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Community Funding Board 8th Meeting
New community reward schemes & ways to support the Nimiq ecosystem
26 Dec 2019
by
5 min
The Community Funding Board was founded with the vision to support, empower and grow the Nimiq community. This month, the board focused on expanding the scope of the Community Funding Board and deploying additional frameworks to further speed up Nimiq Ecosystem growth.
We’d like to thank our community representatives Chugwig, Matt and Wekkel for their time, insights and efforts this month. Without any further ado, we’d like to share the outcomes and decisions made in this meeting.
Bounties
The Board discussed ways to further involve the Nimiq Community into the development of the Nimiq Ecosystem — especially since the Nimiq Community is home to so many talented developers. The main objective is to make Nimiq more “Open-Sourcy”, with the nice side effect of accelerating the growth of the Nimiq Ecosystem through small projects that benefit the community.
RPC Client Libraries
RPC is short for ‘remote procedure call’. In a nutshell, creating RPC client libraries for specific programming languages will make Nimiq compatible with that programming language. There are numerous different programming languages out there and developers might specialize in a single one or be competent in a few different languages. However, like languages around the world, the thing to understand is that just because someone is bilingual in French and English, it doesn’t mean they can speak Spanish. The same is true when it comes to different programming languages.
Source: Medium
For example, if an RPC library was built for the exceptionally popular programming language ‘Java’, it would enable Java developers to build on Nimiq while coding in their favorite programming language. A Java library would also enable Android coders to use Nimiq in native mobile app.
In short, the completion of these RPC client libraries means that the Nimiq Ecosystem can draw from a greater pool of developer talent, opening up to a wide variety of programming languages and use cases.
The Community RPC Client Libraries Bounty Competition
The Community Funding Board explored different options to reward and incentivize Nimiq Community developers to create RPC client libraries for different programming languages. One case study that was discussed at length was the Binance API competition, where programmers were tasked with making the Binance API compatible with eight different languages. In the Binance developer competition, an equal BNB coin reward was granted for each programming language.
However, the board decided to recognize the varying levels of difficulty in creating an RPC client library for different languages and decided that the reward should reflect the amount of work required.
After debate, it was agreed awards would be assigned according to effort but also popularity and reach of the respective programming language resulting in a three levels: low, medium and high.
Low = 200K NIM | Medium = 400K NIM | High = 600K NIM
The consensus of the board was that rewards should be in NIM, rather than USD to align incentives. This means that the final decision was to assign the following RPC client library bounties:
- Python - low | 200K NIM
- PHP - high | 600K NIM
- Swift - high | 600K NIM
- Java / Kotlin - high | 600K NIM
- Go - medium | 400K NIM
- Ruby - medium | 400K NIM
Python was assigned a low difficulty rating because the Python RPC library has already been started. Both Go and Ruby were deemed low priority for the Community Funding Board. However, it was acknowledged that quite a lot of people use Ruby for web apps and this made it a more interesting programming language than others in the ‘low’ category.
Bounty criteria
The Board agreed that bounties should be:
- Rewarded on a broad first-come, first-served basis.
- There will be a window of one month after the first submission for other submissions to be made.
- In the case of multiple submissions, Team Nimiq and the Community Funding Board would choose the best one to reward with the bounty.
Based on how the Nimiq community acts to these new bounties, the Community Funding Board commits to monitoring, fine-tuning and refining bounty rewards.
Shared Network Bounty
Right now, when using the standard JavaScript library, a Nimiq node is created in each app. This task aims at re-using the same node and thus sharing the consensus over multiple Nimiq apps. This comes with two nice side-effects: new apps can access the consensus instantly, plus resources are being saved. More about the technical specs of this bounty can be found here.
The Community Funding Board decided to assign this task a high rating to recognize the difficulty of executing it. This means that a 1 Million NIM reward is up for grabs here.
Community Board Reactive Rewards
The Board also felt it was important to devise a system to recognize past contributions to the Nimiq Ecosystem, new ideas, continuation of old ideas, and especially reward those who have just gone ahead and built cool stuff with Nimiq. For the board, it is important to ensure that there is a mechanism to show appreciation to those that contribute positively to the community.
In terms of assigning these awards, it will be up to the discretion of the Community Funding Board. However, this month the Board decided to recognize the following community members:
- Thomkha - for his documentation on how to run the Nimiq Rust node on Android.
- Smittop - for his cool pixel auction solution powered by NIM.
- Mario - Nimiq widget.
- Sushi Pool - Sushi Pool is closing down and the Board wanted to grant a reward as a token of Nimiq’s appreciation for their past work.
The Board also discussed an old proposal for a NIM/ETH cross-chain atomic swap tool and debated if this old project would be fitting for another community bounty. The outcome was that Nimiq Core should be consulted to see if OASIS would make the project obsolete.
Finally…
The Community Funding Board is still accepting proposals for funding and mentoring. If you have a great idea and need a little help to get it off the ground, please do follow our proposal submission guide and email your idea to proposals [at] nimiq [dot] com.
With Nimiq OASIS and Albatross on the horizon, the question is: do you believe that Nimiq is the future of simple money? If so, it is time to get building and remember the Community Funding Board is here to support you for each and every step.
To do is to dare.
Pura Vida,
Team Nimiq
Disclaimer
None of the statements must be viewed as an endorsement or recommendation for Nimiq, any cryptocurrency, or investment product. Neither the information, nor any opinion contained herein constitutes a solicitation or offer by the creators or participants to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments or provide any investment advice or service. All statements contained in statements made in Nimiq’s web pages, blogs, social media, press releases, or in any place accessible by the public, and oral statements that may be made by Nimiq or project associates that are not statements of historical fact, constitute “forward-looking statements”. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual future results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expected, expressed, or implied by such forward-looking statements. The final decision of implementing any changes to the Nimiq protocol, including its parameters, always remains with the decentralized node operators who agree what version and parameters to deploy and support.