[DAO:4b21399] Polkadot - Substrate integration and education - BUITL

Governance
1

by 0x77e2e933db7941055f0630a5e53137f19872290d (na)

Should the following Tier 4: up to $60,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Community category be approved?

Abstract

Dear DCL family.

I’m seeking funding today to get more polkadot related stuff BUITL in decentraland!

Grant size

55,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x07356B0edF9b934330F41952B09D076C3810C608

Email address

coinatomy@gmail.com

Description

Decentraland <> Polkadot
Recently I’ve been building an educational platform to teach dcl users about the polkadot ecosystem:
Decentraland
(https://BUITL.COM)
(This platform can be used for other things but let me explain why polkadot is a great partnership)

There are over 30 parachains on polkadot. Each with their own tools, dapps, communities, founders, developers and financial ecosystems. A lot of these projects are building stuff that can be integrated into decentraland.

Later this month I will be doing an event to showcase https://talisman.xyz
(A non-profit metamask alternative that can already be used to log in to decentraland and access polkadot and ethereum data at the same time… -Drops mic- )
https://twitter.com/coinatomy/status/1594690826617200642/


How this benefits Decentraland?
Over the next couple of months I will be hosting events for individual parachains. DCL will receive more attention from the polkadot community resulting in more active users through organic marketing and more tools being built for decentraland. Polkadot has around 15,000 active developers and I plan to reach out to as many as possible, to see if they are interested in contributing…
I’ve been involved in polkadot since 2016 and developed good relationships with a lot of polkadot/kusama brands. But with a new ecosystem being added every other week it is becoming hard to keep up with all the developer activity. So I want to bring them all together and show them why decentraland is the best metaverse on the market.

So what have we BUITL so far?
UNO (Which I will opensource)
A Quiz system for inputting/approving/viewing questions…
Maze (Ready for some paintball?)

Specification

What we want to build next?
1. So we want to allow cross chain transactions in-game from polkadot. This is considerably harder than polygon because most of polkadot is not EVM compatible. So our plan is to build a substrate pallet that can be added to an existing parachain like a piece of lego. Then we can work with the talisman code to build a kinda dot-connect (similar to the widely popular eth-connect) which should allow polkadot transactions in-game.
2. The quiz we’ve BUITL is a really good tool for education. I would like to get all of the dot communities to submit good questions and answers about their projects so that we can expand the consciousness of education. Things we would like to include are; NFTs, games, competitions, leaderboards and more. Sure, we’re open to suggestions.
3. Paintball
4. Once the above is completed we want to start working on a polkadot L2 in-game marketplace!

Personnel

Who?
Butter#4840 - Been promoting DCL since launch. Doing events on my own since May 2020. With the most notable being Keep Networks hackathon in Sept 2020 which received 2.2m views from 50,000 unique addresses… Since then I’ve been doing smaller events for individual companies and projects.
Binh - WSS/Backend stuff. Can build anything.
Max - Graphic designer recently aquired. \

Roadmap and milestones

Budget?
Currently I’ve spent about $25k on the quiz and UNO.
And it will take about $30k to build a substrate pallet and dot-connect.

Why proposal?
As you can see we’re hitting new development milestones every day. Up until now I have been paying for everything myself. Cross-chain transactions is something that everyone will benefit from and it doesn’t make sense to have to pay for everything myself.

So let’s get it BUITL!
https://BUITL.com

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like
2

http://buitl.com[link in proposal is currently not working but is meant to forward to the decentraland scene…]

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Wow, UNO in DCL - very cool! I like where this is going, especially the personal investment in building a product to prove the use case to base the proposal on instead of just something conceptual. I think the grant amount is reasonable for this work. Voting yes so that you may keep the momentum going on this.

4

@CarlFravel what you think about this one? We dont get to see you much.

