Open DJED maintenance, development and infrastructure

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

Open DJED maintenance, development and infrastructure

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

100000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

12

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

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.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://github.com/artifex-labs/open-djed
,
• https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafkreigolyibr5gf5h3ncdgltre5ohbgu6sj6e2pwdil5p7ajdigrsz7sy
,
• https://x.com/artifex_labs/status/1924859785574326297
,
• https://x.com/artifex_labs/status/1927401575527415979
,
• https://x.com/artifex_labs/status/1939715559765246322

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

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.

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

GPL-3.0 license

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

Stablecoin

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

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.

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

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:

• Sustainable Maintenance: Ongoing infrastructure management, daily monitoring, and user support to ensure uptime and usability.
• Order Management: Adding essential features like open order views, cancel functionality, and historical tracking for greater user clarity and control.
• Localization & Accessibility: Translating the platform into the most common DeFi languages to broaden global accessibility and reach.
• Enhanced Documentation: Publishing comprehensive end-user guides, developer documentation, and SDK integration materials to empower the community to self-host, contribute, or build upon Open DJED.
• DJED Public Dashboard: Creating a dedicated dashboard to display key DJED metrics, enhancing transparency and user engagement with the protocol.
• Protocol Compatibility: Tracking and adapting to breaking changes in the DJED protocol and COTI backend to prevent unexpected downtimes, crucial given the reverse-engineered nature.
• Contingency Planning: Allocating budget for ADA price volatility and unforeseen protocol changes, ensuring team sustainability throughout the project’s duration.

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.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

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.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & Feasibility

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.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Order Management

Milestone Outputs

The inclusion of all necessary code and deployment changes to include the following functionality:

• View current open orders
• Cancel pending orders
• Order history w/filters & UX polish
• SHEN yield simulation and tracking

Acceptance Criteria

The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:

• Users can successfully view a list of their pending orders
• Users can successfully submit a pending order cancellation transaction
• Users can access a history page describing past orders and transactions
• The views for the order management features and SHEN yield simulation and tracking are consistent with the visual profile of the Open DJED app
• Users can access a page for simulating and tracking SHEN yield over time

Evidence of Completion

Evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• Easily accessible order management features from within the Open DJED app
• Screenshots and/or a video walkthrough demonstrating the new functionality
• Links to the main GitHub pull request(s) merged to introduce the features

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:

• A dedicated publicly accessible dashboard section on the Open DJED app
• The inclusion of key DJED metrics (KPIs and other relevant data not otherwise easily accessible) in the format of visualizations (charts, graphs and other interactive components)
• New backend API endpoints to serve aggregated data to the dashboard and third parties

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:

• The dashboard is live and publicly accessible
• The dashboard includes various important key metrics, to be defined by Artifex Labs, taking inspiration from Ethena and molded to the DJED model which offers a different risk profile and value propositions
• The data presented is accurate and updates in a timely manner
• The user interface is intuitive and easy to understand

Evidence of Completion

The evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• Link to the live DJED dashboard
• Screenshots or a video walkthrough of the dashboard's features
• Link(s) to the GitHub pull request(s) in which the dashboard is implemented

Delivery Month

2

Cost

13200

Progress

40 %

Milestone Title

Translations

Milestone Outputs

The milestone outputs for the translations milestone are:

• An integrated internationalization (i18n) framework
• Complete translations of the UI and error messages to common DeFi languages, including EN, ES, PT, DE, FR, CN, JA
• A language switcher component on the UI for users to select their preferred language

Acceptance Criteria

The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:

• The platform is fully usable and understandable in all aforementioned language
• The language switcher changes the application's selected language and saves the user's preference across sessions
• A fallback to English is implemented for any untranslated texts or errors

Evidence of Completion

The evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• The inclusion of a visible language switcher component on the UI
• The presentation of text in the selected language on the UI
• Screenshots showing the application in several of the new languages
• Links to the GitHub pull request(s) containing the i18n framework and translation files

Delivery Month

3

Cost

5500

Progress

50 %

Milestone Title

Documentation

Milestone Outputs

For the documentation milestone, the milestone outputs are:

