Hi Casini_Niftgen, thank you very much for your kind words and support!
As I clarified with Alberto above, our proposal focuses on building cross-chain interoperability for MoonFit, which will enable us to have, like, several gateways onboarding non-native Moonbeam users to Moonbeam. If we want to attract users from outside and leverage the advantages of connected contracts, we cannot stay only in Moonbeam and talk about ourselves then waiting for people to come. That is not economical and effective at all.
Collaboration with new communities, new projects with rising attention (outside of Moonbeam and Polkadot) requires us to actually have deeper connections and product integration with them. In terms of acquiring new users and retaining them in Moonbeam, that way would be so much better than just doing simple giveaways or ordinary marketing campaigns with outside projects.
It’s not that MoonFit deploying on other chains means that we belong to those chains and do no good for Moonbeam ecosystem. It’s clearly the opposite. You can check out my answer to Alberto to learn more about how this would clearly benefit Moonbeam ecosystem in terms of additional new users, transactions and capital flow.
What message-passing provider(s) do you plan to work with?
How have you selected these ecosystems for deployment? I don’t believe Astar will have very much in terms of new users - ZK stuff is hot but how many users do they have? Why not focus on more established ecosystems like Arb and OP?
Have you tested or started building any kind of cross-chain “connected contracts”
Hey Gm Turrizt, thank you for raising this question about security. MoonFit is still in the beta phase and improving our security systems everyday, but as we got 15+ years of experience in software development, rest assured that best practices are being applied to ensure users’ safety of data and funds.
For off-chain components, we applied WAF, Access Control as well as best practices from cloud provider. We have experience on building large scale system with a high level of security for Merchize, which is officially audited by Amazon, and we applied it to MoonFit system. Merchize, our founding company, is Top 1 POD platform in Vietnam for global merchants, which have been delivering 10M+ orders to 190+ countries in 3 years.
For on-chain contracts, once we complete our cross-chain development including connected contracts’ logic and operation, we will start working on auditing process for all our on-chain system to ensure the safety of all users’ fund and data. With the expertise and experience of our dev team, we are confident to protect users against potential hacks and breaches.
We are still working on the message-passing solution and will update with you once we confirm the best names to ensure security and interoperability.
About these choices, I understand your concerns and would like to add a few points. We consider Astar and Moonbeam are the 2 best parachains and ecosystems in Polkadot. And seeing Astar making a lot of progress lately, we anticipate that this ecosystem will have a lot of potential growth in the future. We want to be there early, not waiting until the ecosystem succeeds to come over. For established ecosystems like Arb and OP, I can tell that their ecosystem’s capital flow and reputation is already over the peak times since earlier this year and their user base is on the fall right now, until there are some other narratives and motivation for the ecosystem to blossom again.
Instead, compared to OP and ARB, BNB Chain is a more established ecosystem that has huge user base already. BNB Chain is a really popular blockchain that has one of the best adoption rate and I think it would not be a good idea to miss it. ZK ecosystems are hot right now because of retroactive airdrop hints, currently they are in the stage of early ecosystem building and all eyes in the crypto space are focusing on them. According to our research and our conversation with several ZK ecosystems, their timing would focus heavily in the middle of next year 2024. Right now they are growing users and Dapps really quickly, if we integrate with them early then when it comes to the ecosystem’s peak growth, a huge new user base can be expected to flow into Moonbeam.
As I mentioned in Turrizt’s question above, we have already started working on it, running tests and stuff for 2 months now, we do not wait for the grant to start building it so rest assured.
It does but I still don’t agree with giving a grant for an Astar deployment. Both ecosystems have been running for a long time in parallel, I wouldn’t expect there to be a massive different in users there vs. Moonbeam. BNB ok, makes sense. L2s - Airdrop chasers aren’t committed to anything, feel like it’s not a good audience to try and attract.
Thank you for submitting your proposal for the Ecosystem Grant. After reviewing your application I would like to give you my feedback on the proposal format and ask a few questions about your draft proposal.
Proposal Format
The proposal should be in line with the grant guidelines and provide some specific information to make it more transparent for the community.
Goal: We asked teams to choose one of the two options as a main goal for their application. You mentioned that “MoonFit’s Grant Ecosystem proposal would achieve two goals”. Can you choose only one which better fits your proposal?
Vision of success: You provided us with a broad vision of success. However, this section should also clearly define the suitable metrics to measure success and explain how you plan to stay self-sustainable and continue to grow after the grant expires and incentives run out. Please expand this section.