1 Like
5

Yeah UNO was tough.
In my head it was such a simple game.
Making it opensource is better than making someone else suffer… :sweat_smile:
It can also be adapted for poker or something as well :+1:

6

Looks interesting. :slight_smile:

1 Like
8

Just remembered I have a video example of an EVM transaction for the shibuya network (astar testnet)

9

As a Polkadot holder and parachain participant, I’m excited to teach the world about this revolutionary (but sometimes confusing) project to understand. Breaking down the information into a game form is perfect, and LFG when these chains are unleashed :slight_smile:

There was a Polkadot sponsored event in Decentraland at coordinates 28,8, on December 4th, 2021. Was this event also ran by you, or was it a different activation?

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Polkadot - Substrate integration and education - BUITL

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 98% 4,853,030 VP (68 votes)
  • No 2% 149,375 VP (11 votes)
1 Like
11

Polkadot - Substrate integration and education - BUITL

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0xbef99f5f55cf7cdb3a70998c57061b7e1386a9b0)

Vesting Contract Address: 0xDF5Aa245fd071500cEbBC25a39d293B028B27660

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Dear Community,

The Grant Support Squad was created to support the grantees in achieving their goals and taking care of the DAO treasury.

At the moment of writing this document, It is appropriate to announce that we will recommend to the DAO Committee that the vesting contract of this grant should be paused since there seems to be evidence to establish that the project is overdue, and has difficulties and blockers in the development process regarding Polkadot integration.

Let´s dive deeper into this project and why we reached the aforementioned suggestion. This document will contain quotes from conversations with the grantee. These will be between inverted commas (“”) and in italics whenever they appear.

  • This team has built an educational platform to teach Decentraland users about the Polkadot ecosystem (the Quiz)

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During January 2023, they “have been adding questions to the quiz but it has been tedious because of the decentraland UI. So I’m currently trying to streamline the upload process and now we’re using an external website to manage the quiz:” so, they are not trying to improve Decentraland UI in their development of their product.

  • Also, they made a game, called UNO.

The code (GitHub - ERC20s/UNO: UNO on a 1x1 decentraland parcel) works, and in the readme.md you can find the instructions to launch it.

We started a conversation with the grantee and they told us that “There are some parts in UNO/server/prisma that could be cleaned up because there are some aspects of the QUIZ in there. But we’re not going to remove them because it would be a lot of effort for no additional benefit. The main barrier to test is launching a server so we’re going to launch UNO on metazone.io so that people can have access to our personal /server so that they don’t need to spin up their own…”

According to their roadmap, this task should have been done in February 2023, but they haven´t posted any new update, and we haven´t received any information or news from the grantee. Also, it is not clear why it is not a benefit to clean up the code documentation.

Also, the UNO hasn´t been changed to work on SDK7, and they don´t have any plan to convert it as of now.

  • Then, they committed to creating another game, a paintball called MAZE. But, they are “firstly focusing on getting polkadot transactions in decentraland… (So that people can battle for items on polkadot)”.

This means that we don´t know when this will happen and a time frame is needed.

  • This takes me to the final goal that they promised to do, which is the central proposition of this Grant, “allow cross chain transactions in-game from polkadot”

During January 2023, they “updated to SDK7 to try and add @talismn/wallet-connect and @polkadot/api but we couldn’t get them working yet… I’ll reach out to nico and see if this is something that he could explain but I believe it’s because not all npm packages are supported…”. To mitigate the problem, they “hired another developer team to work on a bridge between Ethereum and polkadot. Which will allow deposits/withdrawals to a substrate “parathread” node."

Again, we don´t have any update; and the information we have, we obtained from a series of emails that we sent back and forth with the Grantee, because the first update didn´t contain valuable information.

In conclusion, they are at least one month overdue, they have received 26K (DAI) as kind of compensation, and we are concerned about the current state of the initiative. We have encountered difficulties and blockers in the development process regarding Polkadot integration. We have not received updates on the project’s status.

