Development & Node Operation

Stake pool nodes need to be easy to run and developers need tools and libraries to more easily build applications and integrations

Innovation of resources, tools, libraries, SDKs, scripts or research within the developer ecosystem or for the operation of stake pool nodes

Tracking success for this category will mean:

• Increasing the number or quality of tools, libraries & SDKs that help improve areas around running nodes for SPOs, Plutus & IELE development or native asset development.
• Increasing the scalability of Cardano through the introduction of improvements that can come from research, layer 2 solutions and support further integrations of existing solutions.
• Increase the number or quality of the standards, resources and research that make it easier for node operators and developers to understand the ecosystem and to improve the overall ecosystem quality of the software being delivered.

For individual success metrics for the different types of proposal that can be included please refer to the suggested challenge brief success metrics ideas.

—--- FUNDING CATEGORIES BACKGROUND —---

Funding Categories is an approach to doing funding categorisation that will welcome all ideas, maximize the amount of ideas submitted and reduce the effort for all stakeholders in the Catalyst process.

Funding categories also help remove the existing issues with challenge settings. They help to prevent duplicate challenge settings, remove challenges created by self interest, reduce the need for deep knowledge of the ecosystem from challenge proposal teams and also removes an easy entry point for malicious actors.

The full documentation for Catalyst Funding Categories can be found here: https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/

7 funding categories have been documented to cover all forms of ideas and proposals. All proposals can be found here - https://linktr.ee/cardanopace

The budget weighting for the 7 categories has been determined using a community governance process. The voting results for this process can be found here - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/community-votes/fund-8-categories-budget-weighting/voting-results-fund-8

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Overview

Development & Node Operation is focused on the following areas:

• Creation and improvement of tools, scripts, libraries and SDKs that help make it easier for projects to develop on Cardano and for the community to operate stake pool nodes in the network.
• Research, analysis and creation of standards, resources or documentation that bring either novel innovation to the ecosystem or help with improving the education around what is available in the ecosystem for development or node operation.

Why this category is important

The Cardano developer ecosystem and operation of stake pool nodes need to be easy for newcomers and budding talent to start learning and using.

To make it easy to develop projects on Cardano as well as operate the network there is a need for high quality resources, standards, tools, scripts, libraries and SDKs for developers and operators to use.

The higher quality and more thorough the developer and stake pool node ecosystem is for Cardano the faster that people can be onboarded and build out applications to a high quality and security standard.

Types of proposals to include

• SPO tools, scripts, libraries & SDKs - Development that helps the SPO community more easily start and run their Cardano nodes or other ecosystem node infrastructure.
• Plutus and IELE tools, libraries & SDKs - Development that helps developers more easily write and deploy smart contracts onto the Cardano blockchain.
• Native asset tools, libraries & SDKs - Development to improve how the community and developers can issue and manage native assets.
• Scalability solutions - Rollups (e.g. zero knowledge rollups, optimistic rollups), sharding, state channels, zero knowledge proofs, side chains.
• Resources & documentation - Technical documentation on how to use different tools, libraries or SDKs in the ecosystem.
• Standards - Creation and improvement of standards used within the ecosystem that help to improve the overall quality of software deployed.
• Research and development - Research and development on new novel approaches that could be used in the Cardano ecosystem. This could include areas such as security, scalability or interoperability.

Potential success metrics for proposal types

• SPO tools, scripts, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, metrics around any scalability, security or cost improvements.
• Plutus and IELE tools, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, metrics around any scalability, security or cost improvements.
• Native asset tools, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, metrics around any scalability, security or cost improvements.
• Scalability solutions - Total transactions per second achievable, increases in transaction efficiency achieved, security guarantees achieved.
• Resources & documentation - Amount of people viewing resources, reduction in number of common questions to contributors due to better resources.
• Standards - Increase in any security thresholds for new applications, Increases in performance achievable by applications.
• Research and development - Number of projects utilising new novel approaches to development or node operation, number of new standards created due to research efforts

Considerations for proposers

• Open source plan - Any tools, libraries or SDKs are encouraged to be open source either from the start or as soon as possible. There is no requirement to be open source immediately however proposers should include the details of their plan towards open sourcing the project.
• Commercial projects - Development projects most suited here will be open source with the aim of the work executed being available for the benefit of other projects to use and build their applications with. Commercial projects looking to build a network or DApp suited for the end user should use the Products & Integrations category for proposals. Projects are welcomed to make proposals in this category for any specific parts of their project that would be open source and should have benefit to the wider ecosystem around improving the development ecosystem or operation of Cardano.

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of $25K. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. $27,500 will be rounded up to $50,000.