Testnet committee charter and Q3 funding proposal

[taariq]

Continuing the efforts from Q2, I’ve cut down the overall budget by 30% for the quarter, the number of hours by ~30%, and the hourly rate to $85.

We hit all targets for Q2, even though the period was reduced to 2 months due to market volatility during the last proposal.
We did not get to do a network upgrade as it’s planned for September, but we are fully prepared, and testing the beta version as it gets released.

The charter was only updated to add a new faucet, since the current one is down and folks are using the Stashh app’s faucet.

This quarter’s goals;

1. Network upgrade in September
2. Deploy a new faucet, namely faucet.pulsar.scrttestnet.com
3. Support, and any docs maintenance.
4. Finish the examples in Secret.JS templates (I’ll try wrap this up in the next day or so anyway)

If there’s any other issues you think I should focus on this quarter, please let me know, ideally before the proposal goes on chain, if it has any budget impact.

There’s been some good discussions recently around conflict of interest, and whether validators should vote on their own proposals, or any efforts they’re involved in. I’ll take this up in the governance call today to be clear.

Thanks for your ongoing support.

[SecretSaturn]

Going beyond the latest Secret CoC I should note that I declare a conflict of interest in this matter.
I receive some small part of the funding, in particular for the backup endpoint and load balancer and for a validator node.

[taariq]

Thanks Alex. also raised this on the gov call and its not an issue atm, at least until there’s clarity around such edge cases as well. Of course we deliberately have validators involved in the testnet.

Quick update before I post the proposal tomorrow;

• The new faucet is mostly done, it’s already live here but still a few small things to do, and docs to update.

• SecretJS-templates is also done for now, with all examples working and some new ones added. It could use some styling in the new examples.

BTW we’re still looking for 2 more validators to join, along with WhisperNodes, to take us to the full 10.

[taariq]

The proposal is now live, https://secretnodes.com/proposals/106
Please vote.

[taariq]

Thanks for the votes everyone, your support is appreciated and I’ll continue to do my best.

I’ve converted the SCRT to USDC for a net $22,579, a little shy of the $23430 before 10% buffer, this is enough to cover the expenses and the shortfall will come from my time which also has a buffer if the upgrade is smooth.

Since the proposal went live there has been a request in telegram for IBC relayers on pulsar, a possible stretch goal for the quarter with any hours remaining.

If there are any suggestions or concerns about the testnet, please reach out to me here or on Discord in the #secret-testnet channel.

[taariq]

Secret Testnet progress report for Q3

Thanks to the other validators for their support, and also many thanks to Assaf and the rest of the team at SCRT Labs, we’ve enjoyed a smooth quarter on the testnet, with multiple upgrades.

There were a couple of hiccups, but ironed out immediately, thanks again to the great support of all involved.

Budget was tight due to the SCRT price dropping after the proposal went up, but we carry over $1500 to the next quarter, due to 2 of the 10 validators not getting up and running yet.

Setup is expensive both in time and cost, and folks were working on mainnet issues, and other contributions to the network, so I allowed all the time they need to get started.
That said, we have 2 weeks left in this quarter, and if the next ones in line don’t manage to get started by then, I’ll have to ask the next validators in the waiting list.

In terms of hours, my budget was cut by 10 more hours, but I finished all the goals for Q3, mostly the faucet and the network upgrades.
Network upgrades themselves are quick, but I also got the SecretJS templates updated to the latest API.
This wasn’t just a version change, so took a couple of days.

For the next quarter I’ll ask for 20 hours per month, for any potential network upgrades, and to maintain and add more SecretJS tutorials, including a couple of hours to update Figment learn’s app which is using the outdated SecretJS api.

I’ll post a new thread for Q4 tomorrow, so if you’d like to see more, or less, please feel free to post there, or reach out to me.