Considering that, we believe it’s necessary to recommend that the DAO Committee (@yemel @HPrivakos) preventively pause the vesting contract of this Grant until we have valuable information to analyze the real technical feasibility, budget, and timelines for the project’s completion.

It’s important to point out that this suggestion doesn’t imply a definitive revocation of the project but rather a temporary pause (three months starting to count from tomorrow, 1st of March) that will allow us to communicate with the grantee again, evaluate the current state of the project, and make the necessary decisions to ensure its success for the benefit of the project and the community treasury.

Regards.

The Grant Support Squad.

1 Like
13

Thanks for the negative summary of my project.

Here’s the reality:
UNO is live @ GitHub - ERC20s/UNO: UNO on a 1x1 decentraland parcel but we didn’t put our private server information (like IP address) there for standard security measures…
We have sent our code with our private information to metazone.io so that LAND owners can launch UNO on their land with a few clicks.
Metazone are still reviewing the submission.
It will be in SDK6.

QUIZ
We have created an external website to better manage the Q&As. (Delete, view, add). We’ve already built this in decentraland but managing 1,000s of fields of data is easier on an external website. So we added that even though it wasn’t part of the plan.
The update to SDK7 has deprecated the InputText field. So the external website will be used for adding fields of data until there is an alternative solution for the DCL UI.

POLKADOT
We have tried a series of different solutions to implement polkadot.

  1. Adding npm @polkadot/api to a live scene doesn’t connect to the polkadot wallet. Which rules out a lot of basic options.
    1.1. We tried connecting directly with the talisman wallet from within the scene GitHub - ERC20s/TALISMAN but that didn’t work either.
    1.2 We are still going back and forth with Nico about an alternative solution to get users polkadot data in this method.
  2. After communicating with talisman, they are working on a way to connect to ethereum and polkadot at the same time. So that would basically allow users information to be received from both chains when a user logs in. Currently there are no other multi-chain wallets that would allow this method but this is a solution that I’m excited about.
  3. We are currently building a bridge that will connect decentraland to a EVM substrate node. This is a solution that will allow:
    Users to make deposits from ethereum to a polkadot chain.
    Users will be able to make transactions on the polkadot chain with their ethereum address similarly to how polygon works.
    (Please don’t assume this bridge as part of the scope of development because this is way outside of the original scope but it’s being built anyway because I am commited to this project :man_facepalming:)
  4. Hopefully we don’t have to change the core code of decentraland to implement this but this is starting to look like a reality.

All of these solutions could work and we’re trying all of them… Also open to suggestions :+1:

PAINTBALL
We want to integrate polkadot transactions into the paintball game. Until we know how those transactions will work there is no point building paintball.

TL;DR
Everything I’ve explained here can be understood by a developer. Problem is there are no developers on “The Grant Support Squad”. So I might as well be explaining my process steps to a wall.

To a typical end-user:
UNO - Done
QUIZ - Done
POLKADOT INTEGRATION - Coming soon in one way or another.
PAINTBALL - Coming soon after

I understand the purpose of your squad is to promote developer activity, which I respect but I fundamentally disagree that funds to my project should be paused considering the current and ongoing work flow. I missed the Feb update because I am currently away from keys. But I have kept you guys updated via monthly private calls.

Yeah, the development processes is taking longer than anticipated but the majority of the payment is for something that has already been done and we still have ongoing products being built specifically for decentraland.

I believe a 3 months pause as a punishment is unjustified here.
I feel I deserve the rest of the money for all of the work and time invested here so far but if you disagree then please come up with a better solution rather than just pausing funds. Seems like you’re stalling so that you don’t have to pay when this whole thing has already been decided by the DAO.

I will continue building but please don’t waste my time :+1:

2 Likes
14

Hello!

I hope this message finds you well.

I just wanted to clarify something. Our recommendation wasn´t a punishment but a preventive action to ensure transparency and accountability within the community. We’re glad to see your update on what you’ve done this past month. We appreciate your efforts and value your transparency, so we recommend that the DAO Committee (@yemel @HPrivakos) not pause the vesting contract.