Steps to Implement: This part is missing. In this section, you can include associated costs, manpower, and other resources for each step where applicable.
Thank you in advance for answering the following questions:
MoonFit received Grant from the Moonbeam Foundation in September 2022. Do you have any data that showcase this previous grant was effective?
The milestones don’t mention much about the cross-chain development itself. To avoid additional questions, for example, about reusing the work done for deployment on Astar EVM and BNB EVM, please provide more specific information about the cross-chain development (Astar Network, BNB Chain, Aleph Zero).
Can you explain in detail what bridge or messaging passing protocol you would use for each chain you’re targeting?
Why are you planning to use Multichain to communicate with Astar? Have you considered another option, i.e. XCM?
Multichain has had a lot of problems in the past few weeks - how does this impact your plans?
In your updated proposal you changed the portion of the grant amount (between development and incentives) used in each milestone. More grant funds (1 350K GLMR) will be spent on Incentives. Please describe in detail the incentivized initiatives (distribution period, amount, for what types of activity, how the winners be determined, in what form they will be incentivized etc.)
How are you planning to maintain the user base once you use up the 1 350K in incentives?
What ZK-EVM ecosystems do you want to integrate with? I’m not sure if it is the right approach to apply for a grant without providing a chain/chains to integrate with and a proper assessment of the scope of work needed to be done.
In Milestone 3 you mentioned you want to conduct research of ZK-EVM ecosystems. What is your research plan? Will you publish the research results?
The milestones you provided are focused mainly on development and incentives. Please add more progress milestones. What do you expect in terms of user and TVL growth, running sessions, etc.? What KPIs have you set to measure the success of cross-chain deployment and your initiatives?
Milestones 1 and 4 have the same expected achievements (5,000+ Transactions, 5M+ calories burned) but there is a significant difference in grant amount asked: Milestone 1 - Astar Network (600K GLMR), Milestone 4 - Aleph Zero (250K GLMR). Could you please explain this difference?
The first five users in the leaderboard are from Hanoi. From what other countries do you have users? Can you provide the numbers of your users’ distribution? What is your target market?
What are your main competitors in the chains you want to integrate with? How does MoonFit differentiate itself? Have you done any validation on the other chains? Have you sought funding from other chains as well?
If the grant amount you receive turns out to be less than 2M, will you still launch on Astar Network, BNB Chain, ZK-EVM ecosystems and Aleph Zero? Do you have other sources of funding for development, or is the cross-chain development entirely dependent on this grant?
What is your action plan in case of unfavorable “black swan” events, such as hacks, market crashes, etc? Please consider the emergency tactics for the grant-related activities that will be adopted.
Updates to the Proposal
Please note that you have until July 14th, 11:59 PM UTC to make changes to your proposal. A list of changes based on community feedback should be added to the “Updates’’ section of the proposal and any changes should be reflected in the text of the proposal itself
Best regards
Natalia
Non-Foundation Community Grants Committee Member
I appreciate the product and the team involved in its development.
I fail to comprehend why Moonbeam should bear the cost of your “migration” to other chains. It would be more suitable to seek grants specifically on those mentioned chains.
It is evident to me that the majority of networks you plan to integrate with are merely reusing old code, with limited new development taking place.
Hi Natalia, thank you very much for your detailed feedback!
We have made changes to our proposal according to your comments. I would like to add some points to the vision of success - how to stay self-sustainable and continue to grow after the grant expires and incentives run out.
We have been staying self-sustainable through the worst time of bear market, building since July 2022 till now for 14K+ total users (now is 15K+, increased 1K+ since I posted this proposal) and outstanding metrics for an NFT project as stated above.
All of these plans are already in progress and our to-do list, however, this grant will help us to maximize the influence and efficiency, bringing in a greater impact to Moonbeam. This grant aims to make a remarkable contribution to Moonbeam Ecosystem by onboarding non-native Moonbeam users and capital flow. So I would say, after the incentives run out we can still remain self-sustainable with our business model explained above and with our strategies answered in my previous answer to Turrizt.
We received Grant Level 1 from Moonbeam back in September 2022. It’s a policy from Moonbeam that we cannot disclose the grant amount we received from Moonbeam Foundation so that we can have a better comparison. If you wonder about the success of our previous grant, just have a look at our achievements in our main proposal above. In Moonbeam ecosystem, we have been consistently ranking #1 NFT Collection in terms of Trading Volume, attracting and growing new users everyday. We also have a poll stating that 85% of our users are new to Moonbeam, showcasing our contribution to Moonbeam ecosystem in a way that not many other Dapps have performed.
