Dap.ps Future Work Appeal

[cryptowanderer]

Hello happy people. With v1 out the door, I am hoping that there might be a little bit more time to focus on building out SNT use cases, in line with the whitepaper.

Some History

Dap.ps was built entirely by bounties (but designed by the one and only Maciej). No-one from the core team was involved, and only Jakub has been (forced into) helping out since the v1 launch. This is because halfway through the initial work, the budget was cut by some folks who weren’t involved and had no insight into the work that was happening, and so the code is not exactly the best ever written.

That said, we have a history of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good at Status, and I think it’s very telling that the only SNT use case in production was built by external contributors with a budget of around $50k.

Moreover, the above is only about the UI: I designed and wrote the contract myself. Any UI can be built on top of it, with any set of rules. The contract seems to be working well, has over 160 000 SNT currently locked in it and - afaict - is the only dumb immutable software object out there capable of running an entirely open, permissionless, and game-theoretically stable ranking game. I tit-for-tatted with Axelrod and Hamilton et. al. for many months; searched far and wide through curve space before building it; have made sure that there are no owners, fees or middlemen, and only one function with special permission (adjusting the ceiling, which was not possible to model fully given possible SNT volatility). Conceptually, I remain convinced that this is the optimal way to curate digital information in such a way as to benefit communities, rather than monopolistic companies promising not to be evil. Here is a longer video explanation.

Work To Be Done

Given the back-and-forth with budgets on the last go-around, it is really exciting to see Assemble become an actual thing. If you read that link, you will see I have applied for some guaranteed funding for the next stages of work I’d like to do on Dap.ps. Basically, this includes:

1. Adding a KyberProxy contract so people can pay to play with ETH, DAI (and potentially other tokens too). While the contract still handles everything in SNT, this widens our possible user base, makes the UX considerably better, all while still increasing the use of SNT. All that is needed for work to start here is a design from @maciej
2. Removing the current MongoDB, rewriting a lot of the backend, and substituting in The Graph and Subspace. Will improve load times, make for better UX, and move us much further along the road to real decentralization.
3. Dap.ps is getting a bit of a branding makeover from some people in the marketing swarm, so there will inevitably be a few UI touch ups here and there to be done (mostly through bounties though).
4. Begin encouraging people to use Status chats directly from the site. Initially this was going to happen through whisper-embeddable chats (something @iurimatias and @rramos were working on), but not exactly sure yet how that will look with the move to waku. You can see the concept I am after here.
5. With the inclusion of chats, we can begin looking at expanding the categories on the site to include “Most Used”, “Most Useful”, “Currently Active” etc. by looking into topics that are active on the network at that time. It’s all about leveraging conversational spaces to feedback into useful information for real people.

I Need Feedback!

1. How do I garner support for actual funding on Assemble? cc @hester @ceri. What is the source of funds, if any? Should I be looking for funds from people outside Status?
2. Are there any actual engineers who would be keen to work on this with me formally? It’s been really shitty having to go hat in hand to anyone willing to reply to get designs and development done, whenever they have a free moment. If even just one CC was willing to dedicate themselves to Dap.ps for two months, then securing funding would not be as important a thing.

[hester]

Slight reframing here in encouragement of dap.ps . To your point @cryptowanderer, dap.ps is way more than a dapp in that it’s a uniquely well-functioning mechanism for immutable, transparent curation as well as succesful SNT utility case.

What I want to stress is that dap.ps also plays a crucial role in adoption of Status overall and, from a user experience perspective, is far from a stand alone product. Status relies on dap.ps the way a train operator relies on train stations and tracks to get people on-board and off-board (still working out that metaphor ). The reason dap.ps was mostly developed without CC support is because we did not want to risk having to remove it on app/play store submission.

• When we checked in with the community back in 2018. In South-Korea a cryptowallet ranked higher, in United States Chat ranked higher. A dapp browser was consistently ranked 2nd in order of importance.
• Developers and the Ethereum community are our agents towards adoption. They help us refine Status and act as actors to reach wider adoption. Dap.ps is a key feature especially for this community
• If we ever want to move to a window-based navigation where people have full control over the applications they use and reach an ultimate interoperability, dap.ps will play an even stronger role

Hope this can sway CC’s to get involved. Although I’m well aware workload is high as it is.

As for funding:

• I believe @ceri reached out to you. Sorry it’s taking so long. Assemble still needs a governance mechanism. Probably good to know for CC’s is that you can work on Assemble projects and get funded next to your salary. Consider it a side gig!
• Looking for additional funding can’t hurt regardless. For CC’s it’s good to know that Assemble is more like a Kickstarter, it’s not a Status grants program. Meaning y’all can fund too

Correction for the digital history books:

Dap.ps was built entirely by bounties. No-one from the core team was involved

@maciej delivered the awesome designs for this!

[cryptowanderer]

Apologies for the design miss-phrasing. I really don’t know what I would have done without @maciej who is literally amazing. Please don’t think my outlining the history was me trying to be contentious or otherwise; I just think it’s good to document as we all go about learning how to work in this new world. For fullness’ sake, my own project management and communication left much to be desired - this was not a one-sided failure.

I like the train station metaphor! I think the tracks are other things, but dap.ps is certainly one stop where people can gather before heading off in another direction of their own choosing.

Key Points

1. Come work with me, get your salary, plus whatever I can get to you through Liquid Funding! Huge bonus (the Liquid Funding part. Working with me, not so much ) Tbh, most of whatever funds we get should probably go towards building a bar for @jakubgs given how many drinks I already owe him.
2. Dap.ps is literally the most fun, impactful side hustle to be had in crypto right now. Just do it ™.

[jarradhope]

Hey @cryptowanderer! @carl and I are super excited to see DAp.ps on Assemble and we’ve been meaning to fund it and other Assemble projects this week, things keep coming up.

Rest assured we will fund it as soon as we can! Thanks for hanging tight

[cryptowanderer]

Awesome sauce. As always, big love for everyone, literally

One more thing to add to the list here is

5. Channel promotion. We deploy a new contract to handle ranking channels in Status rather than just DApps. This will allow anyone to promote their channel: i.e. stake SNT on your favourite channel and get it ranked highly so people know it exists and can use it. It’ll also help with cool channel discovery for Status users.