On the other hand, we’re working closely with our advisory board to understand the technical aspects of your project and roadmap to ensure its feasibility and success.

With your new inputs, we will start a back-and-forth with our advisor to support you, and it would be great to have more information regarding the timeline, steps, and milestones involved for the implementation of Polkadot.

So:

  • Could you provide a timeframe for that implementation?

  • Could you define the next steps to achieve the integration?

  • Which milestones could be considerably accountable?

  • If you agree, we could publish a Notion with that information so everyone could see it, like this one.

  • Lastly, could you publish what you wrote here in your update section?

Thank you for your cooperation, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

15

  • Could you provide a timeframe for that implementation?
    The customized bridge / pallet we’re building is expected around August…
    I’ll ask the talisman guys if they have an update…
    Then we’ll connect the pallet to the scene and start marketing…
    The whole thing could take until Decemberish to start seeing activity…

  • Could you define the next steps to achieve the integration?
    Bridge…
    Substrate pallet design…
    DCL/pallet communication…

  • Which milestones could be considerably accountable?
    I don’t understand this question.

  • If you agree, we could publish a Notion with that information so everyone could see it?
    We have a roadmap and a github that we are working towards. You have both those links.

  • Lastly, could you publish what you wrote here in your update section?
    When I get back to my keys I will publish an update

16

Dear Polkadot Team,
I am writing to provide a recommendation based on our recent discussions and your input. As we previously discussed, it was crucial to review the project with a technical advisor, but it appears that there is some friction regarding this. We have sent you two calendar invites to coordinate the meeting with our advisor, but we understand that you have decided to publish an update instead.
However, we strongly believe it is still necessary to coordinate a meeting with your team and our technical advisor to address any concerns and ensure the transparency that the community expects. This will help us move forward with the project smoothly, ensure that all aspects are covered, and give you better support.

According to what you have published, the timeframe for Polkadot integration will be:

  • “The customized bridge / pallet we’re building is expected around August…”
  • “I’ll ask the talisman guys if they have an update…”
  • “Then we’ll connect the pallet to the scene and start marketing…”
  • “The whole thing could take until Decemberish to start seeing activity…”

So, we will recommend that the DAO Committee (@yemel @HPrivakos ) creates a new vesting contract for 9 months with the rest of the funds nonvested (24.098 DAI). This will ensure that the vesting contract aligns with the project’s timeline, and we can review it again in August 2023.

Overall, we believe these recommendations will help to move forward with the project and ensure that everything is aligned with the Gran Program’s spirit. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns, and we look forward to coordinating the meeting with our technical advisor.

Best regards.

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Polkadot - Substrate integration and education - BUITL

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0x88013d7ed946dd8292268a6ff69165a97a89a639)

Vesting Contract Address: 0x3cAc4Ffa1cE92c6b35a2d03A16dD453e20cac2d7

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Hello, @zino and @BET. I’m Tobik from the DAO Committee. The vesting contract has been recreated.

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Dear Polkadot Team, @BET

I´m writing because you´ve missed the update #4, and as you know it is mandatory to provide a regular update to the community regarding the status of your project.

I´ve checked the public roadmap that you provided but don´t has updates since February.

According to what you published here, during the period March-August, your team will be working on “The customized bridge/pallet” which is expected to be built around August.

So, could you inform the community what you have been doing during the last month?

Is there any advance to accomplish the task (Customized bridge/pallet)?

Feel free to write technical implementations or steps.

20

Dear Community,

The Grant Support Squad was created to support the grantees in achieving their goals and taking care of the DAO treasury.

To start, It is appropriate to announce that we will recommend to the DAO Committee (@HPrivakos @Tobik) that the vesting contract of this grant should be revoked because the requirements regarding transparency on the project are not being accomplished.

