Committee Grant #005 - MobyMask Watcher Party by Laconic

Project Name MobyMask Watcher Party by Laconic

Project Description

Cerc, Inc. will provide a suite of typescript software to facilitate the synchronization, gossiping, and publishing to L1 of delegatable messages generated from MobyMask users, on behalf of Laconic LLC.

Laconic, a Cayman Island LLC, is a collection of companies specializing in architecting, developing, and deploying blockchain software technologies, which provides censorship resistant data services to projects in the Ethereum ecosystem and the broader blockchain community.

Cerc, Inc. is the lead organizer and developer of the software that powers the Laconic Network.

Project Goals

The ultimate goal of the project is to support both MetaMask and the Delegatable Framework project in facilitating verifiable gossip of delegatable messages between browser-extension-based-nodes. We also intend to operate infrastructure, which provides two services to the peers of the MobyMask network: (1) to run the public IP-based nodes required for NAT traversal; and (2) to inject Ethereum State into the MobyMask p2p network. Initially, we will provide these services at no cost to end-users. We will also develop and provide decentralized methods for readily accessible provisioning and payment. The MetaMask team will provide requirements for our code as well as technical and administrative support in the integration process. We will provide the code and infrastructure.

Target Milestones

We view the project as having multiple steps, which can be expressed in the intermediate Milestones set forth below.

We intend to design the system in a series of deliverables of increasing decentralization and sophistication, with each step building on the previous ones towards two concrete deliverables.

-Milestone 1. Federated V1 Watchers via Libp2p - Develop libp2p-based-libraries for gossiping MobyMask state changes, and run a service that watches for p2p messages (9 dev-weeks)

1a. Bug fix libp2p and create protocol to perform signaling over the relay node. (2 dev-weeks)

1b. Update centralized service so its watcher can also respond to p2p messages. (2 dev-weeks)

1c. Optimize the number of connections we have between peers. (1 dev-week)

1d. Update metrics to work with p2p. (1 dev-week)

1e. Federated relay nodes which facilitate the creation of a browser to browser p2p network. (3 dev-weeks)

-Milestone 2. Trivial V1 Watcher Payment - Simplest payment possible. (8 dev-weeks)

2a. Add trivial accounting of expenses and payments on the server side. (2 dev-weeks)

2b. Add meaningful CLI-based accounting queries. (2 dev-weeks)

2c. Add a UI to MobyMask to watch the balance of expenses and payments. (3 dev-weeks)

2d. Insert support for payment into client UI, based on metrics. (1 dev-week)

-Milestone 3. Centralized V2 Watcher - Write and develop a MobyMask V2 Watcher as a centralized service. (14 dev-weeks)

3a. Verify that the existing MobyMask code connects with our existing Watcher endpoint. (already complete)

3b. Build MobyMask V2 watcher. (3 dev-weeks)

3c. Connect MobyMask V2 Watcher to our existing infrastructure and document process. (1 dev-week)

3d. Implement metrics that will work in watchers. (2 dev-weeks)

3e. Implement metrics that will work in clients. (2 dev-weeks)

3f. Persist Watcher state by posting the p2p messages to temporary L2 EVM. This will be addressed later in Roll-up L3 Consensus on L1. (6 dev-weeks) ****Deliverable: Centra

Timeline / Path to Production

We expect Milestones 1 and 2 to be completed by mid April, 2023.

We expect Milestone 3 to be done by the end of May, 2023.

It’s difficult to estimate Milestone 4, given we don’t know anything about the teams we are working with, and will be determined in collaboration with MobyMask.

Milestone 5 is ongoing, and can be terminated at any time.

Milestone 6 is difficult to estimate, target completion would be before mid July 2023.

About Team

Rick Dudley, Cerc, President Rick Dudley is the President and CEO of Vulcanize, Inc. and Cerc, Inc. With over fifteen years of experience as an architect and consultant, Rick has established several significant blockchain architectures since 2014.

Ashwin Phatak, DeepStack Software, SVP Engineering Ashwin Phatak is President and CEO of DeepStack Software and SVP of Engineering at Cerc, Inc. With over fifteen years of experience, he specializes in the Laconic SDK and typescript.

Ian Norden, Cerc, SVP Engineering Ian Norden has worked with Vulcanize since 2016 and is a world expert in IPLD and blockchain data structures. He has a background in biological chemistry and is currently leading the team at Cerc, Inc, developing Laconic.

Francois Renee Rideau, MuKn, Chief Architect François-René “Faré” Rideau, Co-Founder, has been making programming languages and distributed systems usable for 25 years. Alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, Former Senior Engineer at ITA Software, he also worked at Google and Bridgewater Associates. While working in the industry, he notably maintained and rewrote ASDF, the build system at the heart of the Common Lisp open source community, while continuing to publish in the academic community.

David Boreham, Bozeman Pass, CTO David Boreham is the president of Bozeman Pass and acting CTO of Cerc, Inc. Bozeman Pass is a consulting and contract software development company with a particular emphasis on software performance analysis, cybersecurity, decentralized systems, and special projects.

Erik Dies, Cerc, Chief of Product Erik Dies is the Lead of Product at Cerc, Inc. His background is in software development and pure mathematics.

Thomas Lackey, Bozeman Pass, Senior Developer Thomas Lackey is a senior developer with Bozeman Pass, Inc. and specializes in CICD.

Nabarun Gogoi, DeepStack Software, Senior Developer Nabarun is a senior developer with DeepStack Software.

Funding Request $224,400.00

Budget Breakdown Milestone 1 - federated v1 watchers - 9 dev weeks - $39,600.00 Milestone 2 - trivial v1 payment system - 8 dev weeks - $35,200.00 Milestone 3 - centralized v2 watcher - 14 dev weeks - $61,600.00 Milestone 4 - front-end and front-end integration - 3 dev weeks - $0.00 Milestone 5 - testnet, ongoing - 0 dev weeks - $0.00 Milestone 6 - watcher party consensus - 20 dev weeks - $88,000.00

Total budget requested: $224,400.00

What specific software license does the grantee intend to publish under? AGPLv2