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🚨 NOTE: You must first click DUPLICATE in the top righthand corner before starting.
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GRANT INTRODUCTION
Please provide a descriptive name to help the community understand your proposed, unique approach to decentralized mining pools.
<aside> âž• Stacks is seeking to increase the decentralization of its mining network by a minimum of 200% in order to support the decentralized use of sBTC. This can be only be accomplished by making it easy for anyone (without deep technical knowledge) to run a mining pool.
Current proposals allow for users to deposit xBTC via Magic Bridge. However, xBTC is a niche token that is not very well known outside of the existing Stacks community, and is not guaranteed to be trusted by BTC holders.
We are interested in researching ways to enable users to deposit BTC into Stacks pools, i.e. enabling the ability to “crowdfund” BTC for mining. This will likely entail the use of a Discreet Log Contract to enable non-custodial, trustless deposits. This proposed solution has been discussed with Syvita and is described here: https://www.dlc.link/use-cases/usecase-syvita. We can support Jacob Cantu’s work in this regard.
Broadly speaking, we are generally able to build infrastructure and developer tooling to better support Stacks operators. We can support other work (i.e. led by Jacob, Xan or others) in this regard.
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How many hours of work total should this project take to complete?
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The total number of hours will depend on the amount of work that is scoped. Some possible tasks could include a front-end interface making joining the mining pool user friendly experience, or allowing modifications of mining pool settings dynamically via hot-modifying config files (as per https://github.com/stacks-network/stacks-blockchain/pull/3385).
At DLC.Link we are staffed and experienced to quickly scope out these optional projects, and either complete them or subcontract them from within the available funding.
However, we will scope now what is technically required for a sample white-label-able solution which can easily be duplicated and used by a team who wants to maintain such a product. This will be a well-tested and functioning open-source product with a simple UI for mining participants to join a pool, and the tools and smart contracts needed for a DLC-based solution and supporting non-custodial BTC contributions for STX mining.
The initial research phase will likely take 2 a minimum of weeks and will involve 2 dedicated FTEs, equaling 160 hours. Research is to be 20% of the entire project duration, that suggests a total work effort encompassing 800 hours.
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Take the hours above and multiply by $75/hr. If your project requires any third party fees, add those as a separate cost outside of development time-related costs.
<aside> âž• Just using the high-level estimate above, the research phase will cost out at $12k and the entire project would cost $60k.
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**Please note the complexity of this project will likely require a team of people working together. We ask that only teams with a proven track record of delivering projects at a high level TOGETHER apply.
You are a good candidate for this grant if your team has …**
a) Deep understanding of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Script
b) Deep understanding of Clarity, Proof of Transfer, and Stacks Mining
c) Deep understanding of contemporary front-end technologies.
d) Deep understanding of all required backend / middleware technologies & infrastructure.
e) Experience with being a mining and/or stacking pool operator.
f) Track record of shipping production-level products in Stacks (e.g. related to Stacking or infra level), relationships to work with Stacks entities.
g) Please note having product development, business development, and fund-raising experience would be seen as a value add as Stacks Ventures has expressed interest in investing in this product upon completion.
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We have a deep understanding of Bitcoin, Clarity and PoX, as evidenced by our contributions in the Stacks ecosystem to date. For an example, see: https://www.dlc.link/blog/new-contract-types-on-stacks-testnet
We also have deep experience with DevOps (AWS, ECS & Kubernetes) and the ability to run mining nodes. As we build out the DLC.link platform, we’ve been building a decentralized network of Bitcoin oracles that can be run by individual node operators. If helpful to Stacks, we can amend our scope and operate a stacking pool ourselves. We can also build infrastructure and tooling to better enable stacking pool operators (e.g. working with Xan and others as well).
We also have demonstrated business development skills and can evangelize the product. We have expertise in creating documentation, content and training and have run a hackathon at Stacks as well.
However, we know there are other very talented engineers within the ecosystem, and we’re very motivated to bring on experienced members, such as friedger and pseudozach and members of the Syvita Mining team, with whom we’ve had great interactions with to date.
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