Closed anovum closed 1 year ago
Thanks for submitting a grant proposal. Our team will review your submission and get back to you.
Hi @anovum , we discussed at our grants meeting, which was delayed to Thursday last week. Our next meeting is Tuesday.
We agree a tool of this nature is necessary. In order to make this a super tool with superusers, we would love if you could deliver some early version of this that community could test and provide continuous feedback on. Discord is the best place to find and interact.
Could you please send examples of explorers you’ve built for other networks?
We suggest you start by focusing on one user: e.g., trader or miner. What is your instinct here / why? Feel free to hop into discord if you'd like feedback.
Given that you've built previous components of this for other projects, what is already built to date, and what is this grant specifically funding that is building on to that?
Want to confirm this is open source? That is a requirement for foundation grants.
Thanks! Raffi
Hi Raffi
Thanks for the feedback on our grant application. Since you provided this feedback, we have spoken at length with Trevor and through the accelerator have been able to define our product offering a lot more clearly.
Given the conditions and general “spirit’ of the grant, we have decided to make enthusiasts and community members more generally the demographic focus of our platform. Someone who follows blockchain closely (for whatever reason), when assessing the merit of a new technology, will want to make sure that it is credible and has a long-term future. As other similar projects such as Etherscan, BscScan and Blockchair have shown, having a complete, insightful data analytics platform is a key part of that credibility.
To your point about explorers, we have not built any explorers in the strict sense. Instead we have built a successful Uniswap v2 trading companion called Momentum Pairs (https://momentum-pairs.novuminsights.com/) which shows the latest top performing pairs on Uniswap v2 refreshed daily. We are close to launching a product for Uniswap v3, in the shape of a tool that allows you to analyse your current liquidity position across pairs. Crucially, a great deal of the skills accrued while building these tools is transferable to the Stacks piece.
The grant is helping fund a free-to-use tool as described in the brief. At the time of writing this project is at the wireframing phase. We expect the data will cover the following broad categories:
We hope this answers your questions. Happy to have a chat in Discord or over Zoom.
Please feel free to reach out directly to our very knowledgeable developer Albert @.***) directly.
Best Wishes Anja, Toby, Alberto and David
On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 8:45 PM Raffi Sapire @.***> wrote:
Hi @anovum https://github.com/anovum , we discussed at our grants meeting, which was delayed to Thursday last week. Our next meeting is Tuesday.
We agree a tool of this nature is necessary. In order to make this a super tool with superusers, we would love if you could deliver some early version of this that community could test and provide continuous feedback on. Discord is the best place to find and interact.
Could you please send examples of explorers you’ve built for other networks?
We suggest you start by focusing on one user: e.g., trader or miner. What is your instinct here / why? Feel free to hop into discord if you'd like feedback.
Given that you've built previous components of this for other projects, what is already built to date, and what is this grant specifically funding that is building on to that?
Want to confirm this is open source? That is a requirement for foundation grants.
Thanks! Raffi
— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/stacksgov/Stacks-Grants/issues/138#issuecomment-869327782, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AUQIUQQBOR3KNONHBRZFCL3TU7V5JANCNFSM462AAKRQ .
I would also like to add that this is open source
Ok thanks, this is approved. There should be a contract link that pops up here for you to fill out. thank you and we are excited to work with you.
Congratulations. Your grant is now approved. Please complete the on-boarding link here: https://stacks-grant.netlify.app/onboard?q=22215e42f802fb3c9f237c39f93fd781
Hi @RaffiSapire, I'm trying to submit the details via the link posted above but the page hangs indefinitely and the Chrome console says that an API call fails ( I assume it is functional to the grant submission). Please help
Hi @TobyLewisNovum please DM me at RSAP and 2n10se#5020. @jhammond2012 , 2n10se#5020, is building the app and can help fix.
Fab! Sorry for being slow but I don't know what RSAP is and I cannot find the username 2n10se#5020 on discord. Our developer @albydeca has also contacted @jennymith about this problem. Alternatively if the app will take some time to fix we can go another route
Hi @TobyLewisNovum What is your discord username?
