Engineering Workstream Renewal, February - May 2023

Abstract / Overview

The ShapeShift DAO relies on the Engineering Workstream to maintain the open source code base, undertake core engineering work to enable new features, support integrations from the broader community, and to provide architectural oversight and technical leadership as we continue to execute the DAO's vision.

This proposal is to fund the Engineering Workstream's budget from February 1st, 2023 through May 31st, 2023 inclusive.

This proposal adopts SCP-92 Definition of Workstream Leader https://snapshot.org/#/shapeshiftdao.eth/proposal/0x3529a9ab550387d1eedf34d0ba26b5c80ed1c04a74a3c407d9b06a6ea90325ab

Motivation

Previous proposal

The Engineering workstream came in under budget of the previously approved proposal

• Total labor, infrastructure, and overhead spend of ~$397,810 USDC against an approved $496,540 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W5l60lyEMio-bXMo0cscEHQOT6azcGfmc8lqGvFCBSM

• Approximately 400,000 FOX spent on bounties against an approved dollar amount of $100,000.

Float of $27k USDC stables still in colony, and cumulative ~400,000 FOX in Colony/operations wallets.

Completed

• Multi account support

• Account caching and failure tolerance and major performance improvements

• THORChain swaps integration

• Integration of Idle finance

• Sunset of beta.shapeshift.com and legacy mobile app

• Sunset of fox.shapeshift.com with LPing and farming functionality now native in the app

• Swapper v2 with 0% THORChain failures

• Launch of new mobile app with assistance from Fox Foundation

• Revamp of fiat ramp UX with new dedicated page

• ETH/FOX Farming V5

• Implementation of best rates for swap routing

• DeFi/liquidity providing abstraction

• EVM abstractions upstreamed into Blockbook

• Eligible opportunity UI

• Migration of infrastructure from Fox Foundation to DAO

• Self hosted Cosmos and Avalanche nodes, removing reliance on Datahub and improving stability

• Additional Turkish and Ukrainian language support

In Progress

• Support of Osmosis bounty & integration

• Wherever notifications (EPNS integration)

• Optimism integration (eligible for ~$250k possible grant funding)

In QA

• WalletConnect to dapps

Team

• 0xdef1cafe - Workstream Leader & Senior Engineer

• 0xApotheosis - Senior Engineer

• gomes - Senior Engineer

• kaladinlight - Senior Engineer

Mandate

This proposal seeks to have the Engineering Workstream be the sole maintainers with discretion over CODEOWNERS, permissions and administrative rights of the ShapeShift GitHub repository. The billing account shall be controlled by the Fox Foundation.

This is to ensure the DAO maintains a high standard of code quality, velocity, reduced regressions, and has a single core team acting as maintainers responsible for the codebase.

The Engineering Workstream will work with external contributors to ensure contributions can be made expeditiously while not compromising quality, patterns or stability.

Budget spreadsheet

The details below expand upon the budget spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vOpFwELxFk2vKBGa9GxiQEo3gDGDReJkZVKk3KvMSwE

Recurring costs

Labor

• Any contributor reserves the right to take any portion of salary in FOX and locked varieties thereof.

• The budget includes provision for two new open positions at a rate of up to $210,000 each, denominated in USDC.

Infrastructure

The Engineering Workstream pays a managed-services provider, TaxiStake, for infrastructure that powers the entire backend of the open source platform and mobile app.

Infrastructure costs exceeded our forecasts in the previous budget cycle, due to multiple factors.

• A migration of the development cluster from the Fox Foundation to under the DAO's control, via TaxiStake. The development cluster is necessary for addition of new nodes/chains, local and hosted development environments, upgrades, rolling out breaking changes with blue/green deployments etc. This is another progressive decentralization step, where the costs of the development cluster were hidden and previously absorbed by the Fox Foundation.

• Addition of archival nodes to the infrastructure. Within this budget cycle, this will allow us to remove reliance on Etherscan for internal transaction data required for balance and transaction history, and Infura for archival node data.

