Motivation

This proposal suggests for the protocol's governance to adopt and enact a retroactive funding initiative. Retroactive funding is a mechanism that provides financial support to previously executed activities, decisions or initiatives after they have taken place. This approach has been previously validated and successfully implemented through prior governance proposals (e.g. https://snapshot.box/#/s:samuraifi.eth/proposal/0xb477ef99c55506b5465948ee87c5fd2083d0301cea35399a400fc4acc43a5642), demonstrating its effectiveness in supporting the protocol's continuous development, expansion and innovation.

The broader cryptocurrency landscape has increasingly embraced retroactive funding as a viable model for sustainable ecosystem development. Major industry leaders such as Avalanche (https://x.com/AvalancheFDN/status/1861387888601993580), Gitcoin (https://x.com/gitcoin/status/1866533591720575010), Polkadot (OpenGov) and Optimism (RetroPGF program) have successfully implemented similar initiatives over the past year, further solidifying and validating the adoption, usage and viability of this funding approach. These implementations serve as comparative examples of how retroactive funding can effectively drive ecosystem growth and development.

This proposal details and outlines the efforts, initiatives, and integral features that the core team and its companies have designed, executed, and delivered to the protocol over the last 12 months. It proposes retribution to the core team and its companies in the form of retroactive funding. The retributed amount shall be 800k USDT and the source of funding to facilitate the proposed retroactive funding shall be the Samurai Governance Vault.

The retroactively retributed activities include but are not limited to:

Miko

Samurai Miko represents one of the first DeFi implementations of cutting-edge AI techniques in Retrieval Augmented Generation. The development of Miko marked a significant advancement in making the protocol's growing ecosystem more accessible and comprehensible to users of varying technical backgrounds. Through its implementation of bespoke contextualization and sophisticated vector database architecture, Miko has achieved remarkable accuracy in providing detailed answers to protocol-related queries.

The product leverages OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small and gpt-4-turbo models along with various web scraping, custom text chunking strategies, prompt engineering, and filtration mechanisms to ensure precise information retrieval while minimizing hallucinations. This careful architectural design has enabled Miko to efficiently process and respond to complex queries about the protocol's various products, services, and functionalities, making the entire ecosystem more approachable and user-friendly. Additional measures were implemented to prevent Miko from being utilized for unrelated queries and unintended purposes.

The architecture was designed to work with any other arbitrary LLM, thus making it simple for any LLM provider to be integrated via API and redeployed for Miko. Furthermore, the architecture incorporates a separate vectorizer module, which potentially allows other Gitbook-based resources to be scraped and vectorized in a similar fashion for Miko to use as injected context when considering queries regarding different protocols.

Sambot

Sambot emerged as a profound advancement in on-chain trading capabilities, providing users with a sophisticated yet intuitive trading terminal directly within Telegram. The development involved extensive engineering across multiple domains, from the implementation of sophisticated trading mechanisms to ensuring robust security measures. The product's architecture leverages modern technologies including Node.js, PostgreSQL 16, and Redis 6 to deliver high-performance trading capabilities. Notable engineering achievements include the development of a comprehensive wallet management system with strong private key encryption, implementation of MEV protection mechanisms, and integration with Uniswap's Router Smart Contract for efficient token swaps. The product demonstrated the protocol's capability to deliver enterprise-grade solutions while maintaining its commitment to decentralization through self-hosting capabilities.

Sambot's user experience was carefully designed and crafted around two flows, quick buy and sell, which resulted in an interface that allows users to quickly initiate either flow through the integrated wallets to complete their swaps. The core architecture is centered on automated user account creation and its associated wallet management. This allows a single deployment of Sambot to host and provision its services to many different users without having to pool any funds and keep everything separate and strictly isolated for each registered Sambot user.

ZenEstate

ZenEstate marked the protocol's strategic expansion into the digital real estate sector, representing a sophisticated marketplace platform that combines enterprise-grade capabilities with blockchain technology. The development encompassed extensive technical implementation across multiple fronts, from advanced property listing management to sophisticated search functionalities powered by the Google Maps Platform. The platform's architecture was carefully designed to handle large-scale operations, utilizing AWS S3 for efficient media handling and PostgreSQL 16 for robust data management. The implementation of OAuth 2.0 authentication and comprehensive white-labeling capabilities strives to deliver professional-grade solutions that cater to diverse business needs while maintaining high security and performance standards. ZenEstate was built on top of cutting-edge web technologies such as NextJS, Tailwind CSS, NestJS with Express, and TypeORM integration for PostgreSQL. This foundation allows its front end to be deployed on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions such as Vercel for easier deployment management and monitoring. This enables any business to bootstrap quickly into production with a strong codebase and flexible architecture to keep up with business demands.

Research & Development (R&D)

The protocol's advancement over the past year has been underpinned by extensive research and development initiatives that have shaped both its technical capabilities and strategic direction. The R&D process has been particularly intensive in areas such as artificial intelligence implementation, trading system architecture, and enterprise-grade software development. This research phase was crucial in ensuring that each new product would not only meet immediate needs but also provide flexible, scalable architectures capable of evolving with market demands and technological advances. The R&D process involved extensive exploration of new markets, emerging technologies and architectural patterns. This research phase included a comprehensive analysis of enterprise requirements, evaluation of various technological stacks, and investigation of deployment strategies that would balance security with ease of use. The insights gained through this process were instrumental in shaping the protocol's new strategic direction.

Strategy

Through careful market analysis and extensive R&D, the protocol has identified and pursued a new strategic direction. The strategic pivot revolves around the shift of focus towards the curation and development of white-label products, services, and solutions. By developing enterprise-grade, customizable solutions that can be deployed by both crypto-native and traditional businesses, the protocol shall position itself to tap into entirely new B2B market segments and verticals. The approach shall enable businesses of various sizes to leverage the technology and its capabilities while maintaining full control and custody of the underlying technological solutions. The pursuit of this strategy has already been employed.

Operations

The protocol has received numerous meaningful upgrades over the past 12 months. Starting with the migration from TofuNFT to the PaintSwap NFT marketplace, which presented unique challenges due to the substantial collection size of Samurai Honour NFT nodes, comprising 226,288 NFTs. As the metadata required updating to reflect new RPC URL provisions by the Samurai backend, finding a suitable pinning service capable of handling such a large volume of metadata files proved challenging. This issue was resolved by implementing a solution that packed the metadata files into a single IPFS CAR file, which could be easily uploaded and pinned, thereby solving the complex nature of reliably pinning a significant volume of metadata files.

The protocol has continuously processed and validated new registered release claims from the Samurai Release initiative. Each batch undergoes automatic validation through the protocol's custom backend, utilizing various methods including message signatures and address recovery to secure the process.

Furthermore, the frontend monolithic architecture has undergone a migration to an updated hosting platform with underlying IPFS technology to further improve uptimes. The number of possible concurrent builds has been increased, which has reduced build and compilation times for the protocol's monolithic frontend repository and enables significantly faster simultaneous deployment of new features across all applications.

Lastly, the Samurai backend solution has undergone similar performance enhancements to ensure that Samurai MultiChain, Release, and Levels, which are all actively used and highly time-sensitive, can be executed on demand with greater speed and reduced latency between requests and execution. The PostgreSQL database has also received an update to utilize the innovative pgvector addon for new features such as Miko.

Specification

Enact the initiative Transfer assets