2024 Q2 Roadmap update
Greetings anons,
Happy April! Glad to have you hear. A few updates to share with you all.
Before we hop into our plans, let's take a look at Q1
Q1 in review
In Q1 we aimed at a few major goals that all tie together:
✅ Release MACI v1.2
We completed a significant refactor to simplify the codebase and improve developer experience. After an internal audit, revamped documentation & educational resources, we released a new MACI version the world - see our MACI v1.2 release post to read up on all the groovy benefits of that upgrade.
✅ clr.fund integration
clr.fund, a quadratic funding (QF) project which has distributed millions of dollars to Ethereum public goods, is the longest-running production application built on MACI (since 2020!). Thanks primarily to the hard work of yuetloo, clr.fund successfully upgraded from 0.x to our fresh v1.2 release.
✅ ETH Latam QF round
What better way to celebrate the annual Ethereum conference of Latam than with a QF round? We teamed up with ETH Latam to support their efforts to run a successful QF round on clr.fund with this latest version of MACI. Over 60 attendees participated (using Zupass tickets as the round gatekeeper) to distribute over $30,000 DAI on Optimism to projects across Central America and the Carribean - view the results here!
✅ ETH Colombia QF round
Bonus points! Kudos also to the ETHColombia team who ran a QF round for their community on the #RoadToETHLatam - view the results here!
Q2 Roadmap
Now let's look ahead at what we're excited to build over the next few months:
🎯 MACI-RPGF
RPGF has taken the public goods funding space by storm Building momentum ove the past years and stormed into the Zeitgeist after Optimisms monster >$100,000,000 round late last year. In February we proposed MACI as a solution for Optimism's RPGF tech stack, thanks to its strong guarantees of correct execution, cencorship resistance, privacy, collusion resistance.
Since we released a proof-of-concept MACI-RPGF implementation, we've received lots of positive feedback from the community and interest from communities in running RPGF rounds on MACI.
Part of our effort this quarter will include supporting community organizers to operate MACI-RPGF rounds in production. Stay tuned for updates here! If you're interested in running a round for your community, please get in touch.
We're excited to share that we'll continue to build out MACI-RPGF to be production-ready and to improve the funtionality and UX of this product.
🎯 MACI Coordinator Service
Speaking of UX improvements, from the years of supporting QF rounds on MACI we've learned a lot about the pain-points of community organizers running MACI rounds. The blunt truth is that many technical barriers to entry still exist - in order to operate a MACI poll (whether in a QF round or a simple voting application), you basically need a developer to deploy smart contracts, execute on-chain transations, and generate zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the integrity of a MACI poll. This is no trivial feat, and as a result, MACI is simply not a viable option for many projects today.
We're aiming to change this by kick-starting development of a "Coordinator Service" to simplify the role of the coordinator, automate tasks, & remove technical ability as a barrier to running MACI-RPGF (and all MACI) rounds. This will include a web interface to deploy and operate MACI instances as well as generate and submit proofs on-chain. We're confident this will facilitate greater community adoption by offloading the technical overhead and domain knowledge currently required to use this technology stack.
More details to come on this soon.
🎯 MACI Core Protocol Improvements
After a thorough refactoring of MACI's code, which lead to the release of v1.2, we are now in position to integrate new features and improvements to the core protocol. As always, we are open to suggestions from the community, so if you have any ideas of a feature that should make it into MACI, please let us know!
Currently, we have a few ideas in mind:
Unconditional privacy
As of now, MACI's coordinator can track user key changes, and thus collude with bribers to deanonymize users. We are looking into ways to prevent this from happening. The 3227 team implemented a proof of concept for this, using El-Gamal to remove the link between a new MACI key and their original key. Furthermore, there is a proposal currently being discussed on how to implement anonymous poll signups, which would provide the same benefits of the El-Gamal protocol, though with a much better user experience.
Deployment Improvements
MACI's deployment process can certainly be made easier, and it is in our plans to improve this. We are looking into ways to make this cheaper, for instance by avoiding to deploy contracts which can be reused, as well as to make it more user-friendly, by providing a better interface to deploy MACI instances.
🎯 Support Gitcoin Allo protocol integration
Gitcoin has expressed interest in integrating MACI into their Allo protocol, their on chain stack for public good funding. We are currently in the process of supporting this integration, which is already underway, thanks to Nick Lionis and Tse Lao hackathon project.
We look forward to seeing this integration come to life and to supporting Gitcoin in their efforts to improve public goods funding on Ethereum. It is certainly great to see an increased interest in bribery resistance for funding public goods.
How does that sound?
Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!
If there is a feature you think we should work on, or an initiative you'd like to collaborate with us on, please let us know! We welcome input from anyone in the community.
Onward and upward 🚀