# TL;DR
0xTaylor is working with Spearbit/Cantina to bring an initiative that subsidizes the cost of a virtualized CISO for a limited number of parachain teams and top PBA graduates.

This program would fund 533 hours total for a vCISO offering by Spearbit with leading blockchain security experts. PBA top graduates would receive up to 128 hrs split amongst the winners and Polkadot parachain teams would draw from a bucket of 405 hrs.

### Also, WTF is a vCISO?
A virtual Chief Information Security Officer (or sometimes called a fractionalized CISO) is a service provided by external security service providers to fulfill a leadership role in guiding security principles for early/medium maturity entities as a part-time/fill-in type offering. 


# Synopsis
The proposal seeks to subsidize vCISO services (architecture review/advisory, fuzzing/unit testing, threat modeling + risk assessment, etc) for the top Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) participants and existing Parachain projects. Security is crucial for any project that utilizes on-chain assets or smart contract code. When a project is exploited or hacked, it erodes trust and reputation with the wider web3 community especially with retail and mainstream users. Traditional security reviews, private audits, and security services can be extremely expensive for projects, running upwards of USD $150K+ (much more in some cases).

We are seeking this effort for PBA projects and existing Parachains so that these projects can focus their efforts, resources, and capital on development and engineering initiatives and incentivize their continued engagement with Polkadot. Our vCISO services are catered towards projects that are in the beginning and middle stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) as vCISO is a good fit for projects that are not necessarily ready for a full-blown, detailed audit. Our vCISO services are a great option for projects that want to build with security at the forefront but aren’t necessarily ready to invest a lot of capital in a security review or audit. We believe this program is crucial for the DOT ecosystem and wider web3 ecosystem as it aims to assist in further securing individual protocols and the wider DOT ecosystem.

Spearbit/Cantina will provide all deliverables (upon protocol approval and work completion) for transparency and ROI purposes so that the community can ensure there is value being delivered. Spearbit/Cantina is also responsible for reporting back on milestones, updates, and progress thus far as the program continues through completion. All funds requested will be used for vCISO services for PBA winners, existing Parachains, and the admin costs associated with the scoped work.

The full proposal can be viewed here: 

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/11o1GZaE3Qw1KAW58OhXzMcc96Ydq7p7oOVYaeW5-UBY/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/document/d/11o1GZaE3Qw1KAW58OhXzMcc96Ydq7p7oOVYaeW5-UBY/edit?usp=sharing)

For further information relating to this proposal, please don’t hesitate to contact:

Henry Shen (henry@spearbit.com)

0xTaylor (0xtaylor@chaosdao.org)

Polkadot Ecosystem vCISO Program w/Spearbit

This is a Large tip proposal for 0xTaylor's work supporting the free open-source Discord [Governance bot](https://github.com/ChaosDAO-org/InternalGov-2.0). Sixteen (16) application feature additions were tracked via ChaosDAO's [project tracker](https://github.com/orgs/ChaosDAO-org/projects/3) and completed back in September 2023.

The majority of these features were "Quality of life" that supported an improved experience for the user. For [example](https://i.imgur.com/eirTtan.png), HTML wasn't converted to markdown and thus ate up the majority of the 2000 characters Discord allows and was difficult to read. There were numerous other small issues with handling that markdown and escaping which I worked through to present a well formatted post that we see today. 

You can see the full list of features completed below:
![](https://i.imgur.com/1GinDi6.png)

This bot is also used by The Kusamarian and I as part of ChaosDAO advocate for other DAO's to take up the technology and offer our general support if they are interested.

I would like to request a tip of **694.20 DOT** (~$6,500 using the 30 day EMA of $9.4/DOT) for this work. I normally bill my time at a $250/hr. rate so this would cover 26 hours of work if I were to bill it at my normal rate. This easily covers the time I've spent writing, debugging, and testing this code.

My Github contributions to the bot:  [![](https://i.imgur.com/4miioA2.png)](https://github.com/ChaosDAO-org/InternalGov-2.0/graphs/contributors)

Voting Aye on this proposal helps show support for people like me who commit a lot of our spare time to advancing this ecosystem. This is also my first ever tip request for myself so please be nice to me.