• Node snapshots of synced or syncing nodes - cloud storage costs are expensive.

• Additional EVM chains, namely Optimism - EVM nodes are expensive by virtue of storage and data.

The following factors are expected to increase the infrastructure costs slightly during the next budget cycle:

• the addition of more EVM chains, namely Binance Smart Chain and Polygon, requiring archival node syncs, and multiple snapshots, and data ingress.

The following factors are expected to decrease the infrastructure costs slightly during the next budget cycle:

• Negotiated lower margin with TaxiStake. Previously a 50% markup was applied to the underlying infrastructure costs, this has been reduced to 30%.

• Removal of EVM full nodes (Ethereum/Avalanche/Optimism), once archival nodes are fully synced.

• Removal of outdated snapshot data for currently syncing nodes.

• Migration of API layer from eu-west-1 to us-east-1, reducing application layer costs by 50%, though this may not be worth the labor cost to enact.

TaxiStake is currently forecasting a bottom line cost of $22,100 for February.

The numerous factors above make an accurate forecast difficult. Overall, we are expecting a slight net increase in costs, and are requesting $120,000 USDC for expected infrastructure costs, based on an expected maximum $30,000 for four months. Failure to cover these costs will lead to a 100% production outage.

Non-recurring costs

Bounty Program

As discussed and largely agreed within the community, the bounty program in its previous form had significant flaws. We are requesting $8,000/month worth of FOX, ~200,000 FOX at current prices, to provision for further experiments with tightly controlled scopes of work that are timely and aligned with the shared roadmap where possible.

Miscellaneous

The budget also contains a line item for $5,000 USDC of discretionary funds which may be used for travel, conferences, retreats etc, at engineering's discretion.

The line item above is provisional, and any unspent funds will be returned to the DAO.

This budget seeks approval for the commitment of $5,000 USDC and $32,000 worth of FOX for non-recurring costs.

Contingency

Unforeseen costs will arise, and 10% of the USDC subtotal is requested accordingly.

The budget seeks approval for $52,800 for contingency to be spent judiciously at the workstream’s discretion, shall it be required.

Variance

Unused funds from any budget category will be returned to the DAO at the end of the budget cycle.

In the event that the Engineering Workstream requires more funds, a separate governance proposal shall be raised.

Deliverables

Goals

The Engineering Workstream continues on in spirit from the previously approved proposal(s).

The workstream exists to execute on the shared DAO Roadmap Proposal SCP-121: Roadmap Proposal Jan - Mar 31, 2023 https://snapshot.org/#/shapeshiftdao.eth/proposal/0x5f7f4b731874f6b1d32405c0842223687c32625fb99064ab0a5bbc552563bed1

The DAO recognizes that the crypto ecosystem is rapidly evolving and liable to change quickly. The Engineering Workstream reserves the right to add, remove, or reprioritize goals from this list, with the intent to deliver the most valuable and relevant items expediently to the market.

The product roadmap, externally posted bounties, emerging partnerships, and changes in resourcing are all factors liable to change the scope or prioritization of listed goals, however, broadly speaking, we intend to complete the strategic goals that are currently defined.

Reporting

The Engineering Workstream will report progress against these goals via the following methods

• availability via Discord, covering most time zones

• weekly product/engineering public meetings

• weekly governance calls

• on demand for any specific deliverable

Should the community request other reasonable forms of reporting they will be considered on their merits.

Benefits

Fundamentally, the DAO delivers a product to increase ease of use of the multi-chain multi-wallet multi-protocol universe that we find ourselves in. It is the Engineering effort that builds our product. We need Engineering in order to thrive. The goals listed above will be delivered.

Drawbacks

Engineering labor is the most expensive component of the DAO's budget. Any aspect that does not seem appropriate to serve the greater needs of the DAO should be criticized.

Vote

FOR: Fund the Engineering Workstream from February 1 2023 to May 31st 2023 for $580,800 USDC and $32,000 worth of FOX, with 0xdef1cafe as the Workstream Leader.

AGAINST: Do not fund the Engineering Workstream beyond January 31st 2023.