SPS Governance Proposal - Hire PeakMonsters to finish Development of SPS Chain

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(Edited)

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Introduction

The Splinterlands community is needing to complete and deploy the software to operate the SPS chain.
This proposal is meant to be a community driven alternative for what has been proposed here: https://peakd.com/spsproposal/@splinterlands/sps-governance-proposal-hire-jptr-corp-to-develop-sps-chain

We believe the community would benefit from competitive pricing for finishing the validator software. Likely there are multiple options to get it done but the DAO community should have options and we are throwing our hat in the ring... this is actually something our team had considered offering to do many months ago but it was indicated at that time that the software was almost ready to go and so we stopped pursuing it. Seeing that the recent proposal indicates 12 more months of work we have renewed our interest.

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About Us

The PeakMonsters/PeakD (peakmonsters.com) team is very familiar with Splinterlands ecosystem as we have worked on projects with the game for about 6 years. Also our costs seem to be well below the very high inflated US developer wages so we believe we can provide a very good product at a greatly reduced rate.

We have developers that work on @peakd, @peakmonsters and @peak.open projects that are very familiar with both Hive and the Splinterlands game/community. On top of that one of the treasurers (@jarvie) is part of the team. Our team is very focused on user facing experience and interacting with userbase.

How it would work

We are proposing that if this vote passes our team would spend 2 weeks reviewing the existing code at no cost.
If we believe we can hit the 10 months target we would then proceed creating an official document with the list of all project requirements. We expect to receive some input from the Splinterlands team during this task to be sure we correctly identify the full project scope. Once this document is finalized and approved we'll confirm our intention to forward and start working on the code.

We may decide to not take on the job after the review but we will give feedback of the code and still request no funds.

We have an incentive and would love to get this project done quickly at a very high standard for the benefit of us and the Splinterlands ecosystem well before one year.

Final Audit

As indicated in the other proposal by @splinterlands it is the SPS DAO that is in charge of developing and deploying the code to operate the SPS token. We totally agree with this.
At the same time it is important to mention that the SPS token is fully intertwined with the Splinterlands game. Both are required and none can operate independently.

For this reason we request a final security review of the code by the Steem Monsters Corp. (aka Splinterlands) before the release. For this review we estimate 1 month and a budget of 40,000 USD to be paid directly to Steem Monsters Corp. by the DAO

ℹ️ NOTE: We decided to include this section in our proposal as it's honestly quite surprisingly that there is no mention of something like this in the other proposal. The Splinterlands community deserves an audit by the main game developers before going live with a software developed by a 3rd party (both PeakMonsters or JPTR Corp) that can potentially destroy the ecosystem.

Cost & Payments

Our team can work on this project at a cost of $300k USD for 10-12 months. On top of those $300k USD there are $40k USD to be paid for the audit as explained in the previous paragraph.
The total cost for the DAO will be $340k USD providing a $140k USD potential savings.

 
The payments will be handled based on the following:

  • $300k USDC/USDT should be set aside (either by escrow or deemed untouchable except by this project)
    We request stable coins be used to set aside funds though for monthly payments we are flexible what is accepted.

Funds will be distributed by DAO treasures in the following schedule:

  • $22k USDC per month paid to PeakMonsters for the next 10 months. Total: $220k USD
  • $40k USDC paid to Steem Monsters Corp. at the start of the audit
  • $40k USDC paid to PeakMonsters once the software is audited
  • $40k USDC paid to PeakMonsters after the software is deployed and validator nodes are active

This system of payment rewards expedited work and also focuses on accountability for quality

⚠️ ❗ NOTE: The above cost is purely based on a very high level understanding of the project scope and the cost to operate a 4-5 person team. We are looking forward to reviewing the existing code and getting a clear and well defined list of all the requirements of the validator nodes software.

Open Points

  • Based on the recent DHF proposal there is a chance the Splinterlands game will move to a different blockchain in the future. If this happens the impact on the validator node system is unknown.
    SPL DHF proposal
  • A new proposal to sunset VOUCHERS will be live soon for official vote. If this proposal is approved there will probably be an impact on the validator node system that will require further discussion and adjustments.

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PeakMonsters and Splinterlands links:

Other Social Media accounts:

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splinterlands spsproposal peakmonsters dao sps spschain development
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43 comments
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good to see some competition. :)

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So glad that you've stepped into the ring. Peak has proved itself to be reliable, responsive and transparent. The fact there was no audit in the other proposal and you've picked up on that further establishes your professional in my opinion.