I'm not very active on discord, please liaise with our developer @albydeca (alberto#5463)
Hi @jhammond2012 nice to meet you :) happy to be contacted on discord at the username above
Fab! Sorry for being slow but I don't know what RSAP is and I cannot find the username 2n10se#5020 on discord. Our developer @albydeca has also contacted @jennymith about this problem. Alternatively if the app will take some time to fix we can go another route
Hi Toby, I've responded to Alberto that Jonathon should be able to help here. Let us know if you continue to run into issues.
Hi @jhammond2012 nice to meet you :) happy to be contacted on discord at the username above
Hi @albydeca I have added you on Discord. When you are free, we can connect and find out what the issue here is.
Hi all, thanks for helping us conclude the grant award process !
In the meantime our development team has been busy laying the foundations of the deliverable. I would like to share this early mockup with you guys, which lays out what we believe could be the most salient metrics to show to the users on the website’s landing page. We have placed the various data metrics that we wish to show into the different categories which are listed. In subsequent milestones each category will have its own sub-page, each providing more data than what is already shown here.
We are looking for feedback on this piece. In particular:
Thanks guys!
Hi there @anovum - would pose this to the community for feedback. And part of the milestone deliverable is conducting user testing. Through this process, i'd imagine that you get some feedback on this. As part of your M1 deliverable, would like to see the results of the user testing, the questions you asked, and what you changed as a result of that.
In addition, how would you plan to share back the deliverables on the technical build on testnet?
M1 has been funded! When you are finished with this milestone, please comment on this issue with !m1_complete
Hi @RaffiSapire. Since this call for feedback, we have been busy speaking to various stakeholders and prospective stakeholders. We showed them the PDF mockup together with the plan of action and always made sure to ask appropriate leading questions to steer the conversation in the right direction. These questions were typically:
Armed with the answers to these and similar questions we could properly fit prospects into categories.
We spoke to Xan from Daemon Technologies, who is working closely with Trevor. He definitely saw the need for a solution such as ours and agreed with the categories provided. He said that the product fit in well with the existing data platforms available for Stacks (stacking.club aimed at stackers, stxmining.club aimed at miners - both being active contributors to the ecosystem) as it is aimed at a diverse group of audiences who are not directly involved in the upkeep of the system yet would like to participate either by trading, minting/burning NFTs, engaging in DeFi, or generally developing applications on Stacks. His feedback was to split the dataviz work into two milestones - one homepage which is the development of the mockup (incorporated into M1) and then a second phase with more data for each category in its own page (incorporated into M2). He also suggested we looked into NFTs more, so we are likely to add this category in a future milestone.
That same week we spoke to Gina and Mark from the Hiro team. They were also very excited at having this kind of tool for the audiences described above. He also suggested we built a REST API to allow this data to be exported into other tools and be generally available to devs. We plan to begin developing such an API in M3.
After speaking to a Stacks developer and our own dev team, we made the decision to deploy mainnet data right from M1, skipping the testnet altogether.
Finally, we spoke to members of our network, most of whom are not users of Stacks. This allowed us to gain external perspectives and gauge the demands of people outside the community. The general impression was positive, however we got a clear piece of feedback that the mockup did little to introduce externals into the ecosystem, instead presenting data straight away with no introduction. To mitigate this, we will provide a "What is Stacks?" intro page and link to it in a prominent position. We will also link as many resources of third-parties as we can, keeping in mind that we are a data company so any educational content will be kept minimal.
Hi @RaffiSapire. Since this call for feedback, we have been busy speaking to various stakeholders and prospective stakeholders. We showed them the PDF mockup together with the plan of action and always made sure to ask appropriate leading questions to steer the conversation in the right direction. These questions were typically:
* Where does crypto fit into your daily life? * Are you a member of the Stacks community? To what extent are you involved with anything Stacks related? * What data on blockchain and tokens typically interests you most?
Armed with the answers to these and similar questions we could properly fit prospects into categories.
