SIDAN - Whisky V2 - Cardano Rust SDK with Pallas

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

SIDAN - Whisky V2 - Cardano Rust SDK with Pallas

[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

6

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

Whisky’s CSL core limits maintainability and slows new-feature support. Moving to TxPipe’s pallas gives a Rust-native, community-maintained base with broader features and cleaner extensibility.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://github.com/sidan-lab/whisky
,
• https://crates.io/crates/whisky
,
• https://whisky.sidan.io/
,
• https://dashboard.sidan.io/org-stats
,
• https://x.com/sidan_lab

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

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

Yes

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

Pallas from Txpipe

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

Apache-2.0 license

[Theme Selection] Theme

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

Developer Tools

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.

We use Apache-2.0 due to below reasons:

• Permissive + enterprise-friendly: allows commercial/use/modification with attribution; minimal friction for wallets/exchanges.
• Patent grant & contribution clarity: Apache-2.0’s explicit patent terms reduce legal risk for contributors and adopters.
• Ecosystem alignment: matches TxPipe pallas (Apache-2.0), easing integration; also compatible with EMURGO CSL (MIT).
• Sustains adoption: consistent with SIDAN Lab repos and broader Rust/Cardano tooling, encouraging forks, PRs, and reuse.

How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?

• Public from day 1: All work in sidan-lab/whisky (Apache-2.0); no private mirrors; all changes via public PRs.
• Docs always live: API docs on docs.rs (auto-built per release); guides/quickstarts on GitHub Pages & README.
• Transparent progress: Public Issues/Milestones/Projects; CI (Actions) visible on every PR.
• Versioned releases: GitHub Releases with changelogs; tags link to docs.rs and examples.
• Inform the public: Announcements on SIDAN Lab’s X/Twitter with links to the repo and docs

How will you provide high quality documentation?

Two-tier docs

• API reference (https://sidan-lab.github.io/whisky/)::) docs.rs/whisky auto-built on each crate release with rich rustdoc, examples, and feature flags documented.
• Guides site (https://whisky.sidan.io/)::) Task-based docs (quickstart, tx-builder, tx-parser, era upgrades) on GitHub Pages, linked from README.

Quality gates (CI)

• Build docs for all features; run doctests; check links; fail PRs on warnings/broken examples.
• Versioned releases with changelog

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

Phase 1 — Build transactions on Pallas

• Refactor TxBuilder to take in an interface as serializer core so Whisky no longer has to depend on CSL.
• Create the Pallas-based serializer core (WhiskyPallas) and connect it to the transaction builder.
• Prove it works by building real example transactions, with automated tests and short docs.

Phase 2 — Parse transactions + remaining tools

• Implement the transaction parser interface for whisky-pallas
• Move the remaining helpers (addresses, scripts, datums, formats) over to Pallas.
• Check everything end-to-end with build→read “round-trip” tests and extra stress tests.

Phase 3 — Finish migration & ship

• Switch the whole SDK to the new dependency injection design and make Pallas the default.
• Keep a CSL compatibility layer for a while and provide a brief migration guide for users.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

• Faster access to new protocol features: A pallas-based core lets Rust devs adopt new eras/governance updates sooner (e.g., Conway/CIP-1694), reducing lag between node releases and SDK support
• Stronger Rust ecosystem & interoperability: Aligning with pallas’ Rust-native primitives improves compatibility with TxPipe tooling (e.g., Oura, Scrolls), making it easier to build explorers, wallets, and data apps.
• Better developer experience: Clear, versioned API docs (docs.rs) plus guides (GitHub Pages) and public CI lower onboarding friction and increase trust in releases.
• Resilience & community maintenance: Reduces single-vendor dependency by leveraging an actively maintained, community-driven base, encouraging external contributions and shared standards.

[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?

Capability & accountability:

• Catalyst delivery (Rust libs/SDKs): Successfully completed F11 “Rust library for easy off-chain transaction building,” and the F12 “Advance Cardano SDK in Rust”. Both listed on our public proposals page.
• Proven usefulness (downloads & adoption): cardano-serialization-lib ≈ 250k all-time downloads; our related crates—sidan-csl-rs ≈ 100k and whisky ≈ 50k—total 150k+ lifetime downloads. That’s >50% of CSL’s volume, indicating broad, sustained use of our SDKs.
• Maintainers who ship: 13 tagged releases in 2025; latest v1.0.10 (Aug 7, 2025). Active PRs from SIDAN Lab’s contributors.
• Ecosystem builders: Team maintains related SDKs/tools (e.g., Gin for Python, Vodka for Aiken testing, Mesh for typescript transaction builder), showing cross-stack capability and reuse of Whisky cores. Our team includes an ex-CSL maintainer, bringing deep knowledge of CSL internals and compatibility edges—lowering migration risk and speeding up parity work.
• Recognized by ecosystem: Cardano Foundation “Developer & Builder Delegations” (May 21, 2025) lists Sidan Lab among the seven DReps receiving 20M ADA delegations.