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Would love to see you all hop onto the upcoming DAOnhall to discuss all of this with @clayboyn and PJ. Appreciate you all putting your hats in the ring for this project

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Although I believe the entire endeavor to be wasted funds, I see value in Peakmonsters developing it. Made Splinterlands playable back in the day. You have my trust. Aligning with my beliefs, my Hive and SPL assets are pretty much zero.

The project wasn't a priority when times were good, and I don't think when financial viability is in question is the time to focus on it. SPS won't have value if the game itself folds.

With your expertise - how much would stuff need to change if SPL goes to another chain?

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With your expertise - how much would stuff need to change if SPL goes to another chain?

This is really difficult to answer. Probably someone that is (or was) part of their team is in a better position to do it.
My guess is that it will take quite some work and will be costly. Probably easier to go "multi-chain" and support both Hive and others rather than drop Hive completely.

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Im wondering that to about the different chain thing incase we need to eventually. We should deff have a plan incase its something we cant avoid doing and since the proposal is not passed yet and if we need the funds we should not be wasting any time trying to look at all options until one presents it self as the solution. Even if that is moving off chain to a say EVM chain which i think if possible and we had the funding grant or something to do so would be a good tactical move if we are unable to get support here. There are grants being handed out on other ecosystems and all that to get games and dapps just like this in the door there and they all have deep deep pockets from there backers. Hive does not have those deep deep pockets even though the money might seem like a lot its a small fish compared to some of the others and is declining. We just halved in price as well so not sure what are market cap is but that is not a good sign maybe that is also why they are not wanting to fund bc of the low hive price.

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(Edited)

Proven track record in SL ecosystem with well-known and (edit:) connected people, able to deliver. I like this much. better.

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Thank you for your witness vote!
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Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below

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Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below

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Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below

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Thank you for your witness vote!
Have a !BEER on me!
To Opt-Out of my witness beer program just comment STOP below

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While I am a huge fan of the Peakmonsters team and what they have done and continue to do for the ecosystem, I think it would be a big mistake for the DAO to move the development of the SPS validator system at this point in the process for the following reasons:

  1. The current developers at JPTR corp have been working on the validators for many months now (which has been paid for by Splinterlands) and they are actually quite close to the initial release. The current expectation is that it should be ready to release in the next few months. We did not want to commit to that in the proposal agreement because there's always the possibility that unexpected things come up and we wanted to make sure the date put out was one that could be 100% hit, no matter what, but the reality of the situation is that it should be ready much sooner. Moving the project to a completely new team at this point would delay things unnecessarily.

  2. The SPS validator software is very similar to the software being used currently in production to operate the Genesis League Goals game and the developers working on the SPS validators at JPTR corp were also part of the team that built and released that game in the past. So they also have experience launching and running this software in a production environment and that is important to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to transfer the project to another development team that is new to the software.

  3. One of the biggest and most difficult parts of this project is updating the Splinterlands game to work with the new validator system. The developers currently working on the validators worked for Splinterlands on the game before switching over to the validator project and they are doing the work to update Splinterlands to work with the validators as part of this project. Peakmonsters or any outside developer would not be able to do this and Splinterlands can't afford to take on that part of the project, so if another developer were to be hired to do the initial release of validators, the DAO would need to separately fund a Splinterlands developer to work on that part. So even though Peakmonsters seems to be offering a cheaper alternative, it does not include all of the work that needs to be done.

My highest priority (and I believe it should be the highest priority of all SPS stakeholders) is that this project finally gets done and I am strongly against anything that would add further delays and uncertainty.

That being said, once the initial release is done and the system is running smoothly, both for the validators and for the Splinterlands game's integration with them, then I think it would be extremely beneficial to have as many independent developers working on the project as possible. At that point the code will be open source so anyone will be able to contribute, although there should be a DAO-appointed group that leads and organizes it, which can certainly be Peakmonsters.

So my suggestion is to support the proposal for JPTR corp to finish the initial version of SPS chain, get it launched, and make sure Splinterlands is integrated with it properly, and then re-evaluate and see if it makes sense to have another group take over for ongoing maintenance and additional feature development.

Finally, I wanted to address the following comment:

ℹ️ NOTE: We decided to include this section in our proposal as it's honestly quite surprisingly that there is no mention of something like this in the other proposal. The Splinterlands community deserves an audit by the main game developers before going live with a software developed by a 3rd party (both PeakMonsters or JPTR Corp) that can potentially destroy the ecosystem.

Numerous Splinterlands developers have been working very closely with the developers working on the validator software to review and double check everything that is being done throughout the project and will continue to do so going forward (which is also baked into the cost for development in the original proposal).