We spoke to Xan from Daemon Technologies, who is working closely with Trevor. He definitely saw the need for a solution such as ours and agreed with the categories provided. He said that the product fit in well with the existing data platforms available for Stacks (stacking.club aimed at stackers, stxmining.club aimed at miners - both being active contributors to the ecosystem) as it is aimed at a diverse group of audiences who are not directly involved in the upkeep of the system yet would like to participate either by trading, minting/burning NFTs, engaging in DeFi, or generally developing applications on Stacks. His feedback was to split the dataviz work into two milestones - one homepage which is the development of the mockup (incorporated into M1) and then a second phase with more data for each category in its own page (incorporated into M2). He also suggested we looked into NFTs more, so we are likely to add this category in a future milestone.
That same week we spoke to Gina and Mark from the Hiro team. They were also very excited at having this kind of tool for the audiences described above. He also suggested we built a REST API to allow this data to be exported into other tools and be generally available to devs. We plan to begin developing such an API in M3.
After speaking to a Stacks developer and our own dev team, we made the decision to deploy mainnet data right from M1, skipping the testnet altogether.
Finally, we spoke to members of our network, most of whom are not users of Stacks. This allowed us to gain external perspectives and gauge the demands of people outside the community. The general impression was positive, however we got a clear piece of feedback that the mockup did little to introduce externals into the ecosystem, instead presenting data straight away with no introduction. To mitigate this, we will provide a "What is Stacks?" intro page and link to it in a prominent position. We will also link as many resources of third-parties as we can, keeping in mind that we are a data company so any educational content will be kept minimal.
Thank you for this comprehensive update @albydeca. Looks like you've gotten great feedback so far and we can't wait to review your learnings in detail!
In the meantime, I just wanted to clarify your progress on M1. Since you're now skipping testnet and deploying straight to mainnet, have you effectively moved on to M2? Or is there still some work that needs to be done to complete M1?
Hi Jenny, we will still stay in M1 for the moment as we are still finishing the Webpage that will showcase the data we are pulling.
Hi all, As we draw ever nearer to completing M1, I have a quick question regarding the balances of Stacks wallets. We have noticed that a significant majority of wallets in circulation have 100 STX as balance. Can anyone explain to us why this may be, and whether as a consequence it still makes sense to plot the distribution of wallet balances as a relevant whale analysis? Thanks
(Adding our new front end dev @peopledrivemecrazy)
Hi all, good news. Please take a look at the early version of the platform available here: https://stacksdataverse.herokuapp.com/
!m1_complete
Sorry. Only author can changes status to Complete.
!m1_complete
Thank you for completing M1. The grant committee will review and confirm completion or send feedback within a week
Hi all, good news. Please take a look at the early version of the platform available here: https://stacksdataverse.herokuapp.com/
!m1_complete
Thanks for submitting M1 @albydeca. The platform looks great and provides some really interesting data! We're happy to have you move on to the next milestone.
However, before we disburse M2, could you quickly clarify what you'll be working on next? It looks like you've already completed some of the work originally set out for M2 (e.g. migrating to mainnet).
Sorry. Only author can changes status to Complete.
Hi all, good news. Please take a look at the early version of the platform available here: https://stacksdataverse.herokuapp.com/
!m1_complete
I have added this link to https;//stx.fan data/stats feel free to ping me when the url changes, I will update. Great work, looking forward to the next update.
Sorry. Only author can changes status to Complete.
Hi @jennymith
We have decided to deploy straight to mainnet because we were confident enough to do so and with the API provided it is very easy :)
The second milestone will expand the categories and each category will have its own page ("See More" links currently don't do anything). Pages will contain more metrics than the ones shown already, and we are already putting together a list of these metrics based on what we think is useful as well as feedback from the community.
I would therefore revise the M2 milestone based on this information and the message I sent to this thread on Sep 1st:
As discussed with Xan from Daemon, we aim to implement a broad rather than deeply focused platform, in order to provide an overview of the ecosystem and provide the message that Stacks has a valid technology as well as an active and successful community.
Let us know your thoughts!
Cheers, Alberto
Hello, just wanted to check in if the review is finished and we are ready to move to M2?
Best, Anja
Hi @anovum, we'll get back to you by Thursday at the latest. Thanks for your patience here!
Hi @anovum this is generally approved so we'll get started on disbursing M2 ASAP. We'll share any additional feedback in the meantime.
Hi @anovum I see that you have $20k as the budget for M2 and M3. What is the amount designated for just M2 alone?
