GIP-70: Should GnosisDAO pass a Grant Proposal to partner with Gateway.fm?

[Mandrigin]

GIP-70: Should GnosisDAO pass a Grant Proposal to partner with Gateway.fm

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GIP: 70
title: Should GnosisDAO pass a Grant Proposal to partner with Gateway.fm?
author: Igor Mandrigin
status: Draft
type: Funding
created: 2022-10-18

Gateway.fm is a distributed blockchain infrastructure company. Our mission is to provide enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure at scale, distributed around the world, in a portable way. We focus on all things infra, sre and devops: robust and high-performance RPCs, validators at scale, testnets and devnets including all the tooling needs for chains (block explorers, faucets, metrics, etc). Our contributions to the community ranges from writing best practices for ethereum validators, to operations, management and monitoring. We have been participating in testing the merge on Ethereum, running Ethereum testnet validators. We are making significant contributions to ethereum nodes themselves (Erigon).

Our position and experience allows us to merge the best practices from traditional large-scale projects and web3 protocol knowledge, and we are happy to share the knowledge.
We also put a lot of effort into federating the infrastructure layer both from a physical position to a regulatory position to be as secure as possible.

We built our systems in a very portable way. No cloud provider vendor lock, minimal SaaS dependency: we can run our stack just on bare metal with a linux installation on it. We already support 6 independent locations across the globe with more incoming, we are in the process of continuing expansion to allocate new locations.

Having robust infrastructure with high uptime and best DevSecOps practices is very important for the projects building on Gnosis Chain, as well as for building the chain and growing the builder community itself, projects big and small.

Gateway.fm team should be supported with a significant grant of 1mil DAI upfront, 2mil DAI and 20k GNO vested over 3 years allowing us to focus on the Gnosis Chain. The vested GNO should be used for staking on the Gnosis Beacon Chain and should only be able to be sold three years after the agreement is in place. Gateway.fm’s contributions will include but are not limited to the following milestones. Apart from that, Gateway.fm team will be happy to support Gnosis Chain in achieving any future goals that are within the team’s competence and we will be closely embedded with the Gnosis teams to secure a successful path forward on the direction of new development of the Gnosis Chain

Milestone	Deliverables	Completion Date
Public RPC for Chiado Testnet	Public RPC endpoint with no registration required	Already available (Zurich)
Public RPC for Gnosis Chain Mainnet	Public RPC endpoint with no registration	Already available (Singapore)
Block Explorers for Chiado	Blockscout and Beaconcha.in	Q4 22
Chiado Testnet Validators	⅓ of Chiado validators	Already available
Archival Nodes for Gnosis Chain	High-performance RPC with archival access for Gnosis Chain Mainnet	Q4 ‘22
Best Practices	Sharing best practices for running validators, RPC and further decentralization	ongoing
Participation in core development	Coordinating/testing the merge, hardforks, upgrades, L2	ongoing
Contributions to nodes	Testing, bug reports, patches	ongoing
Dedicated team for Gnosis Chain		ongoing
RPC and infrastructure for L2 on GC	Support L2 solutions on gnosis chain, both optimistic and zero knowledge. Support includes any infrastructure/devops related tasks, including bu not limited to RPC, Validators, extra tooling	Q1 ‘23

[refri]

Thanks for putting this up. Cause its a bunch of money you are asking for I tried to do some research. Might be well invested money, but I am a little disappointed not to find some more information available (e.g. about your engagement with chiado, address of your rpc for gc…). Didn’t I looked at the right places or were these collabs done behind the scene (or maybe in conjunction with gnosis ltd?).

[Mandrigin]

Absolutely, we do participate a lot with the core development of GC with the consensus switch to beacon chain.

You can take a look at any recordings of the core dev calls (I think they are open).

We did participate in Denver and Chiado from the start, including the recent network relaunch. We run about 1/3 of AuRa and 1/3 of beacon chain validators on chiado (other 2/3rds are by Nethermind team and Gnosis devops itself). You can look at ethstats.chiadochain.net

Happy to elaborate more.

[refri]

Great, will love to have a look if

@Mandrigin

recordings of the core dev calls

are available, maybe someone here can provide me with a link.
ethstats.chiadochain.net isn’t loading right now, but I will try again later.

