KAGOME treasury proposal 2

KAGOME is a C++ Polkadot Host implementation that provides an alternative to Polkadot-SDK to run relay chain validator client. In this treasury proposal, the Quadrivium team is seeking further funding for the development and initial security audit of KAGOME.

Why another Host implementation?

With KAGOME and other client implementations, we bring clients diversity to Polkadot, which allows for:

• Reducing the risks of bugs in a single client implementation, such as halted Kusama parachain block production, or Polkadot dispute storm
• Bringing innovations (e.g. 2x faster erasure coding)
• Expanding the development community to other languages

To learn more about KAGOME and the importance of client diversity in the Polkadot ecosystem, you can:

• Watch the most recent presentation during Polkadot Decoded 2023.
• Read some of the recent tweets from the Polkadot account about client diversity.
• Get familiar with the Alternative Polkadot Host implementations RFP by Web3 Foundation.

How is KAGOME aligned with the Polkadot 2.0 vision?

Accoring to Polkadot’s Co-Founder Robert Habermeier: “The 2.0 era will be defined by a decentralized collective of developers designing and building in the open. This marks a transition from a few agents building software to many agents - sometimes competing, sometimes collaborating, but all working to move things forward” (source)

Moreover, in the recent announcement by Parity technologies it was announced that “Parity will be zeroing in on delivering Polkadot's next-gen technology, improving the developer experience, and fostering a strong developer community” and emphasized importance of diverse builders in ecosystem.

The KAGOME team has proven to be one of the most experienced and competent teams in the ecosystem, when it comes to understanding how the Polkadot protocol works. This fact reduces the dependency on a single team developing Polkadot protocol.

Our team has remained relatively unchanged over the past 3-4 years, allowing us to develop the most advanced alternative relay chain client. Today KAGOME:

• Participates in the Kusama 1000 validators program, securing the Kusama network as one of its validators. (Source: Twitter, Validator)
• Serves as a permanent validator in Westend. (Source: Westend)
• Boasts the fastest Erasure coding implementation. (Source: Twitter)

Reflecting on previous proposal submission

This is the resubmission of Referendum 146, which did not pass despite receiving much positive feedback highlighting the team's competence and the high quality of our previous work. Therefore this proposal was adjusted with the following changes:

• DevOps and QA support will be handled without Soramitsu's involvement.
  • The Quadrivium team will take over quality assurance.
  • The existing development team will temporarily maintain the CI/CD process until a new DevOps engineer is hired.
• Optimized Scope resulting in 33% cost reduction:
  • The proposal duration has been shortened from 6 months to 4 months, focusing on the most urgent and impactful features: BEEFY, Async backing, and WasmEdge integration.

The scope of proposal

The proposed scope is already being implemented. The full scope of the proposal is following:

• Asynchronous backing
  • already implemented, being tested
• BEEFY
  • voting is done, only slashing is left (as in Substrate)
• New WASM Engine (WASM Edge)
• Security Audit (by SRLabs)
• General maintenance and minor improvements
• DevOps and QA

Requested DOT: 168432

Please review the full proposal with detailed tasks descriptions and price breakdown:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZmueuaMjXY3_SRBHxWtKNHzpLNtSd_KGVfeTII6Nbc/

About Quadrivium

Quadrivium is a team of original C++ developers who developed KAGOME and C++ Libp2p while being part of Soramitsu. Soramitsu received a Web3 Foundation grant and a Kusama treasury proposal to develop KAGOME. In August 2023, the entire development team spun off from Soramitsu to form Quadrivium, which will continue the development of KAGOME.

About SRLabs

SRLabs is a Security Audit company that will be conducting an initial audit of KAGOME. SRLabs already has years of experience in auditing Substrate, which makes it a perfect fit for checking KAGOME In addition, Web3 Foundation will be participating as technical advisor and will provide mentoring and technical support to ensure the completeness of milestones and conforming the specification.