@anovum Just noting here after our call earlier today that we're going to hold on funding M2 ($15,000) until you figure out whether or not you want to add a wallet feature to the scope of this grant.
Hi @jennymith , after internal discussion we have come to the conclusion that we will keep the scope of this grant as it currently stands. This is because we believe the wallet feature deviates too greatly from the stated mission of the deliverable.
We therefore suggest the disbursement of M2 as previously agreed. In the meantime, we will be having conversations with Trevor et al on the potential to apply for a second grant, or other forms of support and collaboration between Novum and Stacks. With our focus firmly on the present grant, we are looking to develop any wallet feature not before Q1 2022 unless otherwise determined.
Thanks for the updated @albydeca! We'll disburse M2 then.
@albydeca Hi. I saw your issue regarding a data dictionary request for the API's DB and discovered your project here. I'm interested in developing a better method for publishing data from the API to edge nodes for high performance and new use cases.
Do you have documentation on your integration and use of the API? Is your project open source so I can view its current API usage?
Thank you kindly for your help.
Hi @PUN-app , we are currently developing this actively and will be open-sourcing the data and code in due course once the deployment matures. We are keen to contribute to the Db columns documentation but other high priority work is preventing us from doing this at the moment.
We currently cache query results (which we post-process slightly) in an AWS Cloudfront distribution for faster fruition by the end users. I do not have documentation as such, but am happy to help you with individual queries. Feel free to email me at alberto@novuminsights.com
Hi @albydeca, since we're approaching the end of the year, I wanted to check on the progress of this grant. How is M2 going? Any possibility of moving on to M3 before next quarter?
Hi! We are currently finalising the mockups and have written a great deal of code for M2. We hope to get it finished by the end of jan. Figma here: https://www.figma.com/file/u2bx7GkLUXGrYdO5PusYwW/Stacks-Grant-SW-Prototype?node-id=0%3A1
We are looking tp potentially modify our M3 to include wallet functionality, TBD further. Maybe we can catch up in the new year to discuss this?
That all sounds good @albydeca! Let's catch up about M3 in January and feel free to post updates on M2 for the community in the the meantime.
Hi all, Please see the completion of M2 here: https://stacksdataverse.herokuapp.com/
@albydeca will be managing this grant application moving forward, so please kindly transfer ownership of the github issue to that github account. The UI is still a bit rough around the edges but it will be fixed in due course, in the meantime you are warmly invited to review.
!m2_complete
Sorry, you can only complete a milestone if it is active.
I get the following error: Sorry, you can only complete a milestone if it is active.
Hi @anovum can you try again?
!m2_complete
Thank you for completing M2. The grant committee will review and confirm completion or send feedback within a week
that worked, thanks :)
@anovum Vane here! I am supporting the Grants in updating information. Could you let us know your discord username?
What problems do you aim to solve? How does it serve the mission of a user owned internet?
The Stacks blockchain project is striving to obtain a strong development community thanks to a very comprehensive documentation, approachable technical webinars and dev tutorials. So far, this commitment is paying dividends, with the Clarity language being adopted more and more frequently and services such as Pravica, Xverse and Boom already at a significant stage of maturity. However, in tandem with the accelerating growth in the technical community, a similar effort should be provided to enhance the general awareness of the Stacks blockchain, as well as the fantastic features being built on top of it and intelligence about the key metrics that make this ledger robust and desirable.
To the best of our knowledge, the only way to gather metrics about the Stacks blockchain as a non-developer is via the Stacks Explorer at https://explorer.stacks.co/. This tool is very user-friendly and provides basic information about blocks and transactions. However, this tool may be too basic for non-technical use cases such as various on-chain trend analyses, economic analyses and any data gathering that could be useful for journalists or bloggers. As a result, opportunities could be missed to promote Stacks in the wider community and attract further participants and investors. Stacks.club is a great tool in this respect, however by design it only covers the stacking mechanism.
What solution are you providing? Who will it serve?
