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Quadrivium Polkadot-SDK improvements proposal 1

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7 days ago
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Proposal summary

This proposal seeks funding for the work focusing on:

  1. Preparing Polkadot storage infrastructure to handle thousands of transactions per second (TPS)
  2. Ensuring parachain liveness with a single honest collator assumption
  3. Enhancing testing infrastructure by simplifying the bug reproduction process

This will be achieved by implementing the following features into Polkadot-SDK:

  1. State sync fixes and improvements: ensuring we can handle large state synchronization
  2. Compact archive node research and development: ensuring large state parachains have relatively compact archive storages, required for historical data analytics
  3. Multi-slot collation: ensuring we can guarantee liveness of parachains with a single honest collator assumption
  4. Polkadot discrete event simulation research: ensuring we can reproduce any of 1000s test runs that ended up with a failure
  5. Faster erasure coding (RFC-0139): ensuring data availability will not be a bottleneck

The proposal scope will be implemented by the Quadrivium team. We are the original developers of the KAGOME client, which is fully protocol-compatible with Polkadot-SDK, has successfully passed a rigorous security audit, and launched on the mainnet earlier this year.

Parity and Web3 Foundation will provide implementation guidance and conduct final review of proposal deliverables. The Parity team also contributed to defining the proposal's scope.

Read the full proposal for further details about features description, development approach, concrete deliverables, and price breakdown.

Requested funding

288,000 USDC

Context of previous proposal

Quadrivium is best known in the Polkadot ecosystem for implementation of alternative Polkadot Host implementation KAGOME, which went live on Polkadot mainnet in April this year (link) turning Polkadot into one of few blockchains having live multiple client implementations.

Unfortunately, in spite of the great progress with KAGOME, and support from W3F Decentralized Nodes program with increasing fraction of validators using KAGOME, the treasury proposal #1549 to support further development and maintenance of KAGOME got rejected. 

We respect voters opinion and therefore we put KAGOME development on pause.

Nonetheless, our team has a very unique understanding of the Polkadot protocol, which we believe the Polkadot ecosystem may get advantage from. Therefore, we will be refocusing our efforts towards improving Polkadot-SDK and Polkadot Protocol.

About Quadrivium

Quadrivium (https://www.qdrvm.io ) is a blockchain infrastructure development company founded in 2023.

The company specializes in the development of blockchain clients, peer-to-peer networking tools, and zk-cryptography. Quadrivium developed KAGOME Polkadot Host implementation, in partnership with the Web3 Foundation. The company also maintains the C++ libp2p library.

Comments (2)

6 days ago

Hello,

Could you please share some estimated metrics related to the improvements that the implementation of this proposal will represent for the infrastructure?

2 days ago

PolkaWorld votes NAY

1.	Work-hour structure is unreasonable: Project management + Shadow research + state archiving together account for nearly 1,100 hours, which is almost 46% of total hours — a very unusual allocation. The parts that actually deliver visible SDK-level functionality (like erasure coding, state sync, multi-slot collation) total only about 1,200 hours, roughly 50% of the total. For a 4-month technical proposal aimed at core SDK implementation, this ratio is disproportionately high.
2.	Some costs are opaque: Items like compliance expenses and tooling fees aren’t clearly detailed in the budget, making it hard to assess their validity.
3.	PolkaWorld rejects any proposal with an hourly rate above $100 — this proposal’s rate is $120/hour.

We recommend the team break down tasks more clearly and focus resources on the truly critical feature implementations to improve funding efficiency.

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Decision Period

6 / 28 days

Confirmation Period

0 / 4 days

Summary

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Nay

Aye (10)0.0 PAS

Support0.0 PAS

Nay (8)0.0 PAS

Comments (2)

6 days ago

Hello,

Could you please share some estimated metrics related to the improvements that the implementation of this proposal will represent for the infrastructure?

2 days ago

PolkaWorld votes NAY

1.	Work-hour structure is unreasonable: Project management + Shadow research + state archiving together account for nearly 1,100 hours, which is almost 46% of total hours — a very unusual allocation. The parts that actually deliver visible SDK-level functionality (like erasure coding, state sync, multi-slot collation) total only about 1,200 hours, roughly 50% of the total. For a 4-month technical proposal aimed at core SDK implementation, this ratio is disproportionately high.
2.	Some costs are opaque: Items like compliance expenses and tooling fees aren’t clearly detailed in the budget, making it hard to assess their validity.
3.	PolkaWorld rejects any proposal with an hourly rate above $100 — this proposal’s rate is $120/hour.

We recommend the team break down tasks more clearly and focus resources on the truly critical feature implementations to improve funding efficiency.

PleaseLogin to comment