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)
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.