[Grant request] Boost $SCRT builder adoption with secret.buidl.me!

[staky_validator]

Hello everyone,

We would like to introduce our secret.buidl.me project and its grant request. Before going into the details of the project, you can read the pitch deck here (or at the bottom of this post):

pitchdeck_buidl_secret.pdf

1- Who are we?

Staky.io is a Secret validator that launched a few weeks ago. We’re a team of 6 blockchain builders with various profiles: Blockchain and Fullstack developers, UX/UI designers and communication/growth hacking.

Our goal was to define a new staking experience for PoS delegators. We want to bring value to the PoS ecosystem in 3 different ways:

• Indeed, validate and secure the network to ensure its proper operation
• Provide services for delegators such as staking dashboards, balances and rewards tracking or decentralized governance to allow our delegators to be at the center of our decision making. This part takes place on our platform, https://staky.io.
• And last but not least, we believe that a good validator is actively contributing to the network they’re validating. That’s what we want to achieve with buidl.me.

2- What is buidl.me about?

When we designed this formula, we wanted to solve one of the most critical issues facing today’s PoS ecosystem: the number of active developers. Blockchain technologies are getting more and more popular, but we’re still in an ultra-competitive niche. The most precious resource for ecosystems is developers and what is making the success of DApp platforms such as Ethereum (despite its technical constraints) is its strong developer community.

Buidl.me is a platform that is designed to boost the adoption of specific Blockchain technologies by developers.

3- Buidl.me X $SCRT

3.1 - Buidl.me is a community platform that will allow anyone to teach and transmit his knowledge through a series of interactive and engaging courses. We benchmarked the most popular e-learning solutions and decided to go on the “Docs with interactive IDE” format.

Users will be able to read through a series of documentation-like chapters and to practice their skills in an interactive IDE. In this way, developers will have an engaging first approach to the skills and will be much more likely to practice this knowledge after the course!

The applications of this kind of platform are countless, it could be a “Get started” course for hackathon or workshop events, an introduction to a new feature that is released on-chain, etc.

And the community aspect, that is allowing anyone to write and publish its own course will drastically boost the amount of available content (rather than counting on a single entity to publish them).

3.2 - Here is what the platform will look like - These prototypes are work in progress and will evolve in the future!

Users will be able to find a tutorial adapted to their skills level

With the “interactive IDE” format, the lessons will be engaging for the users and they’ll be more likely to practice their skills in real condition after the course.

Anyone can publish a lesson, the collaborative aspect will be a catalyst to bring a lot of content and activity on the platform.

3.3 - As specified earlier, we want the platform to be community-driven, anyone from the community could apply to be admin and therefore approve/decline submitted courses or even contribute to the repository.

We want Harmony to be one of the first ecosystems to host buidl.me. Our plan is to bring more and more features as we deploy it on other ecosystems. Possibilities are countless: gamification (awards, etc.), incentivized course writing, etc. We would keep all the buidl.me platforms updated. In other words, it’s not a one-shot, the development would be continuous throughout the years.

4 - Funding requested

We estimate that we need 4 months to complete the entire platform. We have detailed the missions of each one with the development and creation costs that we will meet in order to create the platform.

3 Fullstack developers who will be in charge of building the collaborative platform. One of the major challenges of this platform is to create the platform and create an efficient course builder tool.

Salary : 2400$/month/developper

1 Designer

1 UX/UI Designer who will be in charge of designing the collaborative platform. They will be responsible for making a good interactive and engaging experience.

Salary : 2400$/month/designer

Those costs also include maintenance costs after the release of the platform.

Total: approx ~ 68430 SCRT (38,400$)

We’d love to have the community feedback or to answer any of your questions about us or the secret.buidl.me project!

[taariq]

Hi Staky,
Is the code compiled and run, or just compared to the course author’s solution?
Is this based on any existing platform?

Also, only curious cos you mentioned Harmony, are they involved in the project as well?

[staky_validator]

Hi!

So, we want the course creation process to be as user-friendly as possible. The code compilation would create too many frictions in the course creation process, it would be painful to write chapters and therefore there would be less content on the platform.

On the other hand, a strict comparison would not be flexible enough.

We decided to opt for a system that would compare the user response with the expected response by removing ambiguous elements and checking if all requirements are present in the user’s answer.
We benchmarked the most popular “interactive e-learning” solution (e.g Space Doggos for Solidity) and this is the best compromise in our opinion.

The platform will be developed from scratch for Secret, there is currently no other buidl.me platform. Harmony is not involved with that project, we were planning to deploy it on Harmony first but Secret seems to be the perfect fit for the initial deployment (with the recent Secret contract update).