I welcome these types of questions and will update the other proposal to be more clear on these items, but I resent the implication that we were planning to hire some unknown developers and just throw their code out into production without review. Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the elected validators - not the Splinterlands company - to choose what code they run and ensure it's audited to their standards. As a reminder, the code will be open source and therefore publicly available for anyone to review and audit before choosing to run it.

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I like to hear @jarvie and @asgarth 's opinion on Matt's comment

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WHY WE THREW OUR HAT IN THE RING
We had wanted to work on the project back when the other proposal was made many many months ago but told it wasn't worth it because it was nearing the finish line anyway. So we decided on different things for peakd/ peak.open team to work on.

Then we saw what we thought was almost an invitation in Matt's proposal (based on what he wrote) and so we sparked our interest again. (Considering our hive wallet proposal isn't presently funded) We knew we could employ our whole staff and hire full time some of our part time people and save the DAO 140k+

Our proposal focuses on an audit to assess where the software is at and get a list of all the expectations first for free ... then start if we are 100% certain.

IF MATT ISN'T INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH ANYONE ELSE
However not if Splinterlands team really only wants to pay their CTO to do it if there isn't interest by them in anyone else then what's really the point. We don't have interest in working on it if Matt isn't interested.

BUT... i'm personally so so curious what happens if both proposals pass and maybe it brings out great conversation and my personal hope for the DAO is they lower their cost.

WHAT WE'D ACTUALLY LIKE TO DO
While i have no concerns that we could do the splinterlands proposal project and save DAO money I think @peak.open has been making awesome stuff for hive these last couple years. Completing (and upkeeping) tons of projects.

Our team Would love for our Hive proposal to decentralize our dependence on a one wallet system and work on the metamask and peak vault wallets (which are already functional) and the sdk that makes it easy for all hive sites to integrate all wallets (keychain, peak vaul, metamask) into their site with a click of a button. Also maybe that proposal saves Hive some money as competition may cause more competitive requests in other Hive proposal since we would have most of the wallet features done in the first year of the proposal since the wallets themselves are already functional. And we wouldn't keep having huge proposals year after year but would keep upgrading and maintaining and keep creating new cool tools.

So yeah would love some support from matt or you and others on that one.

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I had no idea about your 'new' hive proposal. I thought you guys have multiple funded proposals....

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nope our focus for the year was a couple small projects, upkeep and then focus one year on wallet stuff (then move on... not milk it forever) because we could do most of our work easily in one year (specially considering the foundation is already done and it's already two working wallets that can process hive transactions for UIs)
So either that one gets funded or we propose something else for Hive community i guess.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts 🙏

I understand most of your concerns and I agree on many of the points you mentioned. Hiring the people who already worked on the software is the obvious choice.
We decided to step in and offer an alternative mostly because the other proposal has a very high cost and a flat payment structure without any incentives to deliver the software earlier than expected.

Actually after re-reading your comment I'm not even sure why you added the following paragraph to your original proposal in the first place.

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Based on what you wrote in the above comment it looks pretty obvious that there are no other viable options for the DAO than hiring JPTR corp to complete the software.

That said I don't want to work on this sort of project without the full support of the Splinterlands team, so personally I have no interest in moving forward with this proposal based on what you shared above.
My hope is that the community will understand and support your point of view and the validator software will work great and be delivered on time.

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This whole issue is just frustrating to think about. If the current developers are supposedly "quite close" to finishing the initial release, then why would the cost to have them develop it be so much more money than to have PeakMonsters do it? 🧐

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lol because Matty boy is trying to "hook up his buddy" with a job. Vs looking out for what is best for the community. When he wants to hire his buddy “they need time an resources” now when someone better comes along it is “they’re so close to finishing”

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Lmao so true, thats Just Money grab fron the dao from splinterlands

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I trust peakmonsters. Their platform has been amazing, reliable, and transparent. All things Splinterlands has not been. the very fact that Matt opposes this only strengths my belief that peakmonsters is the absolute right choice. Upvote this proposal.

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(Edited)

For more resilient profitability overtime you should also build out a new decentralized sps infrastructure on ICP

Regarding the cost

seamless fully on chain automated dao intergration

fully on chain decentralized swap mechanics

" If this happens the impact on the validator node system is unknown" The validator node system, deployment originally scheduled for Q4 of 2022 is not even live. No validator node system no impact. Pending your two week validator code autopsy and if you approve an official document, could your new version of the decentralized SPS layer two chain software have portability with the fully on chain decentralized ICP layer one built in? Effectively making Splinterlands game a DAPP available within the ICP ecosystem as well as the Hive ecosystem?

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