets management interface and JavaScript API. ## Current Progress This work has proceeded on three fronts: Spritely Goblins distributed object programming environment, the Hoot WebAssembly (Wasm) toolkit in Scheme, and advancing the OCapN protocol standard. ### Goblins 0.12.0 - https://spritely.institute/goblins/ - Primarily funded by our FFDW grant - Reference implementations of Ocapn protocol in Guile and Racket - Time Travel debugging - Multiple messaging transport implementations (TCP-TLS, relay, Tor) - future: IPC, LibP2P - Multiple persistence models imminent (vat, actor) – future: IPFS ### OcapN - https://ocapn.org - There are now projects implementing OCapN in Endo JS, Haskell, and Rust too. - Hoping to host OCapCon late 2024 to bring together the capability tech community. The previous MMGDAO grants focused exclusively on Hoot – so the bulk of the updates here will focus on that. ### Hoot 0.3.0 - https://spritely.institute/hoot/ - Fully functional in the big three browsers (they implemented GC, tail-recurse) - R7RS-small 95%, most tests pass. - FFI support for simplified DOM access. - Rich streamlined tool-chain, including WASM interpreter for rapid testing. - Strong positive reaction with Guix & WASM developers. - Becoming a “reference app” for WASM compiler developer - Multitasking and Scheme-level debugging support are imminent. For detailed progress reports of everything to date, please see https://spritely.institute/archive/ ## MetaMask Integration Completing this project will unlock cooperation between our object-capabilities tooling and other browser-based decentralized projects like the MetaMask assets manager. With full OCapN support available in 1.0 of Hoot, it should be possible to integrate Spritely’s tooling within external systems such as MetaMasks’s tooling, and additionally research executed by Spritely should be useful for other object-capability-using institutions such as Metamask/Consensys. For example, on the UI side we’ll be working hard on petnames/contacts/context management – something that is of mutual interest. We also understand that MM may be taking on a more general Object Capability Kernel project, and collaboration/interoperability on that project would be a boon for all concerned. Seems like this is prime territory for potential three-way collaboration including Agoric. ###Matching funds unlock! Our core FFDW grant budgeted $1.8m over three years, with the next $600k due in August, pending appropriate technical progress (we’re on-track) and “matching funds” in the form of other grants and in-kind donations. Phase 3 extended funding ($250,000) would help us unlock the final third of the FFDW grant!

Target Milestones

Having completed most of the work on Guile->Wasm and on browsers, we have a much clearer and more detailed roadmap for enabling the Goblins ecosystem (and The Agency) integrated with Hoot: Current Hoot "Goblins in WASM"

Roadmap.

• 0.4 - March - "Multitasking (Fibers) and imported modules"
• 0.5 - April - "Goblins supporting libraries, part 1"
• 0.6 - May - "Goblins Core & cryptography support"
• 1.0 - July - "Goblins in the browser, debugging, messaging (ocapn, websockets). Chat and other demos."
• 1.1 - August - "MM integration?"

Timeline / Path to Production

[See roadmap in previous answer]

About Team

The team is 1 full time and 4 part-time roles. We also do extensive promotion of the work when we attend and present at industry conferences.

The key team for this project is roughly the same as for the previous Phase: Andy Wingo as part-time WASM expert, Dave Thomson (full-time) as lead engineer, and half time for Christine Lemmer Webber manager/architect (Goblins) and a new contractor Juliana Simms who replaces Robin Templeton on the project. We'll be adding a UI researcher part time to help navigate human interface challanges posed by capability-based identifiers.

Funding Request

$250,000

Budget: $75,000 Lead Hoots Eng (Dave Thomson) $60,000 Wasm Compiler Expert consulting (Andy Wingo) $40,000 Goblins/Hoot integration Eng (Juliana Sims) $25,000 UI/Application engineering (Contract TBD) $50,000 Mgt/Goblins-Arch (50% Christine Lemmer Webber)

What specific software license does the grantee intend to publish under?

Apache License 2.0

Other Information / Relevant Links / Supporting Documents

https://spritely.institute/archive/

Also, seach for "Spritely HOOT" for how the industry is responding to the work MMGDAO has already funded!