stacking.club 2.1

[fungiblesystems]

APPLICANT

Type:                                                                        Direct Application

Email:                                                                    [email protected]

Discord:                                                    aulneau

Twitter:                                                        aulneau_

Stacks Forum:           aulneau.id

GRANT BASICS

Grant Name:                                        stacking.club 2.1

Total Budget:                              225,000

Total Duration:                 1,500

Grant Type:                                               Open Source Dev Repeat Grantees

Grant Track:                                          Stacks Interface

Grant Goal:                                               Improve Existing Technologies

Grant Audience:             End Users (Consumer)

Specific Audience:         Developers and all Stackers

Grant Team:                                       aulneau, jjenzz, fungiblejasper, +1 more

Previous Grants:                      290, continued funding for micro-stacks

Ecosystem Programs:      

GRANT MISSION, IMPACT, RISKS & REFERENCE

Grant Mission:         stacking.club has been the go-to source for stacking related information since shortly after Stacks 2.0 was launched.

With Stacks 2.1 there are some changes to the pox protocol that we want to include in stacking.club, along with a rebuild of the API, making it officially public (apps use it now, but it's not in a good state for public usage), and improvements to the frontend. We also want to add stacking functionality built into the application, which has been requested by multiple folks in the ecosystem.

The primary goal of this grant is to give us (Fungible Systems) the ability to dedicate real time towards the product, and to help offset some of the costs of maintaining and running stacking.club (~$300+ a month for infra costs alone)

Grant Impact:               App developers make use of the API, users stack through the website, traffic continues to grow.

Grant Risks:                          Not many, stacking.club has seen consistent usage over the last year+

Support Link:                                     the current version of stacking.club

GRANT ROADMAP & DELIVERABLES

MILESTONE 1:

Deliverable:                   new API backend powered by chainhooks

MILESTONE 2:

Deliverable:                   Public API documentation, JS/TS client for API

MILESTONE 3:

Deliverable:                   A cleaned up and improve frontend

MILESTONE 4:

Deliverable:                   Stacking features built into the frontend(contract calls)

MILESTONE 5:

Deliverable:                   Exploration around improved visualizations and other UI/UX improvements

MILESTONE 6:

Deliverable:                   Research and exploration around how best to support pool operators/users

FINAL DELIVERABLE

Deliverable:                   An updated stacking.club for stacks 2.1, new public API built with chainhooks

[stacks-foundation]

👋 @fungiblesystems


Thanks for your application! We will do a pre-review and let you know if we have any immediate questions. In the mean time please refer to our review schedule here for a detailed timeline and response dates.


Best,
Will

[markmhendrickson]

This is great to see! And would work particularly well with the Hiro Wallet extension now that we have Ledger support for it, since many Stackers will want to use their hardware device while engaging with a stacking.club 2.1 that has integrated stacking functionality.

Would it be possible to ship this in time for the launch of Stacks 2.1 itself vs. some date afterwards?

[fbwoolf]

Very cool, happy to see this! 👍

[fungiblesystems]

Would it be possible to ship this in time for the launch of Stacks 2.1 itself vs. some date afterwards?

It's still not clear to me the exact timeline for 2.1, and it would be difficult to commit to doing anything before or at the launch, but depending on the exact launch date, something near it could be likely, provided the grant is accepted and we begin work on it as soon as possible :)

[friedger]

It would be great to have a good looking functional open source alternative to https://stacks-pool-registry.pages.dev/

[markmhendrickson]

It's still not clear to me the exact timeline for 2.1

The last estimate I've heard was 2.1 activation on mainnet by end of December. I'm not sure if that's changed, but I assume that's the earliest it'd go live.

Is there a sense of how many weeks this grant would take if and when it were to start (e.g. if it were an estimated 4 weeks, and it were to get approved by mid-November, we could expect delivery by roughly mid-December)?

[aulneau]

The grant is to safely cover work on stacking.club for around two quarters. It's very unlikely that substantial work will be completed by the end of December. There needs to be much work done to update the indexing service that powers the application before working on the integrated stacking functionality and updated frontend. I'd say it's safe to assume we will not have those features live before '23.

[markmhendrickson]

Good to know, thanks!

[aulneau]

It would be great to have a good looking functional open source alternative to https://stacks-pool-registry.pages.dev/

yeah, we're definitely very interested in providing an interface for delegate stackers and pool discovery too, i just didn't include it in a milestone because we need to do more research. Provided the grant is accepted, we will be doing plenty of exploration and research into building out new features.