In that sense,

  • We´ve tried to coordinate meetings with the team and our technical advisor to address any concerns and ensure the transparency that the community expects, to ensure that all aspects are covered, and to give you better support, but there was friction. We have sent two calendar invites to coordinate the meeting, but the grantee decided to publish an update instead, which has not had any advance.
  • We´ve checked the public roadmap that Polkadot provided, and there have not been updated since February.
  • According to that roadmap, during the period March-August the team will be working on “The customized bridge/pallet” which is expected to be built around August, but there is no update on what the team has been doing during the last month.

Last but not least, they have received more than 26K (DAI) as a kind of compensation regarding what they have done with the projects called UNO (GitHub - ERC20s/UNO: UNO on a 1x1 decentraland parcel) and the educational platform to teach Decentraland users about the Polkadot ecosystem (the Quiz).

In conclusion, Despite attempts to coordinate meetings with the team and technical advisor to address any concerns and ensure transparency, there has been friction, and the grantee has not kept the community current on the project’s progress. Additionally, there have been no updates on the public roadmap since February, and it is unclear what the team has been working on in the last month.

21

Wassup y’all… Apologies for digging this up but thought I’d summarise what happened here as I want to apply for a new grant and hope to avoid getting grilled…

So… I opensourced UNO as promised…
Max did unique t-shirt designs for 30+ parachains and designed a maze…

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I spoke with several parachain hosts and they were all interested in participating but wanted to log in directly with Polkadot.js… (This is my suggestion to implement this!)
Bingo created a private website to interact with the quiz so that we can upload large amounts of Q&As instead of manually adding them individually via our decentraland UI that we built…

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I transfered to the alpha version of SDK7 in feb…
I built a quick higher and lower game to test SDK7:

At this point I realised UNO and the Quiz were toast because they were fully written in the UI of SDK6 which had now completely changed to a react based UI…

Bingo was working on an NFT marketplace…
I was working on integrating it into a substrate pallet ($140 a month in server costs)…
I also had a design for a bridge and was speaking with a skilled eth team about implementing it…
They liked the idea and even suggested some improvements… They are currently building this anyway…
Combining the 3 talents would of allowed the locking of crypto assets in an ETH mainnet smart contract, bridged to a Polkadot Parathread and transfered on the L2 via the custom substrate pallet all through the dcl interface (Similar to polygon opensea but multichain.)…

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Some of my family live 600 Miles away so I went to see them from 20th Feb to 1st Apr.
I still have access to a laptop but I never travel with private keys which resulted in me not updating the vesting contract…
I was updating the GSS directly via email and updating on the forum so didn’t see the problem…
28th Feb the grant was paused without warning…
Between 1st Mar and 7th Mar i exchanged multiple messages to the GSS privately and publicly.
To them it seemed like upgrading to SDK7 was a simple task but it wasn’t.
And none of the GSS had any technical understanding about implementing polkadot or substrate despite multiple efforts to explain.
Everything was on track but subsequently the grant was REVOKED.

The funds had dried up, the project is half complete and I’m at a loss.
I decided to shut down the substrate/pallet server.
The graphic designer was dropped.
Bingo reduced his price 75% but after a few weeks secured a position somewhere else… moment of silence for the loss of this good dcl dev

I was still commited to show something.
So I figured out a cheap way to achieve a similar solution.

In total I spent about $30k on UNO and the quiz and about $20k on designs/polkadot… Not including my own time…

TLDR
I felt the revocation was unfair and I should of been given the time that I had asked for which was September.
I don’t know why my grant was heavily criticized by the GSS while others pass through unquestioned.
SDK7 beta dropped on March 7th and confused things.
When someone is hired to do a task, funds shouldn’t be removed half way through.
We’re basically building a full stack blockchain network focused on DCL. It’s not a simple task.
This requires some patience to build and giving monthly updates about code is not very interesting.
Most of the work was delivered on day 1 and the community had approved.

If anyone has any questions related to polkadot integration… I’m your guy…

Anyway, let’s build…