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

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.