I strongly believe that if we give it a fair shot, our use of grant proved to be successful and a lot more effective than we committed to Moonbeam Foundation.
I think you might’ve missed this part, on how the cross-chain development would work. We explained it in the Hub & Spoke Model, Message Passing and Timeline & Milestones. Please review it again.
We’ve already updated this part due to your comment. XCM technology has not supported NFTs, especially ERC-721 NFT Standard. We will base on the current technology available and develop our own custom solution if needed to make these cross-chain initiatives. Please check it again in our final version above.
We are working closely with Manta Network and StarkNet at the moment and there are a lot of technical difficulties we need to solve before giving in final and official announcement. Even these ecosystems are at the early stage of development and the compatibility is a solid problem that needs thorough research. That’s why we stated that the use of grant in milestone #3 also concludes Research part.
About the research plan, we are actively working with several ZK-EVM ecosystems to align our product development with their plans. Timing of the market and their ecosystem growth is also really important to maximize our cross-chain effort. Rest assured, we will publish our research report to demonstrate our detailed plans and the motivation behind those development.
Please keep in mind that all of these efforts are to grow MoonFit users and onboard them to Moonbeam Network. The more MoonFit grows, the more Moonbeam grows.
We’ve already updated another metric of success - user growth to our final proposal version. We are not a DeFi protocol so TVL is not our focus but we will try to record the capital flow on chain as transparent as possible when interacting with MoonFit
It’s really simple, once we complete all first 3 milestones, our user base, influence and position will have grown remarkably across chains. By then, incentives effort should cost less to achieve our goals of attracting users an capital flow to Moonbeam.
Please have a look at this slide from our pitch deck. Here’s how our users are being distributed across 50+ countries and regions. The majority of our users come from France, Russia, Japan, Korea, etc.
We have not sought funding from any ventures, capitals or any other chains. This question is also similar to Turrizt’s questions above, please take them as a reference for our answers in terms of competitors and plans to differentiate.
I have already answered this question in our previous response to Turrizt and also updated to our final proposal above. These are in our development plans, so if the grant amount turns out to be less than 2M, we will still keep working on our plans to deploy to Astar Network, BNB Chain, ZK-EVM ecosystems and Aleph Zero. But the target and KPIs should be changed on a pro-rated basis. We have been self-sustaining ourselves since July 2022 and have resources to initiate our plans. However, this grant will mean a lot to us in terms of speeding up our progress, maximizing our effort and contribution for Moonbeam ecosystem.
We survived several market crashes and other “black swan” events since building MoonFit and it’s proven that we’re still performing outstandingly despite difficulties. In terms of hacks and flaws in our product, we will ensure to work with the best auditing partners, applying the best security methods from our 15+ years of experience in software development and working with big partners like Amazon.
Thank you once again for your detailed feedback, I hope that our answers and our proposal are expressed clear enough to show that this grant aims to contribute to Moonbeam in several critical ways such as users, capital flow and additional cross-chain transactions.
Hi Gama thank you for your feedback but I would like to add some points.
I know that due to my bad expression, many people have mistaken our plans to solely migrating to other chains. But the point is we “expand” to other chains, opening gateways for users on those chains to use MoonFit and Moonbeam, therefore onboarding them and capital flow to Moonbeam ecosystems. Please check our final version of this proposal above and I hope it clears your misunderstanding.
Furthermore, talking about reusing old code, I would like to clarify that it is not 100% correct. It’s true that expanding to BNB Chain can reuse some of the available development, but our plans also include integrating with CyberConnect, which requires more product changes (both mobile and blockchain interoperability).
Astar Network actually requires a lot more cross-chain works than you can expect, as the current XCM technology has not supported NFTs, especially ERC-721 standard, and many GMP protocols have not supported Moonbeam <> Astar Network. ZK-EVM ecosystems and Aleph Zero are in fact at the early stages of development and there are a lot of flaws in their blockchains at the moment and need more research.
Please keep in mind that our plans aim to use cross-chain connected contracts to expand MoonFit and onboard new users as well as capital flow to Moonbeam ecosystem.
I hope that this answers your questions and we would have your support. Cheers!