The goal for us is to create a “master” buidl.me repo that we would update as new ecosystems get theirs. We have tons of idea for iterations (gamification, incentivized course writing system, etc), that means that the secret.buidl.me would get updated continuously as the overall buidl.me repo is growing. I also want to insist on the fact that the secret.buidl.me platform will be dedicated to the secret.buidl.me community, this will be 100% separate from other buidl.me platforms that may be created !

[taariq]

Cool, thanks for clarifying.

[Brendan]

I support this project. I’ve taken a class like this for Python and really enjoyed it. This will really help developers learn how to develop Secret Contracts! Also I appreciate the rationale provided for the amount requested. Will this be custodied by the foundation and have payments in installments based on delivery schedule? Staky should join a Governance and/or developer call.

[staky_validator]

Hi @Brendan!

Thanks a lot for your support!

1°) I assume that you are referring to the platform custody. Yep, we want this platform to be owned by the community. The repo could be owned by enigmampc for example (or any other community team), but that’s details. The point is that anyone from the community can be admins (to approve new courses for example). We’ll be there too to update the platform and provide contents! What we want to mean by that is that secret.buidl.me will be a tool of the Secret community and not a service provided by Staky

2°) We wanted to know if it would be possible to have all the funds now, it was convenient for us because we wanted to stake a part of the funds to gain importance within the Secret community while paying the team progressively. We will of course be posting regular project updates to keep you informed of progress.

We leave it up to you, let us know if you prefer another system.

3°) Of course! I saw that there was a dev call today, unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to join for schedules problems. I’ll be glad to join a future call

[staky_validator]

Following a question about the content management in a private channel, we decided to post our vision about the content strategy for secret.buidl.me. We’d love, once again, to have your thoughts and your question about it!

"Let me talk a bit more about we’re planning to handle content on the platform.

So there will be 2 phases, the first phases will be basically the release, we will as buidl.me builders, coordinate the creation of a group of editors who will be in charge of creating the content. This could be anyone from the community and we would also be happy to write some courses. The goal will be to provide a content base, “get started” courses, introductions to specific events or technologies etc.

In a second phase, we plan to update the general repo buid.me (so by extension the secret.buidl.me platform) with features to provide a system of content writing incentivization. We believe that this will be a great catalyst for rich content. It’s not set in stone yet (we’re still thinking about the form), but we’re planning for a kind of DAO-style system in which anyone from the community could propose some content writing with a budget and people could vote if the proposition should be accepted or not. There are a lot of thing to decide, for example the fund origin (we’re thinking about a public bounty like gitcoin for example) or even the tech that will be used to run the DAO.

We’re believing that secret.buidl.me will be very benefic for the secret ecosystem activity and that it could help a lot for the developer adoption even without the DAO update. But it won’t also be a one shot, we’re planning to update the general buidl.me general repo on a long-term basis. We believe that it’s a win-win situation, secret fund the initial project, and the ecosystem will benefit all the further updates!"

[staky_validator]

Hello everyone,

Most of the questions around our secret.buidl.me platform were around the content. We’d like to provide a list of content that we’d like to release in the short term of the platform release.

Get Started with Secret Contracts part 1: The Contract

This course will aim to teach the fundamentals of Secret Contracts. A lot of chapters can be addressed there:

• Dependencies installation,
• Environment setup (IDE, testnet, etc)
• Write your first contract, this will be a simple game such as a dice game.
• Deploy and monitor

---

Get Started with Secret Contracts part 2: Interactions and frontend

This course will cover the other aspect of Sceret Apps: interactions with users.

The goal will be to introduce the interactions with SecretJS and the frontend. We’ll be creating a basic UI and we’ll interact with the game previously created

---

Discover the Secret API and build a real-time Block visualizer

This course will introduce the secret API features, its possibilities, and a live example of a live Block visualizer built with a modern JS framework like Vue or React.

---

Advanced courses

We’ll be able to produce ourselves the first 3 courses, advanced courses will be the opportunity to bring specialized content for Secret ecosystem. We’ll be requiring help from community members to create this content and we’ll even be able to give a bounty if necessary. Here are the subject that we are considering:

• DeFi related course
• Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol and interoperability related
• Adaptation of current tutorials such as the secret texas hold’em

There are a lot of possibilities there and we’d be glad to receive any suggestions.

---

We have also decided to update our proposal with a payment schedule:

33% of the funds at the passing of the proposition

33% at mid-project update (60 days after the passing)

33% at product release (at the end of project ~4 months after passing of the proposition)

All the unreleased funds would be held by the foundation.

We’d like to submit the on-chain community spends proposal soon and we’re looking forward to all your feedback and questions!