• End-user guide (how to mint/redeem) and exploration of core DJED protocol concepts for end-users in an article or video format
• Detailed developer documentation for the API and integration flows
• Reference documentation for the public Open DJED SDK (markdown and source code documentation)
• A publicly accessible documentation site (e.g., using GitHub pages)

Acceptance Criteria

The acceptance criteria for this milestone are defined as:

• The documentation is clear, well-structured and publicly available
• The end-user guide is sufficient for a new DJED user (with entry level Cardano DeFi experience) to successfully mint and redeem DJED and SHEN
• The developer docs enable third-party developers to integrate with the Open DJED API or SDK with ease

Evidence of Completion

The evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• Link to the public documentation portal
• Documentation source files readily available in the Open DJED GitHub mono-repository

Delivery Month

4

Cost

6600

Progress

60 %

Milestone Title

Core Maintenance & Sustainability

Milestone Outputs

The milestone outputs for Core Maintenance & Sustainability are:

• Consistent uptime and performance of the Open DJED application
• Timely resolution of bugs and community-reported issues
• Active user support via Discord, X and GitHub
• Management of all infrastructure costs and operations (servers, logging, domains)

Acceptance Criteria

The acceptance criteria for this milestone are:

• Public uptime dashboard (e.g., BettersStack) showing >= 99% availability
• GitHub issues tagged as bug are triaged within 48 hours and resolved in subsequent releases
• User support channels are actively monitored, with response times under 24 hours for critical inquiries
• Infrastructure invoices are managed, ensuring no service interruptions

Evidence of Completion

Evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• Link to a public uptime monitoring dashboard
• GitHub repository showing bugfix pull requests and resolved issues
• Screenshots or links to support conversations on public channels (Discord/GitHub)

Delivery Month

6

Cost

24200

Progress

100 %

Milestone Title

Contingency & Volatility Buffer

Milestone Outputs

For the Contingency & Volability Buffer milestone, the outputs are

• Successful navigation of unforeseen technical challenges, such as DJED protocol changes or Cardano hardforks
• Mitigation of budget shortfalls due to ADA price volatility

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:

• The project successfully adapts to any breaking changes from its dependencies without derailing the roadmap
• The team remains funded for the project’s duration, even with moderate ADA price volatility
• Project deliverables are completed as planned
• Public announcements/communications precede the activation of this buffer

Evidence of Completion

The evidence of completion for this milestone is:

• A brief report published in the event of a major challenge that requires the activation of this buffer
• The project close-out report will include a section about this buffer, including whether it was or not significantly used and why

Delivery Month

12

Cost

32800

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

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:

• Direct project execution covering core maintenance, protocol adaptation, order management, SHEN yield simulation, translations, and comprehensive documentation (67,200 ADA).
• Contingency & Volatility Buffer (32,800 ADA) allocated for unforeseen costs and ensuring project resilience. This buffer is crucial for mitigating risks such as:
  • ADA Price Volatility: A buffer to ensure developer compensation remains fair and the project can operate for the full 12-month term, regardless of market fluctuations.
  • Protocol Emergencies: Funds reserved for urgent, unplanned development work resulting from breaking changes in the DJED protocol or Cardano hardforks.

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

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:

• Ecosystem Resilience and Decentralization: By providing a fully transparent, auditable, and forkable open-source interface, Open DJED reduces reliance on proprietary solutions, enhancing the ecosystem’s robustness and alignment with decentralized principles.
• Reduced Friction & Increased Adoption: Maintaining a user-friendly, well-documented, and localized interface lowers the barrier to entry for new users and developers to interact with DJED, directly fostering wider adoption.
• Developer Empowerment & Innovation: Comprehensive documentation and SDKs enable developers to build upon or integrate with Open DJED, fostering innovation and expanding the utility of the DJED protocol.
• Long-term Sustainability: Proactive maintenance, protocol adaptation, and a contingency buffer secure Open DJED’s continued operation, providing a stable, reliable resource for the community for the long term.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes