Proposal Overview

Currently, there is no registrar available for automated judgements on Kusama. To address this gap and provide a wider range of registrars, we seek funding to continue the development and maintenance of open-source registrar tools that are crucial for the ecosystem. This includes reworking existing tools, polkadot-registrar-watcher and polkadot-registrar-challenger, to integrate with the Kusama-People system parachain for judgements and identities.

Key Objectives

1. Maintain and Enhance polkadot-registrar-watcher:

   • Ensure compatibility with the Kusama-People system parachain.
   • Utilize either the polkadot-api or subxt for long-term supported functionality.

2. Maintain and Enhance polkadot-registrar-challenger:

   • Fork and enhance the repository for broader usability (forkable backend for all registrars).
   • Integrate Beeper/Bridge-Manager for Puppeteer bridging of Twitter/Discord/Email DM verifications into Matrix (avoiding the expensive Twitter API).

Funding Request

We propose hiring one full-stack developer, Dan, and one part-time developer, Tommi. The project requires:

1.5 Full-Time Equivalents (FTE) for a period of 4 weeks:

• Tommi: Over 10 years of experience.
• Dan: Over 20 years of experience.
• Estimated rate: $80 per hour.
• Total budget: $19,200 (1.5 FTE * 4 weeks * 40 hours per week * $80 per hour).

Based on the DOT rate of 7.223 as of 2024-05-27, the final amount in DOT considering a 3% slippage/conversion is calculated as follows:

Slippage/Conversion 3%: $19200 * 0.03 = $576
Final Payment USD: $19200 + $576 = $19776
Final Amount in DOT: $19776 / 7.223 ≈ 2737.92 DOT

Milestones

This proposal seeks funding for the initial milestone, focusing on creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Totaling 240 development hours:

Milestone 1: Development and Integration (MVP) (240 hours)

Task	Estimated Hours	Description
Initial Setup and Environment Preparation	30 hours	Fork and clone the polkadot-registrar-watcher and polkadot-registrar-challenger repositories. Set up development environments and necessary dependencies for polkadot-api or subxt. Set up bridge-manager to receive DMs in a secure fashion over an end-to-end encrypted bridge.
Enhance polkadot-registrar-watcher	70 hours	Integrate the watcher with the Kusama-People system parachain. Choose between polkadot-api and subxt for subscribing to the people chain state. Implement basic functionality to monitor judgements and identities. Test and verify the watcher's compatibility and functionality.
Enhance polkadot-registrar-challenger	80 hours	Integrate Beeper/Bridge-Manager to be used in verification. Test and verify the challenger's basic functionality.
Create Reference UI Implementation	40 hours	Develop a basic registrar UI in SolidJS for new identity creation and automated verification with challenges.
Documentation and Initial Testing	20 hours	Write initial documentation for the tools. Conduct basic testing and gather feedback for improvements.

Future work:

Governance Proposal for New Registrar Registration:
- Prepare and propose a governance proposal to register as a new registrar on Kusama.
- Craft a governance vote that initiates the addRegistrar function with root origin on the system parachain.
- Provide the code and methods for this process as well-documented open-source resources for other registrars.

Additional Enhancements:
- Implement a DNS TXT checker for automated web field verification (Code for the DNS checker was written a year ago and can be found here).
- Implement Discord challenge verification through Matrix.

Cost Savings through Puppeteering with Beeper/Bridge-Manager

One of the significant advantages of our approach is the integration of Beeper/Bridge-Manager to handle direct message verifications via Matrix. By using Puppeteer to bridge Twitter, Discord, and Email DMs into Matrix, we decrease the maintenance scope and can avoid the extremely costly Twitter API v2, which can run up to $5,000 per month. This puppeteering method allows us to automate DM verifications without incurring such high costs, making our solution more sustainable and cost-effective for the community.

Support and Licensing

While the code will be released under the MIT 2.0 license, we do not provide free support. For those registrars requiring assistance, we offer consultation services at paid rate. This ensures that our team can focus on continuous improvement and maintenance while providing professional support as needed.

Background

The polkadot-registrar-challenger and polkadot-registrar-watcher projects were initially developed by the Web3 Foundation as an automated registrar service for Polkadot on-chain identities. However, this project has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, leaving the ecosystem without a functional automated registrar. This has held back the release of the Kusama-People chain on Polkadot. Our proposal aims to revive and enhance this service to support the broader adoption and usability of on-chain identity verification.

Why Rotko Networks(AS142108)?

We are heavily invested in the success of the People’s chain. One of the main motivations for us becoming a SEA infra provider was the shared vision of delivering a global low latency public DNS service that supports resolving web3 domains in applications like browsers. We believe that with careful design, the identity pallet and People’s chain have the potential to challenge ICANN as the single truth issuer of top-level domains (.com, .net, .io, .network). It’s been nearly 15 years since the launch of Namecoin, yet we still do not have a single global low latency public DNS supporting decentralized domain names. It’s time to change that.

Team and Experience

Tommi:

• Ecosystem validator for around ~4 years.
• Full-stack developer with over 10 years of experience.
• IBP infra builder for South East Asia at Rotko Networks.
• Rome Blockchain Labs products: benqi, moonwell, etc..
• GitHub: hitchhooker

Dan:

• Over 20 years of programming experience.
• Expertise in Rust and functional programming.
• Passion for demoscene music & writing drum machines.
• GitHub: d-r

Team Code Repositories

• Unlabored - Proxmox Ansible infrastructure for blockchains
• snitch - Prometheus watchdog alerts to Pushover
• genpeerid - Generate peerid from secret_ed25519
• bootnode/endpoint monitoring
• wenbeefy dashboard
• polka.run - polkavm disassembler GUI(MVP/discontinued until upstream stable)
• polkavm example game-of-life(host/guest)

Work Repositories for proposal

• w3reg.org - SolidJS reference UI
• polkadot-registrar-watcher
• polkadot-registrar-challenger
• bridge-manager

Thank you for considering our proposal.