[can]

Thanks @staky_validator for providing more information about the content.

Does product release include the first 3 courses?

[Avret]

So, to be clear, this does not include an IDE that deploys sample contracts, a la redux, and therefore doesn’t easily allow developers to see the impacts of changes to the code?

[staky_validator]

That’s true. The course including “interactive IDE” chapters won’t compile the code or deploy the contracts. This kind of tool would be a great pick in a dedicated product, maybe like the https://remix.ethereum.org/ of CosmWasm.

We don’t exclude the possibility of integrating it in further buidl.me updates (which secret.buidl.me will benefit) but not in the initial release

[staky_validator]

@can

Yes, it would be possible for us to have those 3 first courses ready at release. We’ll also get the community started & coordinate the content creation to get advanced courses as soon as possible!

[guy]

@staky_validator thank you for putting so much effort into this proposal and for your continuous support of the network.

While I like the idea as a whole, I do have some serious concerns about the proposal as it stands:

• There’s little value in the content management platform itself (for Secret Network), compared to actually delivering content. This was somewhat improved in the refined proposal, but it still feels light.

• Without something like remix (which is extremely needed and would change significantly how I feel about this platform), where people can play, experiment and compile on the web as they learn, there’s likely limited value for this product.

• The following quote from the original proposal concerns me. Was Harmony mentioned because this proposal is being replicated across ecosystems? There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if this is a commodity product that is being developed for many ecosystems, then there should be a proper disclosure.

We want Harmony to be one of the first ecosystems to host buidl.me

Personally, for the amount of funding this proposal is asking for, I think the product should (1) include an actual, compileable, interactive IDE; and (2) have more content (and less content management).

Again, a lot of thought was put into this and I don’t mean to dismiss it in any way. I think such proposals are paramount and from anything I’ve seen Staky is well equipped to execute. However, in order to be able to support this, I’d like to see the issues above addressed, or the funding amount adjusted significantly.

[staky_validator]

Hi @guy

First of all, thanks for your feedback. Let me address all the points you mentioned

1 - About the content, I think that we have to seek for the long term there. We designed this platform in order to ease the creation of content and create an education hub. Of course that the real value lie in the content, but having the tools to easily create interactive and engaging content will be the catalyst of content creation. The goal of this platform is to see some content created by people who would not have taken action without these tools, to create a community activity around education. We want to go even further in that matter with the DAO plan.

2 - Yep, our goal with buidl.me is to provide tools to several Blockchain ecosystems as we specified in the initial post The platforms won’t compete with each other and would be 100% separated, it’s like Keplr deploying its tools on several Blockchains or Mintscan explorer! Also, the benefits is that secret.buidl.me would benefit all the updates literally funded by other ecosystems! It’s a bit like when you buy the Tesla autopilot and get free updates as new features are coming haha. Also, there is currently no active development of any buidl.me platform, we’re currently searching for the first ecosystem to host it. If we find one, we’ll keep you updated and will lower the amount requested.

@staky_validator

Our plan is to bring more and more features as we deploy it on other ecosystems. Possibilities are countless: gamification (awards, etc.), incentivized course writing, etc.

3 - About the compilation/deployment of code. We agree that these features would be a great addition to the overall platform. Let me first explain why we didn’t want to include that:

The platform won’t be rust-only, there will be tutorials on SDK, even some with frontend part etc. It seemed weird to be inconsistent on how we handle verification/interactions and we obviously wouldn’t add features to compile every possible language We also have in mind the course creation UX that is definitely extremely important to have rich content on the platform, our system of flexible verification is also better for quicker course creation.

However, we see that this feature is extremely requested by the community. We’re going to discuss it with the team to see what are our options and if we can redesign the product to include code compilation deployment. The only way that I can see this on the platform would be to keep our code verification system (for chapter progress), but also to allow the user to deploy its contract. That would preserve the verification logic consistent across languages and also the course creation UX!

We put the grant request on hold, we’ll come back with an updated proposition (either including compilation/deployment option, either with updated funding request if we’re able to find funding elsewhere).

Thanks everyone for giving your thoughts, even if it’s critical toward our project. The last thing that we want would be to get funded for something that wouldn’t satisfy the community

See you soon! We’ll come back as soon as possible with updated plans

[taariq]

@staky_validator

So, we want the course creation process to be as user-friendly as possible. The code compilation would create too many frictions in the course creation process, it would be painful to write chapters and therefore there would be less content on the platform.

Hi again @staky_validator, just revisiting this since I’ve looked at gitpod.io recently.
Did you guys make that assessment while being aware of gitpod and similar projects?