We are offering to research, design and implement an on-chain data analysis tool and API for the Stacks blockchain. This tool will take inspiration from other highly-successful platforms such as Dune Analytics and Blockchair to provide access to a wide gamut of metrics which can be useful to chart the progression of the Stacks blockchain and the behaviour of the various actors interacting with it. The collaboration between Stacks and Chainlink is a major facilitator for this project. A project breakdown can be found in the answer to the next question. Here we detail whom this data product may serve in the future:
Journalists: crypto media organisations can gain deep insights into user activity on the Stacks blockchain and the different ways users interact with it over time. Thanks to trend analyses focused on key usage metrics such as unique wallets over time, transaction volumes, contract calls and deployments, these organisations can produce detailed articles and spotlights on Stacks which will increase awareness.
Developers: building upon the groundwork already established, developers can better understand the status of the blockchain at any given time at a glance. This can be useful for making development decisions.
Investors: in a similar fashion to economic analyses such as “whale analyses” on BTC and ETH, metrics such as token concentration, available STX liquidity, minting schedule, stacking TVL and per-contract fee distribution can help crypto investors make informed decisions regarding allocation of their funds. This is especially important in the context of Stacks becoming a DeFi layer on top of Bitcoin.
B2B: To provide a wider context, data pertaining to the Stacks blockchain and ecosystem can be included as part of a general overview that reports on all Blockchains to provide a comprehensive view.
Enthusiasts: crypto geeks looking for a bit of fun can feed themselves to glory with the analytics they love to monitor and explain to their friends.
What are the components or technical specs of the project? What will the final deliverable look like? How will you measure success?
The main components of the project are as follows:
A subscription-based web SaaS product that collects various metrics of the Stacks blockchain, including spot statistics, time-series analyses, financial analyses and more. This could also be integrated into a larger service offering , where Stacks is just one of the Blockchains that will be reported on Novum’s consultancy services to make bespoke reports about the Stacks blockchain on a periodic basis.
A set of blog posts and a research report which showcase our work and its most relevant findings.
Optionally, a DeFi Pulse-style project showcase page, built in collaboration with the Stacks Foundation, which will be free to access and will showcase the most successful projects built on Stacks.
Optionally, the possibility of hosting the SaaS as a Stacks Foundation project on its website. In this case, a further commercial agreement is to be put in place.
What grant amount are you seeking? How long will the project take in hours? If more than 20, please break down the project into milestones, with a clear output (e.g., low-fi mockup, MVP with two features) and include the estimated work hours for each milestone.
Total Grant Request: USD 10k for M1 + USD 20k for M2+M3 (contingent on M1 being delivered to a satisfactory standard).
M1 (4-6 weeks total):
Scope of Work:
Narrow down and identify customers as well as their needs. Perform customer interviews to test assumptions and gather priorities on analytics of interest (1-2 weeks)
Define Business Requirement document (1 Week)
Create Wireframes and user test them (1 Week)
Technical build on TESTNET (2-3 Weeks) consisting of:
Basic metrics, indicatively including: total txs per day, unique addresses over time, gas price over time, daily active addresses over time, number of contracts and tokens deployed, number of daily contract calls, hash rate.
Financial metrics, indicatively including: price-based graphs, total STX transferred per day, total STX supply, median/average transaction size in STX.
Mining metrics, indicatively including: number of miners, number of stackers (as well as over time), total TVL locked in stacking, minting schedules, current reward cycle status charts.
Integrate into existing Novum Insights service offering (1 Week)
M2 (6 weeks total):
Migrate all the above to mainnet.
Add a whale analysis (concentration analysis) initially on testnet. This aims to help analysts understand how concentrated the supply of STX is, and therefore how susceptible the currency is to external events, adversarial or otherwise, by a small minority of actors in the ecosystem. In simple terms, the lower the concentration, the higher the decentralisation and thus the higher the stability of the currency. We indicatively break this task down into the following deliverables:
A “STX Gini Coefficient” that expresses the financial inequality within the system in an easily-digestible spot statistic.
Further analysis that breaks this coefficient down, including graphs that indicate the % of wallets that hold more than a given amount of STX, the % of supply owned by the top 10 wallets, the amounts of time that these funds have been locked in said wallets.
Begin making blog posts showcasing our work so far as well as its main findings.
M3 (6 weeks total):
Migrate the M2 deliverables to mainnet
Add further on-chain and financial metrics to the software as agreed with the Stacks Foundation as well as based on our user interviews.
