Title - [Proposal: XX] [Idea] Delegate dashboard renewal for Moonbeam, Moonriver and Moonbase
Abstract
Karma has built and has been maintaining custom delegate dashboards for Moonbeam, Moonriver and Moonbase over the past year. This proposal is a request for funding to continue enhancing and maintaining these dashboards.
Motivation
To build a healthy and dynamic ecosystem, a DAO needs active contributors. It is in the best interest of the DAO to recognize the most active contributors, engage them and potentially reward them for their contributions. Having a contributor tracking system will encourage members to lead various initiatives and contribute. By having visibility into the contributions, DAO can encourage the right kind of behavior from their community.
Project Overview and Team Experience
The delegate dashboards we have built are used by the DAO and community to onboard delegates, delegate their tokens, get visibility into their activities, hold them accountable, improve voting participation and further decentralize the DAO. The dashboard also provides deep insights into each delegate’s governance activity that will help token holders decide who to delegate their tokens to.
Note: Moonbase is not actively used but it acts as a sandbox to test any contract changes before deploying to other networks.
Team: I am the founder of Karma, have been in the crypto space for over 8 years and have been working on Karma for last 2.5 years. We are team of 5 mostly devs.
Rationale
Our dashboards are being actively used by Moonbeam community to perform delegation and gain visibility into delegate activity. Some of the features that are actively used include:
Features of the custom dashboard include:
Delegate onboarding flow
Ability to link social handles (Forum, Discord Handle)
Update delegation pitch and interests
Display Voting stats, history and voting reasons for each proposal
Display Forum stats
Contribution Scores
Ability for token holders to delegate directly from the dashboard
In Depth insights about delegates
Auto tag inactive delegates
Overall Cost
We are requesting 150k GLMR ($25k) for Moonbeam and 2500 MOVR (~$20k) for Moonriver and Moonbase dashboards.
Use of Treasury Funds
The funds will be used for the following:
Infrastructure costs: This includes the cost to maintain servers and third party indexers used to index delegates on a daily basis, store and calculate various stats.
Maintenance and Support: We received support requests on a regular basis and we help tokenholders resolve the issues in timely fashion. Like with any software, there is maintenance tasks related to upgrading libraries, bug fixes, performance enhancements, changes caused by third party services/indexer and small changes (branding upgrade for example).
Enhancements: We are constantly add features to the overall product and those updates are pushed to these three dashboards automatically.
We will maintain the dashboard for one year from the date of approval of proposal.
I will be happy to answer any questions from the Council members and the community. We look forward to continuing to contribute to the DAO
could you please provide a detailed breakdown of the projected costs associated with this proposal? specifically, I’m interested in the expenses for infrastructure, maintenance, support, and any planned enhancements. It would help community understand and process the proposal better
Apologies for the delay, had an old email address on my profile and didn’t see the reply.
Absolutely, here is the breakdown. The infrastructure and devs working on all the dashboards are same, so I am breaking down the aggregate cost for each section below:
Infrastructure cost:
Subscription for hosting, domains, indexers: $1k/month = $12k/year
Support and Maintenance
Support and maintenance usually involves PM(me) for customer facing and triaging issues and developer (backend or frontend) depending on the issue. Note that this also involves any small enhancements which only take a day or two. This is on average 16hrs/month at $150.
1612 months150 = ~$29k
Big enhancements
We have a backlog of features we will be working on such as displaying token holder addresses who have delegated tokens to a delegate, using AI to identify quality comments on the forum instead of just quantitative data etc. These costs are not specific to Moonbeam alone, so I am adding only a fraction of the cost which is a little less than $5k.
Let me know if this is sufficient or if you need any more details. Thanks.
could you please provide a list of the specific features / enhancements that have been implemented in the past 6 months?
the maintenance and support costs are the largest part of your funding request, totaling around $29k annually. to better understand this expense, could you provide detailed information on the number of support requests you’ve received and resolved over the past 6 months? specifically, how many of these issues were due to changes on the Moonbeam side versus bugs or issues introduced by Karma’s implementation? also, can you explain the typical complexity of these issues and whether any of them could have been prevented or streamlined to reduce ongoing maintenance costs?
the proposal requests $20k for maintaining the Moonriver / Moonbase dashboards and $25k for Moonbeam. could you clarify whether the infra and codebase for these dashboards are shared between Moonriver / Moonbase and Moonbeam? If they are shared, how do you justify the separate $20k allocation for Moonriver? If they are not shared, could you explain the specific differences in the work required for Moonriver that lead to this separate cost?