[friedger]

There needs to be much work done to update the indexing service
We now have https://github.com/byzantion-xyz/alexandria-stx-indexer That could speed up things :-) (I couldn't find the reference to that grant @will-at-stacks)

Does this grant also include open sourcing the app? What will happen when the grant money has been spent?

[aulneau]

There needs to be much work done to update the indexing service
We now have https://github.com/byzantion-xyz/alexandria-stx-indexer That could speed up things :-) (I couldn't find the reference to that grant @will-at-stacks)

Yeah -- I've been watching it since they got the grant, but I think it's more likely we'll be using chainhooks as the event observer/emitter for the indexing service that powers stacking.club

Does this grant also include open sourcing the app? What will happen when the grant money has been spent?

Yes -- will be fully open source (api and frontend)

[MarvinJanssen]

@aulneau I assume the new public API will come with documentation / Postman? Good docs take a bit of work so I think it is worth mentioning as part of the overall application or a milestone.

[fungiblesystems]

@aulneau I assume the new public API will come with documentation / Postman? Good docs take a bit of work so I think it is worth mentioning as part of the overall application or a milestone.

Yes -- good call. Updated the milestones. Please note, the milestones are not necessarily in order, they might come at different times depending on what we end up with around planning/architecture/research

[will-corcoran]

Hello @fungiblesystems

Thank you for the application and for your patience with the grant review process. We did a thorough review of all of the applications (each application received an average of 6 reviews from members of the Grants Review Committee).  However, after much consideration, we decided not to fund any of the Cohort 19 grant applications as we did not feel they aligned with critical priorities core to the development of the Stacks blockchain.  

We invite you to please read this blog post we authored to help elaborate on the reasoning behind this decision and clarify the current mission of the Grants Program.

Thanks in advance,
Will
Stacks Foundation Grants Program Manager

[314159265359879]

I am sorry to read this is not approved. I think it is important to have a well functioning stacking.club for Stacks 2.1. Today Stacking.club was down and it was immediately noticed by users. Especially when the team has shown an interest in adding a slick UI for delegated stacking (and the new Stacks 2.1 features) which would naturally include functions for continuous stacking and topping off?

I understand that the Grants Program wants to focus on key areas and I like that idea.

Perhaps the grant needs to be changed a bit to make it focus more on the critical bounties from the blog post? Just having the smart-contracts being the focus though seems shortsighted to me. The user interface and user experience is equally important and this team has already shown an interest to do that work too (post). I believe they would be able to knock this out the park.

I hope the team considers adapting the grant in such a way that it gets the required focus (to align with the critical bounties, and for the Foundation to allow some flexibility.
If there are good arguments to do the whole grant instead of a revised version (I can't judge if it makes sense to focus on milestone 4 and 6 without working on the others) I think the whole grant should be reconsidered, perhaps the order can be adjusted such that the first work aligns (sufficiently) with the critical bounties.

[laststrawman]

I too am disappointed this could not have been approved. There are many of us that looked to get daily statistics from this site. If it had been approved, it could have provided many people new to stacks information on how to use Stacks most basic contract ... PoX.

[whoabuddy]

+1 this has definitely been a valuable resource for me, I check it often and use the data for various purposes.

With the changes to PoX in 2.1 I would think this would be a go-to resource for people to get the most up-to-date information on Stacking, and iirc it was also feeding data into DefiLlama.

This would be an excellent example of setting up an API using a chainhook event observer, which could be a great template for future projects looking to do similar things.

[bogachevanton]

+1 support this grant and see a huge need for this resource for our entire community.
I and many users at Stacks Eastern Europe use the resource to track information about reward cycles and their stacking status.
A site update after the start of 2.1 is necessary, as it will have to redo the method of displaying stacking for users and pools with the activate of infinite stacking. The site also had a great API that was used by several other applications in the ecosystem.

[will-corcoran]

@aulneau thanks for revising your application for this project. This revised scope at $90k has been approved. Congrats!

Thank you also to @markmhx @igorsyl and Christian for your feedback on the process.

We would also like to thank @diwakergupta @owenstrevor @wileyj @tycho1212 @jennymith and @kenrogers for their time and effort in conducting a review of the revised application.

@aulneau we will be sending a contract shortly.

[Hero-Gamer]

Congratulation team!

[will-corcoran]

Additional discussion for this grant can be found here.