Hi @alexm, I’m writing here on behalf of the revocations committee. We’ve had an initial discussion regarding this grant and we need the following information from you to make a decision. Please respond within 30 days to the following questions in a reply to this post:
Please justify your choice of the Platform category (as opposed to the Accelerator category suggested by the Grant Support Squad).
Please specify how you will publish the code and architecture documentation as this is a requirement for the category you have chosen.
Please confirm that the SDK discussed in the grant proposal is your own SDK and not the Decentraland SDK. Please also describe how you plan to secure the SDK and provide information regarding an audit of your submission.
Please complete this review with a detailed plan on how you will provision liquidity for DCLx. This plan should address the community’s concerns over how your proposal will accomplish liquidity and a sustainable exchange model.
If you have questions or need clarification, please of course reach out!
Hey @dax , thank you for your message. Below are the answers to your questions, please let me know if you have any further questions or if the revocations committee would like to have a meeting to discuss any items in further detail.
The decision around opting for the platform category was based upon our desire to opensource all code developed for the Decentraland dex product. As stated in our proposal, “all code will be open-sourced to the desired specifications of the Decentraland DAO in order to maintain security, decentralization, and transparency for the community.” We hope to connect with DAO admins to discuss the best way to do this, and allow collaboration and transparency for the product.
All code will be hosted in two public repositories. This will include the dex, including the frontend code, smart contracts (with deployment scripts), and SDK. These pieces will allow anyone to deploy their own copy of the dex, host an offline interface, or integrate with the included SDK. All code will be licensed under the MIT free software license. Alongside the repository, there will be a gitbook describing each front-end flow. This will be useful for new users to understand how to perform specific actions for example swapping or adding liquidity. Short explanations of what these actions do will also be provided. All smart contracts will be documented in Natspec and included documentation on each method inside of all contracts. This will include expected inputs and their types, expected outputs and types, a short description of the method, and potential use cases. Each method inside of the SDK will be documented inside of a public gitbook explaining what the function does expected input and output as well as a description of use cases these use cases will also be pointed towards the first party dex where users of the SDK can see how the sdk is implemented, for example how to fetch quotes.
The SDK will be used solely for use with the proposed dex this will separate NPM package allowing developers and creators to integrate with the on-chain first-party dex. This package will have native integration with eth-connect to enable the best integration with Decentraland scenes. The sdk will be open source for easy maintainability, Asystem of access control, version controls, and alongside standard software composition analysis tools will lay the foundation for a continuously secure SDK. A platform audit will be conducted by CertiK prior to launch.
In our role drafting this proposal, we were well aware of the requirements for liquidity in order for the DEX to be able to function properly. As we communicated many times in discord, it would have been disingenuous for us to promise an exact amount of liquidity that would be able to be raised by the DEX. Our objective with this DEX was to minimize the amount of cost and lift required for the community, so we did not make a request of the DAO itself to fund the liquidity for the DEX, we instead opted to approach this through a strategic marketing effort as we outlined in several discord messages.
As I mentioned on May 31st “As the default swap across the DCL ecosystem we expect to receive a significant amount of organic traction around the launch, we will also do a marketing push both internally in our network of investors, vcs, and LPs, and publicly via Twitter, our PR team, and other avenues. We will also encourage DCL community members and $MANA holders to consider providing liquidity on the DEX. We have also explored aggregation as a fallback plan in the event that liquidity raised is insufficient, however we feel confident in the ability to attract liquidity. Decentraland also has lots of opportunity for onboarding of first-time liquidity providers through gamification in the DCL ecosystem through creative integration of the SDK integrated with native blockchain provider libraries.” On top of this point, on May 22,I personally committed to providing $64,000 in liquidity on the DEX as a sign of good faith prior even to our grant being approved as a sign of good faith. “I am happy to commit to personally putting $64,000 in liquidity into the DEX as a show of good faith if folks would like me to.”
Liquidity will have to come from many sources and will be an ongoing objective. We understand the undertaking that is required to make this a success and we hope to receive support from DCl as we work to make this product a success. We appreciate your consideration and hope to have your support.
Our team, the Revocation Committee received a request from the Grant Support Squad to discuss this case and make a decision in regards to the proposal “Decentraland X Powered by Decentraland”:
As a result of discussion and the final vote, we suggest that this grant should be revoked.
Those points are well discussed in the forum and the combination of these points raise enough concern, in our opinion, to revoke this grant.
Reasoning against revocation:
The wrong category argument, from my perspective, is not strong enough to revoke this grant. The only requirements, at the time of writing, is that the code for such a project be open source, which the author of this grant proposal committed to. Furthermore, I very much disagree with the precedent it sets to revoke a grant that was voted in by the community based on what in my opinion amounts to little more than the possibility of what could go wrong.
Further recommendations:
We recommend the GSS update the platform category documentation to have more meaningful rules, such as security considerations and expectations.
We recommend the grantee to attempt the bidding/tendering process with full documentation as to how a DEX could be achieved, accounting for security and liquidity.
