Hi @shane, I believe @JackALaing already clarified a number of your questions, and we’re glad to see you’re aligned with the value proposition of gateways, as well as what an undertaking this will be. We also wanted to share our perspectives on a few things.
First, I would like to point out that the Quote you pulled was from a Pre-proposal, the details of which were quite different from the actual proposal, which the DAO actually voted for and approved. For one thing, you will find that the quote you pulled was not included in the passed proposal.
Second, there appears to be some confusion regarding the timelines involved. The development of LeanPokt by the Poktfund team, led by @poktblade, began in February 2022 and was merged into Pocket Core in December 2022. Subsequently in February 2023, we submitted a reimbursement request for the work completed by our team during that period. Currently, we are seeking funding for the upcoming 6 months of work. Therefore, if we consider the start dates of these two asks, there is actually a gap of over a year between them. To be clear, The LP Proposal (and its subsequent passage) was not intended to fund future projects. LeanPOKT was also never intended to be an all-inclusive grant for all the work we perform at Pocket. Generally speaking, we consistently do pro-bono work for Pocket that adds value to the ecosystem, but considering the scope of work required for the gateway, it made sense for us to seek funding.
Furthermore, there have been changes in personnel over time. Some of our team members who worked on LP have transitioned to our staking operation, which is unrelated to our gateway operations. Some, like @poktblade, have remained; while others, including myself, have joined as new team members specifically for Nodies DLB. I recently began my role as a business development representative for our gateway.
Thank you for transcribing from the Community Call. I believe this was misconstrued, so allow me to clarify. @poktblade’s intention was to highlight that in the event Pocket Network is unable to handle specific requests (for instance, if a customer needs websockets, but Pocket is not yet capable of handling those requests), NodiesDLB will still handle the requests to meet the client’s needs. This will allow us to incentivize DApps to use our platform (developer productivity is a common value prop), help provide market data to the protocol team and shape the roadmap, and ultimately pipe this to Pocket once it is supported. If the focus is demand, then we need to be competitive in our product offerings by strengthening our value propositions and providing DApps with what they need instead of turning them away. This in return will indirectly provide traffic to Pocket as well, as clients hardly want to use multiple providers for blockchain development. If you take a look at many other RPC providers, this is a common strategy in order to capture demand.
This is a mischaracterization based on incorrect assumptions. First, we released LP well before Nodies began running nodes, and we never stopped working on LP even as “PNI and the community” were testing the beta. Second, it is true that Nodies’ commercial staking operation began in September 2022 (and some small nodes for ourselves, friends, and family prior), and we were using a software akin to the Geo-Mesh. There were conversations to open source this work as well, but it was in alpha testing during a time when we had a relatively small amount of nodes and limited data to test. Even then, it would suffer from outages fairly often, bringing down some of our nodes with it. It took us a while to get the software to a stable enough state. We prioritized the network’s health and security similar to how LeanPocket was originally closed source as advised by the protocol team. By that point, the PoktScan had already released their Geo-Mesh in October 2022 with a much more reliable and supported codebase, hence we didn’t see the need to release ours. The timeframe between all of this is really quite short and hardly gave us much market advantage. In fact, we already alluded to this in response to a comment you made back during LeanPOKT’s Preproposal -
Lastly, we have since switched over all of our nodes to Geo-mesh in the spirit of keeping consistent with the rest of the network and encouraging open sourceness within the ecosystem. In fact, we are the second and only other contributor to Geomesh. We’ve worked with them to identify bugs, optimizations, code reviews, and have been credited multiple times directly from the main developer @Jorge_POKTscan (PR 1, PR 2, and countless of private conversations on how to architect and code).
I hope this clears some things for you. We are excited to continue contributing towards enhancing and supporting Pocket Network in various aspects!