For Moonbeam, Moonriver, Moonbase - Looking at our github commits, the main feature we added in the last 6 months was displaying the breakdown of voting power for all delegates across various tracks. Just that one feature which took atleast two weeks to spec out, implement, test and release is considered, we are already at 80 hours of aggregated time between designer, frontend/backend dev, devops and PM.
Most of the support requests are funneled through two Telegram groups we have with Moonbeam team. There have been few ocassions I have received DMs. I unfortunately haven’t kept track of total count. But it is only about 2 a month if I average it out. The system was fairly new and no. of requests were high. As the system has stabilized, support requests have gone down significantly. There are some issues which just take under an hour. We have resolved almost all of them within the same week. The only one in the recent memory was an issues from a month or so ago when a token holder couldn’t undelegate their tokens for some reason. It took a lot of back and forth to track it down. My dev even hopped on a call and screenshared with the user to solve this problem. Hope that gives an idea.
Another example: We found out very recently that when tokens are locked with conviction, you can’t just withdraw after that lock time. The timer starts after the token unlock trigger happens. We had to figure out all the implications in our code and make changes.
One more example: Delegates link their forum handle to their profile by signing and posting on the forum. Sometimes they sign with one wallet and try to link another, signatures don’t match and it fails and they message us. We have to help them in such cases.
Another one I forgot to include is the discourse plugin. Discourse has released a major version of their software and we have to rewrite some parts of the plugin to support it. The hosting provider is waiting on us to make changes before upgrading moonbeam forum. The plugin is used by only 2 other DAOs and that cost will have to be split between the three.
I have taken all this into consideration and quoted the total cost. I am not sure how to itemize each of these issues and get to an even more accurate estimation. Going forward, I will document each issue so there is more visibility.
Most of the codebase is shared across all of them to make it easy to maintain. There are always some differences. All of the dashboards use same hosting providers and third party services and libraries. There was no science behind the split. Because the funds will come from two different treasuries, I thought that’s how it should be split. I am fine combining them or splitting in a different way.
Let me know if this answers and have any other questions, feedback or suggestions.
as one of the trasury councillors I was well aware of your upcoming funding request.
But as a web3 native with both - dev skills in React and systems engineer providing blockchain infra - I am a bit stunned by the requested amounts.
My friend @turrizt already frontran me on many of my points Thanks a lot for that.
So I’ll focus on some specifics.
The majority of requested funds is directed towards maintenance and enhancements.
I was trying to track these enhancements and the only moonbeam-specific fixes I found for the current year have been 2 commits of which one was a super quick color and logo design that came with Moonbeams redesign and the other one was the balance fix you already mentioned.
You did outline that it was effort spread over PM, design team and Dev while the actual job literally had zero design involved as it’s adjustmants in a table and none of the styles been changed in the commit feat: moonbeam balance overview · show-karma/dao-delegates-app@d0624ed · GitHub
Also while I would say this clearly took a day of work I can’t imagine it being anywhere near of 10x that time (you stated that it took 80 days).
With regards to the outlined support I think @turrizt is way better fit to judge these as community members usually reach out to him who relays such issues and questions. I for myself couldn’t find any possibility to obtain support (there’s no infos on the delegate page so I assume peeps land in Moonbeams TG and Discord for that).
On the infrasctucture side you put a flat 1k$/month for hosting and indexer.
For sure there is no debate about the dashboard needing no more like a few bucks droplet to exist so I just assume 99% of the sum is for the indexer.
I was having a look at your codebase to find out more about the indexer stack and found the graph subquery configuration.
As seasoned node operator for theGraph I’ll reference the specs here outlying that a 200$/month is absolutely capable to index a hundred subgraphs. Through the data on your website I assume you’re indexing 25+ subgraphs which should split the indexer cost among those instead of re-billing all of them big sums.
Would love if you could send somebody from your technical team in here to address these points.
Is it fair to just look the final code that is in prod and decide how much time it took? What about all the research that went in to it, discussions with your team, internal discussions, what to not do etc.? I agree for this particular feature it probably wasn’t full 80 hours of work but it definitely wasn’t just one day’s work. TBH, making any change in moobeam is non trivial. There are multiple levels of complexities. You would think just graph protocol subgraph will give all the info. But it doesn’t, it’s madness pulling data from different places, making sure it all works and nothing breaks.