[Mandrigin]

I think you have to type “https://” manually, the redirect isn’t setup yet and on the plain http port 80 there is nothing.

Try that: https://ethstats.chiadochain.net/

[1proof]

Based on the Ethstats page:
https://ethstats.chiadochain.net/

Only one device showing is provided by other than Nethermind; none from Gnosis or anyone else show at all.

How many units in total do you claim you are running? How do you identify them?

[Mandrigin]

These (pinned them on my machine).

Some are validators some are for RPC. Keep in mind that “Nethermind” is the name of the execution layer, so we use it in naming as well.

If the community wants I can rename them with the company prefix, but we never needed that so far.

[1proof]

You should use your actual email address for devices you operate, and not use the ‘hello@nethermind.io’ email address that is used for devices operated by other teams.

[Mandrigin]

Good point, I will add that later today, when I am home.

[Mandrigin]

Done

[jbradach]

This is quite a large request. I can’t find much information about your company. I assume based on the creation dates of your Twitter handle and domain registration that this is a relatively new project.

Can you share some of your major partners and where your project is in development? I see that joining the waitlist is the only available option right now.

[StefanGeorge]

Gateway, lead by Igor Mandrigin, has been doing great work over the last two months in testing and providing infrastructure required for the merge on Gnosis Chain. Based on the experience we had, we trust their expertise in reliably running core infrastructure for Gnosis Chain, its testnets and layer 2s. In our view it makes sense to double down on Gateway as a strategic partner for Gnosis Chain operations and create a long term alignment between Gateway and Gnosis Chain. This is a big investment by GnosisDAO but a reliable network is very important to attract top tier applications to the network. Gateway will be able to significantly increase reliability and also development speed of the network itself by accelerating testing of all important components.

[Sisyphos]

Hi! Thanks for the post, and for all the effort progressing testing and developing the GC and Chiado testnet! It helps knowing there is track record.
Previous posts signal that Gateway and its leadership are trusted actors and has full support.

In order to have a better understanding of the proposal:

• since a few proposed milestones are already in place, others ongoing and a few to be implemented, does it mean part of the requested funding is retroactive, part for one-time development, and funding for ongoing cost?
• The table with deliverables is great, but for the untrained eye like mine it may help to also see a column that says something about the impact of each contribution. That may also help linking the funding to the benefits that the ecosystem will capture.
• Given this is a global distributed company, it would also help having details like how big the team is or the infra is, so that we can somehow link funds to costs.

Thanks again for the help and the post!

[refri]

Thanks for eleborating about this, it convince me about the value it will have.

But also I am interested to learn more how these things evolved. Regarding the service gateway.fm already provided: was it payed by gnosis ltd? Or was it a voluntary collab with possible later payment by gnosis DAO? If the latter is the case I would have expected some announcement here before, if the former is right some details about the agreement would be nice.

[StefanGeorge]

This was an agreement between Gnosis LTD and Gateway without the intention of reimbursement by GnosisDAO. We saw the immediate need for more resources to accomplish the merge on Gnosis Chain. At the time, we were still aiming to apply the Merge before Ethereum. The deal was a fixed sum for support by Gateway for everything related to the infrastructure required for the Merge until the Merge happens. Gateway took the risk that this might take longer than expected. Now it is clear it will take significantly longer than anticipated and nonetheless the support from the team has always been very substantial. That’s why we want to make the relationship stronger and double down.

[refri]

Thanks for the info, makes totally sense and I will support it.

Regarding the future I would appreciate some more communication of gnosis ltd to the community regarding actions that might have impact on topics gnosis DAO is involved, would feel better not to be thus uninformed.

Imo everyone here would have agreed to the need of additional resources if it’s necessary for the success of the merge, and even more if gnosis ltd is willing to take part of the costs.

[StefanGeorge]

Yes, I agree with you. We saw the need for immediate action at the time and did not take the time to inform the community as we should have. In the future I see Gnosis LTD becoming less and less important for the future of Gnosis Chain. Similar to the role of the Ethereum Foundation for Ethereum. But for the time being, we will communicate actions we take from Gnosis LTD to support GnosisDAO/Chain as transparently as possible.

[Mandrigin]

Snapshot vote result here: Snapshot