Datagen proposal to amend payment for Milestone 2

[Lord-Nymphis]

Project Abstract

B-Datagray’s Datagen project concerns the development of a decentralized infrastructure for CPU/GPU cloud computing, in chain, through different blockchain components.

The Datagen infrastructure requires the creation of a Substrate-based blockchain with some key features: low latency time, high efficiency (compatibly with the decentralized nature of the network), high degree of decentralization (higher than a traditional PoS would allow) of the physical hardware providing the cloud computing (therefore requiring a customized consensus protocol) and in-chain (or near-in-chain) computation (no off-chain based solutions).

The Datagen infrastructure primarily want to serve: privacy friendly search engines and browsers, decentralized Web3 games and other ones (for example decentralizing the hardware layer of PoS blockchains, typically hosted on AWS and similar, etc…).

We will implement only a PoC with this grant.

The goal is to achive a fully functional mechanism for the random selection of the nodes in the fast blockchian and smooth communication between the two blockchains.

This pull is to propose a change in Milestone 2 amount (21K USDC for the second Milestone, 53K for the whole Grant). See Files changed

Grant level

• Level 1: Up to $10,000, 2 approvals
• Level 2: Up to $30,000, 3 approvals
• Level 3: Unlimited, 5 approvals (for >$100k: Web3 Foundation Council approval)

Application Checklist

• The application template has been copied and aptly renamed (project_name.md).
• I have read the application guidelines.
• Payment details have been provided (bank details via email or BTC, Ethereum (USDC/DAI) or Polkadot/Kusama (USDT) address in the application).
• The software delivered for this grant will be released under an open-source license specified in the application.
• The initial PR contains only one commit (squash and force-push if needed).
• The grant will only be announced once the first milestone has been accepted (see the announcement guidelines).
• I prefer the discussion of this application to take place in a private Element/Matrix channel. My username is: @_______:matrix.org (change the homeserver if you use a different one)

[Lord-Nymphis]

Let me know your thoughts.

[Noc2]

Thanks for the PR. Could you also update the total costs as well as the costs of the milestone as part of your PR?

[Lord-Nymphis]

Ciao @Noc2 , I did their the you requested directly at the link you sent me (and in the abstract above).
Let me know if it's ok.

[Noc2]

Ciao @Noc2 , I did their the you requested directly at the link you sent me (and in the abstract above). Let me know if it's ok.

Could you please update it as part of this PR?

[Lord-Nymphis]

ok, I think that now it is updated

[keeganquigley]

Thanks for the changes @Lord-Nymphis I will mark it as ready for review and ping the rest of the committee.

[Lord-Nymphis]

thanks @keeganquigley

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[Noc2]

Thanks for the PR. But after looking at it again. I'm personally not willing to accept the amendment. The main reason is that I think the grant is against our guidelines, specifically:

• "We do not award grants for projects that have been the object of a successful token sale."
• and "Applications must not mention a specific token".

This was already highly controversial when you applied, but now you even publicly said that you paid your devs working on the project in the native token allocation.

[Lord-Nymphis]

Hi @Noc2

As said we tried to ask for the amendment because the guys from Parity told us it was worth a try. If you want to vote no or to close the pr is fine.

Just a clarification. I think you are referring to: "....We thought we could count on @viac92 as an affordable dev. @viac92 was working at a much lower salary than the average substrate dev, both because he was involved in the project with a native token allocation and because he was very junior, and we paid him a salary during his formation in the substrate framework. ...."

I was not mentioning native token allocation for the milestone development. I already explained this fact, when we did the application, that devs already had done some previous work for the project (he developed the tokenomic smart contracts BEFORE the grant). For this reason, he had a pre-existing allocation in the project, as an early team member, and compounding the fact that he was an early team member with tokens (fact uncorrelated to the grant, as said in the original grant the tokens are used for other purposes that are not correlated to the object of the grant) and the fact that we paid him for months a salary in order to learn substrate (this being instead correlated to the grant) contributed to him accepting a lower salary than the benchmark. I never ever said that we paid him in native FOR the milestone or for the grant.

Businesses are complicated to run, devs do more than one thing for a company, there are many things going over, and it's not all black or white, my comment was just to give more context about the milestone development. BTW we both know which is a substrate dev salary, which is why I preferred to give more context.

As said, the scope of this amendment was to align the milestone with the real costs of the development.
I don't think in any way that the way in which we managed the dev payment is against the grant rules (we are an incorporated company, not an informal team just working on the grant and the relationship between devs and companies is complex), having said that, I'm fully aware that the process to accept amendments it's decentralized and it is fully within the rights of the commission members to accept or refuse our proposal for changes to what is already approved. We are totally on the same page on this, I just want to clarify eventual factual errors or misinterpretations.

[Noc2]

Thanks for the detailed answer. You are correct that the rule is somehow subjective and hard to define. So the rest of the team/committee might have a completely different opinion here and I will ping them again.

[keeganquigley]

Hi @Lord-Nymphis it is my opinion that if additional development work is needed, it should be added into the application. Without an expansion in scope I find it hard to warrant an increase. Therefore I won't approve the amendment as it stands. Let's see if the rest of the committee has a different opinion.

[semuelle]

Thanks again for the submission, @Lord-Nymphis. The committee has decided not to support this amendment, I will therefore close it. I hope you'll still find a way to finish the project. Best of luck!