CNTools

Manually running commands can quickly become complex and the risk for mistakes increases. CNTools is like a swiss army knife for pool operators to simplify typical operations regarding their wallet keys and pool management. The idea that a tool was needed to easily wrap all the underlying commands required by a stake pool operator was evident. CNTools was created and ready for MainNet launch in July 2020. Much work and time have been put into the tool since then to make it even more complete, stable, and feature-rich. It's now a tool many pool operators rely on to manage their stake pool.

Adding developer-focused features will bring another level to the tool and seems like a good next step in its evolution.

Third-party developed Integrations

As CNTools is widely adopted in the community integrating third-party developed applications helps spread the adoption. Examples of already integrated applications:

CNCLI: Low-level direct communication with the cardano-node application to be able to calculate leader schedule, validate block production and much more. A Rust implementation by Andrew Westberg. cardano-hw-cli: A CLI application created by Vacuumlabs for Ledger/Trezor hardware wallet communication.

Future direction and integrations

I see an increasing demand to extend CNTools beyond being a pool operator only tool by adding developer-focused features. Some ideas that have been floated in various channels include:

DB-Sync: By adding predefined dynamic queries in CNTools through a postgREST API to a DB-Sync instance developers can get fast and easy access to query chain data. cardano-wallet/cardano-address and/or adawallet integration: To add more integrations developed for the Cardano community. Applications that handle mnemonic and HD wallets integrations. Native assets: Mary hard fork brings some interesting new features for developers to play around with. I see many potential use cases for developers to be able to use CNTools to handle their assets. Metadata: This is another interesting topic to explore for developers, integration to be able to send metadata to the chain is already part of CNTools but extending the current functionality could be worth exploring.

Impact

CNTools is already a widely adopted tool in the community and with the future plans to add developer-focused features this could be a good gateway to onboard more developers in the community.

Risk Assessment

I'm invested in the project as a stake pool operator and I estimate the risk of being unable to maintain and keep the code up-to-date with upcoming changes, hard forks, and features as low. The GitHub repository is open source and licensed under MIT License (Expat) and as such the tools will always be available for continued development.

Deliverables

Contributions, activity, and continued development can be tracked through the public GitHub repository. New releases will be released on an on-demand basis as changes and/or fixes are needed and features added.

The repository is open to post ideas on how to improve the product and I welcome any suggestion for how to make the tools better.

Code: https://github.com/cardano-community/guild-operators

GitHub handle: @Scitz0

Documentation: https://cardano-community.github.io/guild-operators

Costs / Funding

The estimation used to calculate the requested funds is based both on my previous contributions and how much time implementing the mentioned features would take. Funds are calculated to support development for a period of 6 months.