Cardano Mempool Explorer

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

Additional applicants

N/A

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Mempool explorer is a visual explorer like cexplorer.io but specifically for mempool transactions. The explorers helps to uncover the questions like:

• How fair is the Cardano blockchain?
• How stake pools are operating?
• Which pools are playing fair or censoring transactions?
• What is the average lifetime of a transaction?
• What is the average lifetime of transactions mined by different stake pools?
• Is my transaction being censored?
• How many competing transactions are there for my transaction? eg. trying to buy an NFT on a marketplace.
• If your transaction did not go through, then which other transaction front-run yours? what was the content (fees, amount etc) on that transaction?

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

I believe it is important to let the community know what is the state of fairness on Cardano and what is happening on the mempool before the transactions are mined. A lot of people are unaware that certain attacks are possible and people of knowledge and access have higher advantage than others.

This proposal brings attention to this issue and hopefully if funded we'll provide the answers to the questions.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Besides the technical execution which we are confident on delivering, the success of the project largely depends on the cooperation of SPOs. To discover the overall state of the Cardano mempool, it is necessary to be connected to as many pools as possible which cannot be done without cooperation from our fair and honest SPOs.

Therefore, the most important metric for the measurement of the success is number of SPOs participating in the project.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

The output is an open source mempool explorer which anybody can host and run analytics on. We'll also host a version of it so that community can find out the answers to the important questions mentions earlier in the proposal.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

We're the team behind KuberIDE which is an online web IDE for complete Plutus smart contract development. During the development , we have extensively worked with Cardano node and networking. So, we are familiar with the node operation and how to extract mempool out it.

Furthermore, we have already done a PoC with two pools and prepared the basic code and scripts to extract memory pool information needed for an explorer. The funding on this proposal is to be able to build an explorer by turning those code and scripts into production and building a user-friendly UI on top of it. We believe we're one of the qualified teams to contribute such a solution to the community.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

The main goals of the project are to answer the following questions visually on an explorer:

• How fair is the Cardano blockchain?
• How stake pools are operating?
• Which pools are playing fair or censoring transactions?
• What is the average lifetime of a transaction?
• What is the average lifetime of transactions mined by different stake pools?
• Is my transaction being censored?
• How many competing transactions are there for my transaction? eg. trying to buy an NFT on a marketplace.
• If your transaction did not go through, then which other transaction front-run yours? what was the content (fees, amount etc) on that transaction?

The approach is feasible because we have already done a PoC with two pools and obtained the mempool transactions from them. That out of way, the rest is normal software engineering and analytics which we can certainly do.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Milestone 1: Operational setup and Data collection

Key tasks:

• Communicating with SPOs and requesting them to join
• Setup a production cluster for data collection and failover
• Correlate mempool data with DbSync
• Prepare APIs for integration with the frontend

Timeline: 1 month

Milestone 2: Design and Development

Key tasks:

• Design of the explorer
• Development of the frontend

Timeline: 1 month

Milestone 3: Alpha/Beta release

Key tasks:

• QA and tests of the API and frontend
• Bug fixes
• Onboard community members to test

Timeline: 1 month

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Milestone 1: Operational setup and Data collection

Deliverables:

• Social media post announcing collaboration by SPOs
• Blog post about interesting facts uncovered from the analysis.
• Blog post with answers to the fairness question.

Output:

• Communicated with SPOs and requested them to join
• Setup a production cluster for data collection and failover
• Correlated mempool data with DbSync for analysis
• Prepared APIs for integration with the frontend

Intended outcome:

• Several honest SPOs are onboard on the project
• Blog posts with our analysis of fairness on Cardano is published on Essential Cardano.

Milestone 2: Design and Development

Deliverables:

• Design/mockups of the explorer
• A deployed dev environment

Output:

• Designed of the explorer
• Development of the frontend
• Integration with the APIs

Intended outcome:

• Well functioning dev environment

Milestone 3: Alpha/Beta release

Deliverables:

• A deployed explorer accessible to the wider community to try and give feedback

Outputs:

• QA and tests of the API and frontend
• Fixed reported bug
• Invited community members to test

Intended outcome:

• Well functioning beta environment

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Milestone 1: Operational setup and Data collection

Resources: DevOps, Backend developer

Timeline: 1 month

Budget: 30,000 Ada

Milestone 2: Design and Development

Resources: Frontend and Backend developer

Timeline: 1 month

Budget: 30,000 Ada

Milestone 3: Alpha/Beta release

Resources: Frontend and Backend developer

Timeline: 1 month

Budget: 30,000 Ada

Project Management (1)

Timeline: 3 months

Budget: 10,000 Ada

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The project answer a few important questions regarding the fairness of Cardano blockchain which we believe is important for the community to be aware of and know about. While several studies and research are conducted on other blockchains like Ethereum, there is not much known on Cardano. Therefore, we believe this project brings value to the Cardano ecosystem by highlighting the overall state of the mempool and uncovering issues and attacks happening on the chains so that those can be addressed by Cardano core team or the community.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.