I can not imagine running our business on a droplet costing $100/month. Just to give you what our backend code size is
As you are well aware, it takes lot more than just hosting cost for your infrastructure. What about github, vercel, sentry to name a few? I don’t want to go over every single line item of our business and operations.
It is clear you guys don’t agree that it costs this much to run these dashboards. So can you suggest what you think is reasonable and suggest where we can cut costs. If we can do it without losing money, we will consider.
Hi @mmurthy ,
Thank you for actively engaging with our community members. Sik and Turrizt are two of our most active Community Delegates, and they’re well-equipped to inquire about maintenance and support.
I’d also like to mention that working with you on setting up the dashboards was a pleasure. Those biweekly calls during the first three months were crucial in determining the best implementation approach. Both you and Arthur were very helpful throughout the process.
Based on the April 2023 Requirements document, we agreed on a cost breakdown of 10k USD as a one-time setup fee, plus 20k USD annually. This fee was intended to cover the continuous indexing of both on-chain and off-chain data for the two delegate dashboards (Moonbeam and Moonriver) and the Forum plugin. Given that the workload hasn’t increased and support tickets have significantly decreased due to market conditions and general participation apathy across web3, I find the numbers your team proposed a bit confusing.
Could we revisit and update the numbers according to the Requirements document we drafted together? If in the future there is a larger ask for a new feature, that could be handled as a separate engagement.
Additionally, I agree with Sik that our current support mechanism via Telegram chat isn’t ideal. We should explore better alternatives, maybe incorporating a request form on the dashboard or at least providing a direct link to a team member who can assist users.
@turrizt and @dev0_sik , if you have any ideas on improving the support system, please share them.
thank you for the detailed response. I just want to clarify that my questions aim to understand the scope of work and the associated costs totaling $29k, as the proposal lacks detail in this area. please don’t take this personally, I am advocating for transparency. It’s important that the community has access to this discussion and can review all aspects when needed
I recall this issue and remember directing the user to the Karma devs as per your request, especially after our initial attempt to resolve it proved unsuccessful. I suspect there was a misconfiguration on Karma’s side, as I couldn’t identify any triggers for the issue within the Moonbeam framework. could you please clarify where the misconfiguration occurred that prevented the user from undelegate his funds? I believe it’s somewhat unfair for the Moonbeam treasury to bear the costs for issues originating on Karma’s end. but, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this matter
i believe I pointed out and explained this issue in detail quite some time ago in our joint tg group, indicating that this is how it works. could you clarify what you mean by discovering this “very recently” - I’m a bit confused by the timeline here. could you please share more insights?
regarding this issue, many users have DMed me about it. the solution is quite simple, I just delete their erroneous message from the forum, allowing them to link the correct address. I don’t believe users need to reach out to karma for this issue, instead, they report it directly to us and we resolve it promptly
considering that the dashboards for Moonriver / Moonbase and Moonbeam share a significant portion of their codebase and infra, I’m curious about the justification for the high funding requests for both, especially $20k for Moonriver / Moonbase. could you provide a detailed breakdown of the specific costs that lead to these amounts?
btw, i noticed that the new logo has been updated for Moonbeam but not yet for Moonriver. it would be great to update the Moonriver logo as well. here’s the brand kit link for your reference: Moonbeam Brand Guidelines
hey @lina.k.m, I believe the official Moonbeam channels should remain the first point of contact for any issues, as is currently our practice. If the mods can’t resolve an issue, then escalating it to the Karma team would be the next step. should the initial resolution attempt fail, directly referring users to the Karma team might be necessary. it might also be beneficial to have a Karma team member join the Moonbeam Discord to help address questions directly. to ensure nothing gets overlooked, I can personally tag Karma team members in our joint Telegram group as a reminder to address pending issues. this would enhance transparency and keep us all informed about ongoing issues
also, we could include a feature on the Karma delegate dashboard directing users with issues to Moonbeam’s official channels, such as Discord or Telegram
hey @mmurthy, just wanted to flag that there seems to be an issue with the Voting History - it hasn’t been updated since June 20. could you look into this?
Thanks for these words, not taking it personally at all. It’s just that we have spent a very large amount of time over the last year bringing these dashboards to life and it has been the most complicated integration we have done compared to all our other dashboards and was just trying to communicate that.
