tl;dr I like everything POKTscan team does but believe the POKT asking amount is too high and proposed other ideas.
Before I chime in, I want to say that I fully support the POKTscan team and everything they do for the community.
- Their team builds and maintains poktscan.com, which I use daily
- I use their service to stake several nodes
- Their team has given me access to their API to help debug various v0 issues
- Their team is helping us collect data in various v0 scaling efforts
With that said, I wanted to build upon what @deblasis and @shane discussed and add my own opinion on a couple of topics:
- Incentives for core protocol devs
- An amendment to this proposal
Incentives for core protocol devs
Even with PEP-49 passed, the asking amount in this proposal is still significantly greater than what any protocol developer at PNI vests over a 4-year cycle.
Until a mature and self-sustaining version of the protocol exists, there is still a need for a core team to manage v0 and build the foundation for v1 to work more effectively, at the cost of not receiving such sizable grants from the DAO.
Seeing such grants being given to community members creates a disincentive for anyone to work on v1 as an internal team member because any core protocol developer can:
- Work on more visible & immediate v0 features/tools
- Work on V1 bounties while maintaining another full-time job
An amendment to this proposal
Regardless of whether GeoMesh is a v1 feature or not, or whether it aligns with the vision, I believe we can agree on the following:
- GeoMesh reduced latency in the network
- The tools the PoktScan team builds and maintains are invaluable to the community
My amendment aims to optimize for the following:
- Maintaining a DAO treasury for future work
- Normalizing the payout
Maintaining a DAO treasury for future work
The DAO’s treasury after PEP49 will be at < 100MM POKT, meaning that this one feature is worth > 5% of everything they can plan to fund (marketing, design, v1 development, other v0 features, etc…) in the near future; I’m not taking newly minted POKT given how much inflation is slowing.
I don’t have a good way to quantify what this number should be, but my gut is leaning towards closer to ~2%.
Normalizing the payout
My guess (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the asking amount was based on “contracted human hours” (i.e. num_hours * $/hour) plus infra costs, which amounted to $325,000. @Jorge_POKTscan If possible, it’d be useful to see the breakdown of where this number came from.
The conversion from USD to POKT was done using a 7-day spot avg close to an ATL, so even if we agree on the fiat amount, it is a large fraction of the existing treasury. Since the exact POKT asking amount was not specified when the project started, I would propose the following:
- Agree on what the USD amount should be (based on a breakdown provided)
- Pay out the amount in monthly installments (total/12) over the next 12 months using a monthly USD/POKT average every month.