First and foremost, I would like to thank all for taking the time to engage with this proposal and offer your insights, comments, and criticisms. We appreciate the diverse perspectives you are bringing to the table.
About Poktscan:
I’m sure that all have used the poktscan.com portal and know through the grapevine that at Poktscan we run nodes. What you probably don’t know is that for now, Poktscan is sort-of a pseudo social enterprise that combines the principles of a traditional for-profit company with the mission-driven focus of a non-profit organization. This is why, for example, poktscan.com is free for the community.
We have a team of ten talented engineers working on a number of products that will help the Pocket ecosystem grow and scale. More on that in the coming months. You probably know some of our most vociferous members - Jorge leading engineering and Ramiro leading data science and AI. The rest of the team is not very visible and like it that way. We have have Alan and Alexis working on pixel perfect UI’s (v2), Jeff and Seba on our backend and a ton of other stuff, Julio on our orchestration product, Vini on infra, Nico on data science and AI, Pablo on pure math, and last but not least Fede on design and keeping honest our engineers.
Genesis of Geo-Mesh:
The need to build Geo-Mesh does not come from a community or a PNI requirement but from a network anomaly identified through our data and algorithms monitoring network fairness and behavior.
The red flag for us was that a small number of nodes were being assigned relays beyond the limits established by our network models. Till then, you could not have the same nodes at multiple locations hence traffic per node per session was limited by response times. This was an important competitive advantage that only a few had. This anomaly led us down the path of discovery, and later building the product we launched last year. You can read more about this in our initial post (POKTscan’s Geo-Mesh).
Network fairness and equal playing field are at the core of our mission, so rather than reap the benefits of the technology for personal gain we decided to share with the Pocket community.
Estimates and Funding:
We decided to put forward this proposal at the request of several members of the community. Initially, I was particularly hesitant due to reasons not germain to this proposal, but was convinced otherwise due to its value.
Our proposal estimates are based on two components: 1) Cost to build, plus 2) Cost of opportunity. The cost to build is what they are and can be seen below. The cost of opportunity or benefit to the community was trickier given that there is no model to follow.
We looked at the following impact criteria: traction, benefit, and ecosystem-wide significance. We decided to use 25% of the total development cost vs ecosystem impact given the fact that it’s something unmeasurable at this time. We all concur that given the fact that Geo-Mesh provided an opportunity to compete for relays to small and large node-runners was worth at least 25% of development costs. Please note that we are requesting $325K and not $324,862.50. This will be adjusted in a final proposal to reflect the exact amount.
The path forward:
We believe that the funding request is fair, evaluated professionally and methodically.
Consensus and voting can be complex processes, especially in larger groups. While it provides a mechanism for making decisions that is transparent and democratic, it can also discourage participation and lead to frustration among members. In our particular case we welcome the engagement, however others may shy away from “town square” debate. Process guardrails may be necessary to encourage participation.