Public Goods Working Group Meeting notes, February 21

Attendance

Makoto
Sumedha.eth
Ricmoo.eth
Avsa.eth
Scott Moore
Antony (viewer)

Topics

Colony DAO

Avsa annouced the creation of a Colony for ENS in Gnosis Chain. He’s been testing it with his own funds that were set for ENS Integrations bounty and is moving that process to Colony. He invited the other stewards to join and maybe execute the grants in this process. Makoto asked what was the real difference of that and just having a 3 out of 5 Gnosis Safe on main net, since the budget for stewards are supposed to be in their control, not run by other people based on “reputation”. Ric thought the interface was unresposive and he wasn’t keen on having yet another account to create. Scott asked “where is the 10x improvement that would justify the change”? The stewards agree to let the experiment run more and Alex would come back with more of his experience on running the Colony before making any request of the other stewards.

Grant request

The topic moved to grants. Since it’s the first time these budget requests ever happened, there were many questions on how to them and when.

  • Ideally there should be some coordination among Working Groups, so that their budgets are in similar formats and compatible sizes
  • The total sum of all grant requests, including the True Names refund for taxes spent, should be less than last year revenue from ENS names. Preferably much less than the revenue, because the goal is also to grow the ENS warchest, not take from it
  • We don’t want to have a large overhead, and we should hire people for work that clearly has value (preferably after the value was demonstrated) and not simply hire for a job because there’s money for that, without clear value add.
  • We don’t want to replicate the Gitcoin infrastructure

Working Group vs Gitcoin

The last point was important, because if all we are doing is generating grants for public goods gitcoin style, then we might as well save on the overhead and simply donate them.

Scott, also a Gitcoin Steward explained they could do a special ENS grant for us, which would still require some man power and not be a simple donation. This could help show ENS where the community was interested in donating.

Something that Public Grants could do that would not overlap with Gitcoin would be to come up with a series of proposed Bounties, in a Request For Proposal scheme for things that we would consider ENS Public good.

What is a public good after all?

An ENS public good should be a project that the steward believe would bring great benefit for ENS and the Web3 ecossytem if it existed, but there isn’t anyone building it yet because it’s not a clear VC win.

A gitcoin like bounty is good for a project that already exists and has a team, but needs to grow and is having a hard time attracting seed investors.

A Request for Proposal / Bounty is for a project or protocol that doesn’t exist yet (other than maybe some hackaton attempts) and we want to incentivize it sprouting. If gitcoin is where a small seed grows, RfPs is where they are planted.

Conclusion

We all agreed to come up with a good list of projects for a future bounty page:

Examples:

Some Suggestions on RFP that we could bounty

Tools to encourage ENS usage as a social media/blog/website
We believe ENS is a key part of a future decentralized social media. Not as “yet another alternative social media” but rather a piece of a series of protocols that will help decentralize the internet. Some suggestions:

  • ENS + signed RSS: a tool that would turn a series of messages signed with a private key associated with ENS into an RSS feed of signed messages, so that the user only needed to update his ENS content field once
  • ENS + Markdown: a tool that would help a user create a Medium style website using the information from his profile, the signed RSS messages and/or a series of markdown files uploaded to IPFS
  • ENS for standard messaging protocol: a common protocol for ay EVM based apps that wants to offer chat functionality, allowing anyone to message an ENS name.

Tools for further integrating ENS with traditional internet

  • Allow cheaper method for owners of website to claim ENS names
  • Can the new scalability and wildcard features of ENS be used to allow a user claim an ENS name by just confirming an email?
  • Can we claim ENS for subdomains?

More ideas to be collected in the future

4 Likes

Did you mean allowing ENS names to claim DNS? I am confused by this. Currently claiming a DNS costs about 0.5 ETH in gas :smiling_face_with_tear:

That’s what I mean. I believe Nick has already worked the solution

2 Likes

Yes - we can use CCIP Read / EIP 3668 to make it possible to configure a DNS name on ENS for free. Users will be able to store their ENS records as DNS TXT records, effectively making DNS an L2 for the purpose of name resolution.

The only blocker here is someone with the time and skills to rewrite the DNSSEC oracle to be stateless, and to write a resolver that understands DNS TXT records.

3 Likes