Feasibility & validation plan:

• Incremental migration: Introduce a Serializer trait and implement a WhiskyPallas backend, keeping the current API stable—validated behind feature flags. (Parallels our existing builder/parser architecture already released.)
• Cross-implementation parity tests: Golden-vector tests comparing CSL vs pallas outputs (CBOR, hashes, witnesses), plus round-trip build↔parse tests in CI.
• Ecosystem alignment: Pallas is an actively maintained Rust-native base with regular releases, making the approach practical and sustainable.
• Release gating: Ship as pre-releases on crates.io, with changelog, migration notes, and docs.rs builds; promoted to stable once CI, examples, and external PR reviews pass.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Preparation and Organization Setup

Milestone Outputs

• Team setup: maintainers/advisors confirmed with roles, responsibilities, and meeting/on-call cadence.
• Communications: public announcement, community channel (Discord/Telegram), X/Twitter post, contributor guidelines.
• Project planning: GitHub Projects roadmap with milestones, labeled issue/PR templates, initial delivery plan.

Acceptance Criteria

• Maintainers/advisors listed with GitHub handles, roles in README/MAINTAINERS.md.
• Repo: public repo live with LICENSE, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md committed and visible.
• Communications: announcement post published (link in repo), community channel invite in README.
• Project planning: GitHub Projects board active with milestones and actionable issues linked to this milestone.

Evidence of Completion

• Legal entity established and operational
• Link to README/MAINTAINERS.md showing maintainers/advisors roles
• Link to repo tree on main showing LICENSE, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
• Link to public announcement post on X/Twitter/Discord.
• Link to GitHub Projects board with visible milestones and issues for this milestone.

Delivery Month

1

Cost

20000

Progress

20 %

Milestone Title

Development of Whisky-pallas Phase 1

Milestone Outputs

• Complete the tx-builder integration using pallas as core serializer: TxBuilder wired to consume a serializer interface and configured with a WhiskyPallas implementation; sample spend/mint/withdraw transactions built and shown in docs/examples.
• Migrate all the utils required by development of pallas tx-builder: Port the required utils (e.g., but might not be exact, CBOR encode/decode, hashing, address/policy-ID, fee/min-UTxO, datum/metadata helpers) so the tx-builder works end-to-end on pallas, with unit tests.

Acceptance Criteria

• Upgrade TxBuilder to take an interface as type of serializer rather than enforcing CSL serializer: code builds and runs with a generic serializer interface; no CSL-only paths remain for the builder in this phase.
• Develop the WhiskyPallas class implementing the tx buildable interface: used by the tx-builder to construct valid transactions (inputs/outputs/change, multi-asset mint, datum/redeemer, script witnesses) verified by tests.
• Develop all the utility functions required by the tx-builder: all required utils implemented for pallas and covered by tests showing parity with previous behavior (except different cbor due to adoption of different encoding/decoding format), plus a README/example demonstrating tx-builder with pallas.

Evidence of Completion

• Successfully build transaction with the pallas as serializer core proved by test cases
• Public link to the developed code on SIDAN Lab Github
• Public link to post on Twitter/X to inform the Public
• Link to SIDAN Lab discord on release announcement

Delivery Month

2

Cost

30000

Progress

50 %

Milestone Title

Development of Whisky-pallas Phase 2

Milestone Outputs

• Complete the tx-parser integration using pallas as core serializer: Implement a parser interface over WhiskyPallas to decode raw CBOR/hex for further use. The behaviour should mirror current WhiskyCSL functionality without developer knowing / learning about the migration to pallas.
• Migrate the rest of utils of whisky-csl to pallas: Port the remaining helpers in packages/whisky-csl/src/utils to a pallas-based module. Add migration notes for anything required dev attention, update README with examples and a brief mapping table.

Acceptance Criteria

• Develop the WhiskyPallas class which implements the tx parsable interface: The tx-parser decodes valid transactions using pallas as the core serializer, covering spend/mint/withdraw cases and era-aware fields; API remains consistent with existing naming; example usage compiles and runs.
• Develop all the rest of utility functions: All required utils for builder/parser are implemented on pallas with unit tests, and equivalence tests against the former whisky-csl outputs (including round-trip build↔parse), except different cbor due to adoption of different encoding/decoding format.

