Detailed Plan

INTRODUCTION

Dandelion is a Catalyst Fund5 funded proposal (find original here [0]) that aims to nurture an open network and marketplace of API deployments and as expressed in the original proposal, developing further this project will enrich the Cardano developers and operators ecosystem by providing OpenSource tools and a fault tolerant backbone for dApps and light wallets.

The first phase of the development of this network included research around the need of a reputation system that can be used by clients (dApps, light wallets…) of the network to choose between the different operators running the network.

The research being held cooperatively among the operators of the Dandelion IAN (Incentivized Alpha Network), and discussed in the public weekly meetings that take place in Gimbalabs Discord [1] every Wednesday, led us to recognise the need of developing multiple pieces of software to coordinate the different vital tasks of the nodes participating in the network.

Desired Outcome

A micro-services ecosystem of "dandelion daemons" [2] that enables the network to evolve to a Beta stage and uses on-chain metadata for orchestration; which will increase transactions traffic and fees given back to Cardano treasury.

References

[0] <https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Dandelion-Cardano-API-market/352562-48088>

[1] <https://discord.gg/2z59BtY7Sm>

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

DETAILED PROPOSED SOLUTION

We propose to build a team to develop multiple OpenSource micro-services that will be integrated into Dandelion main project (kustomize-dandelion [0]) to solve the current challenges we encountered:

- Node-to-Node communication and coordination
- API endpoints authorization using Cardano native assets (NFTs) as "master key"
- On-chain reputation registry using Cardano metadata
- Requests routing/proxying/tunneling and rate-limiting
- Utility token mint, sale and distribution among the nodes

API authorization is already ongoing as part of the job done by our fellow Catalyst Fund5 winner, Giovanni Gargiulo, as part of his Metadata Challenge Fund5 [1] proposal.
His work from the Java client library [2] and the Scala implementation [3] for the API authorization mechanism will serve as baseline and will be integrated into the new micro-services ecosystem.

The rest of the work will need to be researched and developed from the scratch, including a potential SmartContract integration, for which we plan to hire a Plutus Pioneer from the Gimbalabs PPBL [4] (Plutus Project-Based Learning) program (already ongoing).

3 months goals / roadmap tentative (starting from funding date)

- Have an alpha-level implementation to solve the challenges exposed above that can be tested with testnet-ADA
- Integrate the microservices in kustomize-dandelion
- Build the continuous integration pipeline to ease the development of the microservices
- Research and develop the role of smart contracts into Dandelion ecosystem

6 months goals / roadmap tentative

- Have a beta-level implementation to solve the challenges exposed above that operators can use to start monetizing the service in mainnet

12 months goals / roadmap tentative

- Have a mature implementation that fully accomplishes the challenges exposed

Costs estimates
- 2x 20h/week Senior developer familiar to microservices architecture and distributed systems (2x $3200/mo x3 months: $19200)

- 1x 20h/week Plutus developer ($3200 x3 months: $9600)
- 1x 10h/week Product Owner role ($1600 x3 months: $4800)
- $2000 bonus for team member if goals are met after the 3 months mark (4x $2000: $8000)

Total estimate: $41600 for a 3 months period.

Intellectual Property

Every asset developed will be released under Apache 2.0 license.

References

[0] <https://gitlab.com/gimbalabs/dandelion/kustomize-dandelion>

[1] <https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/352005-48088>

[2] <https://github.com/speedwing/blockchain-auth-mech-dev>

[3] <https://github.com/speedwing/cardano-auth>
[4] <https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/gimbalabs-Plutus-PBL-program/369148-48088>