Application for Sub-Consensus Mechanism

[lawmeskiviahs]

Sub-Consensus Mechanism

This application is to engineer a novel consensus mechanism for communication between relay and para chains.

Grant level

• Level 1: Up to $10,000, 2 approvals
• Level 2: Up to $30,000, 3 approvals
• Level 3: Unlimited, 5 approvals (for >$100k: Web3 Foundation Council approval)

Application Checklist

• The application template has been copied and aptly renamed (project_name.md).
• I have read the application guidelines.
• Payment details have been provided (bank details via email or Polkadot (USDC & USDT) or BTC address in the application).
• The software delivered for this grant will be released under an open-source license specified in the application.
• The initial PR contains only one commit (squash and force-push if needed).
• The grant will only be announced once the first milestone has been accepted (see the announcement guidelines).
• I prefer the discussion of this application to take place in a private Element/Matrix channel. My username is: @_______:matrix.org (change the homeserver if you use a different one)

[dsm-w3f]

@lawmeskiviahs thank you for the grant application. There are some initial comments on it:

• The link for the RFP mentioned is broken, please use this one.
• Project details are missing. You say in the application that the proposed solution is " introducing a mechanism that allows parachain collators to achieve consensus among themselves on the "best" block faster than the existing process.". Could you explain how do you plan to develop this?
• The overview doesn’t tell why your team is interested in creating this project.
• What are your future plans for this project?
• Milestones 1 and 2 need the Table with the Deliverables.
• It look like this is more a research grant proposal than a development one. If you don't know how to develop Milestone 2, I suggest you to remove it from the proposal. You can also try to use our research template if the grant is more for research than development.
• Your team has already developed some grants. You can put this and other information in Additional Information.

[github-actions]

Thank you for submitting a grant application.

We've assessed your submission and have found that it requires a higher level of technical detail in order to be considered for review. We encourage you to expand on it by providing a more precise specification/technical details. The section on project details in the application template is a good reference as to what type of information we expect applicants to provide, and these category-specific requirements contain more precise guidelines depending on what type of software you're building.

An area of the application that we often find to be insufficiently elaborated are the milestone deliverables. At a minimum, please indicate what languages/technologies you will be using to implement each deliverable, and provide a technical summary of its expected functionality. Note that deliverables should be tangible, reusable by other teams and in most cases not already present in the ecosystem. If they are, you will need to provide a comparison to existing implementations and explain why it makes sense to fund your approach. Also see our FAQ for a breakdown of what we fund and what we don't.

Let us know as soon as you're done with your changes, and we'll give your application another look!

[Noc2]

@lawmeskiviahs, thanks a lot for the application. I agree with @ dsm-w3f that the application needs to have more details, but we are quite interested in someone looking into this. I will try to update the RFP in the coming days: https://github.com/w3f/Grants-Program/blob/master/docs/RFPs/sub-consensus.md An (optimistic) finality method together with slashable collators and 1 second to under 200ms finality would be useful for a lot of applications or simple micro transactions. So let me know if you have any questions.

[lawmeskiviahs]

Hi @dsm-w3f @Noc2 Sorry for the delay. I have updated the application with what we're exploring as solutions. More on the scope of work will be clear after researching more on this.

[dsm-w3f]

@lawmeskiviahs thank you for the improvements in the application. As I understood from your deliverables, this grant proposal is more for initial research about the theme and to outline a solution. In this way, I think it is more appropriate to apply using our research grant template. I noticed that you started to use it, but some parts in the Project Details are missing. How do you plan to check if the proposal works? Do you plan to perform a Proof-of-Concept? What would be the configuration for doing it? This research is interesting to us, however, I would like to see more details on how you plan to conduct it.

Furthermore, could you please outline the experience of the team in designing and developing consensus algorithms or core parts of decentralized systems?

[lawmeskiviahs]

Hi @dsm-w3f sorry for the late reply. I was not well last week so wasn't active. I have updated the application. About the Proof-of_Concept, that will be a follow up grant to this. I had made the POC milestone 2 in this grant earlier but now I think it will be better to do this in two phases. Our experience is already mentioned in the application. Kindly let me know if there is anything else.

[dsm-w3f]

@lawmeskiviahs thank you for the improvements. I think we have more details now and it is almost ready for the review from the committee. I would like to ask one more thing. Please notice in our research template that the results of the steps needed to perform the research are listed as deliverables. In this way, we can check and verify if each step of the methodology was followed and if the results are good. Please add the results of each step of the methodology proposed as deliverables in the milestone table. Feel free to split them into more than one milestone if you want. After that, let me know to check it again and make this application ready for review.

[lawmeskiviahs]

Thankyou @dsm-w3f for your comment. I have added deliverables and I think I have better clarity on how to proceed with the deliverables. I feel that the deliverables will be more clear once we get deeper into the research, I have a basic idea of what we might do but I refrain from writing anything uncertain into the application.

[dsm-w3f]

@lawmeskiviahs thank you for the improvements. I think the deliverables in the milestone table are still unclear. I noticed that you just copied the default description from our template, we expect a more clear description of each result to be able to check it as deliverable. We need this specification in the deliverables table. I'll make the application ready to review, but I personally won't approve it since it is not possible to check the deliverables in the way it is described.

[Noc2]

Thanks a lot for the application and all the effort you put into this. However, the grants committee decided against supporting your project. Part of the reason is, for example, that there are currently no "academic papers regarding finality in parachain ecosystem." There is only one paper on GRANDPA. Independent of it, we wish you all the best for your project, and let us know if you have any questions.