Last updated a month ago
Open DJED offers a more reliable & accessible front-end to DJED. Costs associated with its maintenance, development, and infra render its operation unsustainable without funding, risking obsolescence.
To ensure Open DJED’s long-term survival as a key public good, this proposal funds vital maintenance, protocol updates, and new features to serve the Cardano community.
Please provide your proposal title
Open DJED maintenance, development and infrastructure
Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA
100000
Please specify how many months you expect your project to last
12
What is the problem you want to solve?
Open DJED offers a more reliable & accessible front-end to DJED. Costs associated with its maintenance, development, and infra render its operation unsustainable without funding, risking obsolescence.
Supporting links
Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?
Yes
Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'
We depend on the DJED protocol which is operated by COTI. Breaking changes to the protocol may require us to update the codebase. This is mitigated via the contingency buffer stipulated in the last milestone for this proposal.
Will your project's outputs be fully open source?
Yes
License and Additional Information
GPL-3.0 license
Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal
Stablecoin
Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.
The open source license we adopted is GPL-3.0. The rationale behind the adoption of this license is as follows: we believe DJED, as one of the first stablecoins on Cardano, together with its reserve coin SHEN are cornerstones of Cardano DeFi. The original front-end of the DJED protocol suffering major outages, periods of inaccessibility and geo-restrictions was something we wanted to solve. Choosing any license other than GPL or MIT didn't make sense to us as we believe DJED should be a Cardano public good and we do not want to gatekeep access to the protocol.
How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?
We have made and kept the Open DJED repository fully open-source since we originally finished the minimum-viable product implementation. We've informed users of this through our Twitter account, where we focus our marketing and social media communication and education efforts.
How will you provide high quality documentation?
We will provide high quality documentation by listening to users and developers in the community and focusing where their doubts, concerns and questions most frequently pop up. A backwards documentation approach seemed most appropriate to us given our team and project's highly agile nature.
Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem
Open DJED currently serves approximately 200 different users per month, demonstrating its existing utility and adoption. This proposal seeks to sustain and grow this user base by ensuring Open DJED remains compatible with the evolving DJED protocol and Cardano hardforks, while significantly enhancing user experience, accessibility, and documentation.
Key Challenge: The underlying DJED protocol is proprietary and was reverse-engineered. This presents a unique and significant maintenance burden, demanding continuous monitoring and adaptive updates to ensure Open DJED’s functionality and security. Our dedicated team is essential for navigating these complexities.
Our team of five developers and a dedicated designer will ensure that Open DJED remains operational, secure, and user-friendly across future changes.
We aim to achieve this through:
This initiative will solidify Open DJED’s role as a reliable public good for the Cardano ecosystem, empowering users and builders alike with transparent access to one of its key DeFi primitives.
Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community
The continuation of Open DJED ensures that the Cardano community has uninterrupted access to DJED, even if proprietary services are discontinued or limited.
Maintaining this open-source interface provides:
• A trustless, forkable alternative to centralized frontends, aligning with decentralized principles, and ensuring continued access even if proprietary services become obsolete or limited.
• An educational resource for developers seeking to understand stablecoin UX and integrations on Cardano.
• Increased adoption of DJED: Grow our monthly active user base from 200 to over 300 by enhancing usability and adding new features.
• Greater developer engagement, through updated documentation and accessible SDKs.
• Long-term resilience against Cardano hardforks and COTI protocol breaking changes, ensuring the project remains functional and relevant.
We will track:
• GitHub contributions: Foster community engagement by resolving at least 10 community submitted issues or merging 5 pull requests from external contributors.
• Release milestones and uptime reports to demonstrate project progress and reliability.
• Translations delivered: Increase global accessibility by providing full translations in 6 major languages (ES, PT, DE, FR, CN, JA).
• Documentation updates and community adoption metrics to measure developer empowerment.
What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?
The Artifex Labs team possesses a proven track record and the comprehensive capabilities required to successfully deliver this project with high levels of trust and accountability. Our approach is validated by our existing functional product and a robust, well-defined technical architecture.
Team Overview
The Artifex Labs core team consists of five experienced software engineers with diverse fullstack capabilities. Our collective expertise spans backend infrastructure, robust frontend development, complex protocol integration, on-chain logic, and comprehensive documentation. We operate as a highly collaborative unit, sharing responsibilities across disciplines while leveraging individual strengths to ensure efficient and reliable project execution.
• Kylix Afonso – Project Coordinator and Developer: Oversees strategic direction and manages milestones while actively contributing to critical backend development and protocol integrations, ensuring alignment with project goals and technical excellence.
• Gonçalo Salgueirinho – Backend-focused Developer: Possesses deep expertise in infrastructure design and API development, crucial for maintaining Open DJED’s robust server-side operations, data integrity, and system stability.
• Rafael Gil – Full-stack Developer: Experienced in building and maintaining high-availability frontend components and resilient backend logic, ensuring a seamless, intuitive, and reliable user experience across the platform.
• Nuno Santos – Developer and QA Specialist: Leads the documentation effort and ensures stringent code quality across the entire stack, vital for project maintainability, future extensibility, and community adoption.
• Pedro Nogueira – Generalist Full-stack Developer: Contributes across frontend UX, backend logic, and comprehensive testing, serving as a key generalist for addressing crosscutting concerns and ensuring feature completeness.
• +1 External Designer: Supports the team by refining UX flows, enhancing UI aesthetics, and creating essential visual assets for new features like the order manager and the documentation portal, ensuring a polished and user-friendly product.
Milestone Title
Order Management
Milestone Outputs
The inclusion of all necessary code and deployment changes to include the following functionality:
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:
Evidence of Completion
Evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
1
Cost
17710
Progress
20 %
Milestone Title
DJED Public Dashboard
Milestone Outputs
For the DJED public dashboard milestone, we propose the development of:
This dashboard will take inspiration from Ethena's dashboard page, where the wildly popular Ethereum DeFi product includes important key metrics related to the USDe and sUSDe markets (performance) and risk.
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:
Evidence of Completion
The evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
2
Cost
13200
Progress
40 %
Milestone Title
Translations
Milestone Outputs
The milestone outputs for the translations milestone are:
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:
Evidence of Completion
The evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
3
Cost
5500
Progress
50 %
Milestone Title
Documentation
Milestone Outputs
For the documentation milestone, the milestone outputs are:
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are defined as:
Evidence of Completion
The evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
4
Cost
6600
Progress
60 %
Milestone Title
Core Maintenance & Sustainability
Milestone Outputs
The milestone outputs for Core Maintenance & Sustainability are:
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:
Evidence of Completion
Evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
6
Cost
24200
Progress
100 %
Milestone Title
Contingency & Volatility Buffer
Milestone Outputs
For the Contingency & Volability Buffer milestone, the outputs are
This is a buffer, not a deliverable. The primary output is the stability and on-time completion of the other milestones.
Acceptance Criteria
The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:
Evidence of Completion
The evidence of completion for this milestone is:
Delivery Month
12
Cost
32800
Progress
100 %
Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources
Total budget: 100,000 ADA (approx. $79,000 USD at $0.79/ADA)
Developer compensation: $88/hour (approx. 111 ADA/hour average across project milestones)
Estimated 604 hours of work across 5 core members and 1 external designer.
Budget allocation includes:
How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?
This proposal represents exceptional value for money by safeguarding Open DJED as a vital, community-owned public good within the Cardano ecosystem. The investment ensures:
Terms and Conditions:
Yes
The Open DJED project is maintained by Artifex Labs, a team of 5 dedicated developers and 1 external designer, all committed to ensuring the sustainability and evolution of Open DJED as a community-owned public good.