Thanks for the kinds words @lina.k.m. It’s been great working with you and rest of the team as well. Thanks for pointing me to the doc which had these numbers. I severely underestimated the work involved here! We might potentially lose some money on these dashboards if support requests increase over the next year but I will honor what I had quoted. We will accept $20k. Apologies for wasting everyone’s time and energy with this discussion.
@turrizt Let me know if you are fine with this number and also if you want me to respond to your follow-up questions or if those are irrelevant to this conversation now.
We are taking a look at the issue you mentioned with voting history.
@mmurthy - just to clarify, my main goal here is to ensure transparency for the community, so that everyone has a clear understanding of the proposal and its details. I’m not part of the Treasury Council, so I don’t make decisions on whether the proposal will be approved / rejected
as for the follow-up questions, it’s totally up to you whether you want to respond to them. If there’s anything helpful or something we can learn from, that would be great! but no pressure - whatever you think is best
at the end of the day, we’re all aiming to do what’s best for the community, so thanks again for your openness and for taking the time to consider the feedback
Great, thank you Mahesh!
And no need to apologize - this Forum is exactly for this; an open discussion.
The hope is that there will be more users but not necessarily support requests
Title - [Proposal: XX] [Idea] Delegate dashboard renewal for Moonbeam, Moonriver and Moonbase
Abstract
Karma has built and has been maintaining custom delegate dashboards for Moonbeam, Moonriver and Moonbase over the past year. This proposal is a request for funding to continue enhancing and maintaining these dashboards.
Motivation
To build a healthy and dynamic ecosystem, a DAO needs active contributors. It is in the best interest of the DAO to recognize the most active contributors, engage them and potentially reward them for their contributions. Having a contributor tracking system will encourage members to lead various initiatives and contribute. By having visibility into the contributions, DAO can encourage the right kind of behavior from their community.
Project Overview and Team Experience
The delegate dashboards we have built are used by the DAO and community to onboard delegates, delegate their tokens, get visibility into their activities, hold them accountable, improve voting participation and further decentralize the DAO. The dashboard also provides deep insights into each delegate’s governance activity that will help token holders decide who to delegate their tokens to.
Note: Moonbase is not actively used but it acts as a sandbox to test any contract changes before deploying to other networks.
Team: I am the founder of Karma, have been in the crypto space for over 8 years and have been working on Karma for last 2.5 years. We are team of 5 mostly devs.
Rationale
Our dashboards are being actively used by Moonbeam community to perform delegation and gain visibility into delegate activity. Some of the features that are actively used include:
Features of the custom dashboard include:
Delegate onboarding flow
Ability to link social handles (Forum, Discord Handle)
Update delegation pitch and interests
Display Voting stats, history and voting reasons for each proposal
Display Forum stats
Contribution Scores
Ability for token holders to delegate directly from the dashboard
In Depth insights about delegates
Auto tag inactive delegates
Overall Cost
We are requesting 55,865 GLMR ($10k) for Moonbeam and 1094 MOVR (~$10k) for Moonriver and Moonbase dashboards.
Use of Treasury Funds
The funds will be used for the following:
Infrastructure costs: This includes the cost to maintain servers and third party indexers used to index delegates on a daily basis, store and calculate various stats.
Maintenance and Support: We received support requests on a regular basis and we help tokenholders resolve the issues in timely fashion. Like with any software, there is maintenance tasks related to upgrading libraries, bug fixes, performance enhancements, changes caused by third party services/indexer and small changes (branding upgrade for example).
Enhancements: We are constantly add features to the overall product and those updates are pushed to these three dashboards automatically.
We will maintain the dashboard for one year from the date of approval of proposal.
I will be happy to answer any questions from the Council members and the community. We look forward to continuing to contribute to the DAO
Dear @mmurthy this reply just to signal you that you have the Treasury Council Green Light to proceed with onchain proposals creation (both MB & MR) accordingly to above Updated Post (20k usd as total cost).
@mmurthy the process of putting up a treasury proposal on-chain is outlined here but if you need any assistance feel free to contact me on TG or Discord ( @dev0_sik )
@micheleicebergnodes - I am ready to submit the proposal. I just noticed, the I will be receiving about $1.4k less with the token price you suggested. Can I adjust it to today’s price?
Thanks a lot for that.