Evidence of Completion

• Successfully parse transaction with the pallas as serializer core proved by test cases
• Public link to the developed code on SIDAN Lab Github
• Public link to post on Twitter/X to inform the Public
• Link to SIDAN Lab discord on release announcement

Delivery Month

1

Cost

30000

Progress

80 %

Milestone Title

Full migration from whisky-csl to whisky-pallas

Milestone Outputs

• Refactor the rest components of Whisky to allow dependency injection for serializer core: apply the Serializer interface across remaining modules (tx-builder, parser, wallet, utils), remove CSL-only paths internally, and keep an adapter for transition.
• Integrate with entire Whisky package, change default into whisky-pallas: wire the entire package to use the pallas core by default; update examples/README and add a short migration note if needed; keep an optional csl feature.

Acceptance Criteria

• Develop all the functions / logics needed for full migration: all public APIs build and run with the pallas default; round-trip build↔parse tests pass except difference due to different cbor encoding/decoding format selection; no hard dependency on CSL remains in core paths; docs and examples reflect the new default.
• Complete integration by most crates importing whisky-pallas but not whisky-csl: workspace shows default = ["pallas"]; csl remains optional.

Evidence of Completion

• Successfully running current test cases
• Public link to the developed code on SIDAN Lab Github
• Public link to post on Twitter/X to inform the Public
• Link to SIDAN Lab discord on release announcement

Delivery Month

1

Cost

10000

Progress

90 %

Milestone Title

Documentation and Closeout Report

Milestone Outputs

• Publish Whisky V2 docs: API reference (docs.rs) plus GitHub Pages guides (install, quickstart, tx-builder, tx-parser, DI, migration CSL→pallas), with runnable examples.
• Add contribution materials: CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, SECURITY, issue/PR templates, and maintainer notes for future collaboration.
• Produce the close-out report (scope, KPIs, adoption metrics, lessons, next steps) and a close-out video (demo + summary), and announce links via README/X/Discord.

Acceptance Criteria

• Docs site live and linked from README; pages include quickstart, builder/parser guides, migration guide; examples compile; doctests and link checks pass; Pages deploy green.
• CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, and issue/PR templates committed; CHANGELOG and version tags updated.
• Close-out report public (in repo or site) covering objectives, results, and roadmap; close-out video uploaded (public, captions) with links added to README and posted on X/Discord.

Evidence of Completion

• Documentation served at the public Github repository with link provided
• Publicly accessible closeout report
• Publicly accessible closeout video

Delivery Month

1

Cost

10000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Engineering (Rust/Cardano) — 75,000 ADA (~75%)

The bulk of the budget pays engineers to do the core work: build the Pallas-based tx-builder (Phase 1), add the tx-parser and remaining utilities (Phase 2), and complete the full migration/dependency injection (Phase 3). This also covers tests, CI fixes, code reviews, and basic performance/security checks.

Project management & QA — 8,000 ADA (~8%)

Planning the roadmap, triaging issues, running release checklists, confirming milestone acceptance, and verifying parity/round-trip tests so what we ship is reliable.

Documentation & DevRel — 12,000 ADA (~12%)

Writing quickstarts and task guides, the CSL→Pallas migration guide, runnable examples, and keeping docs.rs / GitHub Pages updated. Also includes launch threads, demo walkthroughs, and helping developers adopt the SDK.

Reporting & Closeout — 5,000 ADA (~5%)

Preparing the fund closeout report and a short video (with captions), publishing everything, and linking it clearly from the repo and channels.

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

• High public-good ROI: Whisky V2 (Apache-2.0) is reusable by any team—wallets, DeFi, data tools. A pallas-based builder+parser saves each team ~2–4 weeks of integration vs. rolling their own. With only a handful of adopters, the ecosystem’s saved effort already exceeds this grant.
• Faster protocol adoption: Aligning Whisky with pallas (active, Rust-native) shortens the lag between node/era updates and Rust SDK support, unblocking downstream builders sooner (more mainnet features, earlier).
• Lower ecosystem risk: Moving off a single-maintainer dependency to a community-maintained base reduces bus-factor and fragmentation; DI keeps options open if future serializers emerge.
• Measured outcomes, not promises: We’ll track releases aligned to node/era tags, docs completeness (guides + examples), downloads/reverse-deps, external PRs/issues closed, and adoption announcements—all publicly verifiable on GitHub, crates.io/docs.rs, and SIDAN channels.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes