Despite the long lead time with complete lack of community updates, and what appear to be multi-month gaps in repo commits relevant to the pokt bridge, I have been holding out hope that this project could be brought home in a timely fashion. However, the single biggest thing that continues to stand out to me is a lack of consistency, even in things as simple as describing what will be required to implement the bridge.
Is this going to be a consensus breaking change or not?
Having spent twenty years in leading software engineering teams (and as a developer myself), I very much understand that unforeseen difficulties can arise, especially when the complete scope of the project is not well understood by the development team, which seems to have been the case here. Inadequate initial architecture aside, the response of the development team at that moment of discovery is often the make or break factor which helps determine the project’s success.
In this case, it appears that upon discovering that difficulty, the Ferrum team perhaps made an initial effort at notifying the Pocket core team, which was understaffed at the time, and then…did nothing? For months?
In previous communication here, the Ferrum team advised that they had been in “constant communication” with the Pocket team through out all this time, and that failing to update the DAO which is funding this project was “simply an oversight”.
There was no oversight in proposing to the DAO.
There was no oversight in accepting the initial 50% payment from the DAO.
There’s simply been a year of intermittent activity on a series of repos which suddenly ramped up in the last two months as it became clear the community was reaching a breaking point around this project. Hell, even the stubbed out demo should have been ready on the first call last week, and appears to me to have been rapidly developed in the last week or so.
Which brings us back around to where things stand now, on what appears to ACTUALLY require a consensus breaking change, contrary to what Nick advised literally last week.
To my knowledge, Pocket has exactly ONE full time engineer focused on supporting the v0 track, as all resources are focused on the v1 deliverables. All v0 deliverables require pulling engineering resources from v1 to implement, which potentially delays the launch of v1, a critical step forward in meeting the promise of truly decentralized architecture. Implementing a consensus breaking change will require more than simply merging “side car modules” as was intimated by the Ferrum team in their first call with the community.
The inconsistent messaging, additional labor requirements, additional timeline, and questionable underlying architecture (as outlined in @blockjoe and others’ comments) are all adding up to be a non-starter for me. While I’ve been excited about the potential of wpokt (for all of the reasons outlined in my RFP-11: A Bridge To The Future post), the risk to reward ratio of continuing down the current path has flipped in favor of waiting to see what sort of native on-chain mechanisms (such as an IBC integration) can be implemented in v1.
I am casting a vote of no-confidence in this project as it stands.