Develop a Stacks DeFi showcase page, similar to DeFiPulse, which showcases the top 50 projects on Stacks. Potentially expand this to NFT projects.
Develop dashboards on Dune Analytics which show the most interesting metrics from our main product.
Initiate relationships with other major blockchain data players such as Blockchair, CoinMetrics and Chainalysis to offer STX analysis tools as a service.
Write a fully-fledged report on the STX ecosystem that ties all the work together.
Who is building this? What relevant experience do you bring to this project? Are there skills sets you are missing that you are seeking from the community? Please share links to previous work.
The Novum Insights team collectively holds 30+ years of experience in the Blockchain space, including leadership positions in projects ranging from data verification to on-chain analytics and protocols. The team formed around the shared objective of using data as a tool to bring much-needed clarity to an expanding Blockchain ecosystem. So far, we have delivered successful consultancy projects to international clients such as Barclays and Hitachi as well as token projects like UNN and OpenExo
Alberto De Capitani
Alberto De Capitani is a senior engineer at the company. He has accrued vast knowledge and experience in the blockchain space since 2014, and currently focuses on product development, data analysis and strategy. He is currently working on 2 blockchain projects including a platform to issue educational credentials on various ledgers. He holds a MEng in Computing from Imperial College.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/albydeca/
Toby Lewis
Toby Lewis, market monitoring company Novum Insights’ founder and CEO, is a prolific analyst focused on technology startups, venture capital and data science. Toby co-founded and successfully exited from venture capital analyst firm Global Corporate Venturing. He was formerly a regular writer for the Wall Street Journal
https://www.linkedin.com/in/toby-lewis-7aa5a533/
David Henderson
David Henderson spent 10 years in Finance, Audit and Accounting working as a qualified accountant followed by 20 years at the intersection of Supply Chain, Finance and Technology. He has broad experience in international accounting, auditing and financial management as well as being a Chartered Accountant who has lived and worked in Europe, South America, Africa, USA and consulted for some of the world’s largest companies as well as for SMEs
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbbhenderson/
David Layton
David Layton is a former CERN Physicist and current Agile Evangelist who specializes in Cloud-based Big Data solutions and Machine Learning having consulted for some of the biggest multinationals like Nestle, BNP Paribas, Reckitt Benkiser, Sky, and Centrica. He has spent the last several years devoted to his passion of helping data-centric startups transition to medium-sized companies.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-matthew-layton/
What dependencies or obstacles do you anticipate? What contingency plans do you have in place?
Do you have previous projects, code commits, or experiences that are relevant to this application? What community feedback or input have you received? How do you plan to share your plan to the community over time and as the final deliverable?
Novum has a successful track record in delivering blockchain-related projects both as research/opinion leadership pieces and data applications. Up to July 2020, Novum successfully commercialised a blockchain market monitor which featured both micro and macro market indicators and contained data on 10k+ blockchain companies and 7k+ investors. At the time of writing the dataset behind this platform, still maintained, has reached 18k+ blockchain companies and is a strong contender for the most comprehensive blockchain company database in existence today. This software, paired with our high-quality analyst work, was instrumental in guiding the blockchain strategies of large multinationals including Hitachi, Barclays and Telefonica.
Fast-forward to today, and Novum runs a successful blockchain advisory service with top-drawer clients including UNN and DLTx, as well as a fledgling software offering focused on research and trading tools in the DeFi space.
Toby, Novum’s CEO, has built a very strong network in blockchain and startups in general, partly as a result of his spell as a journalist at the WSJ. We therefore have a large base of prospects to which to promote, and gather iterative feedback for, a Stacks analytics tool.
How do you plan to share your plan to the community over time and as the final deliverable?
As a data service provider it is important for Novum to provide data that matters . Thus we plan to provide continuous updates about the project via our different channels, e.g. Whatsapp, discord and Linkedin and Medium. During the iterative development phases we intend to:
Identify and engage with at least 2 prospective customers per bracket in the list aforementioned.
Engage with them on an ongoing basis to iteratively gather feedback to upgrade the product and really solve their pain points
In the meanwhile, regularly update our wider community on our various channels to build hype around the release.
Ensure robust documentation is written