Below is the draft for the dAPI team proposal.
Please feel free to comment and/or ask questions!
Draft will be up until the 16th before an on-chain proposal will be made.
dAPI Team Proposal #3, May 2023 – August 2023
Team: dAPI Team
Period: 1 May 2023 – 31 August 2023 (4-months)
Amount: 460,253 USDC
Destination: Gnosis Safe (Multi-sig wallet)
Address: 0xbBbd583e6660dF247E13E7C99Ee71c54271407e6
signers:
Ugur - eth:0x62B8E7CD3bCb904a0335Cf4b1E8D10013b5bEFca
Aaron - eth:0xc5cC23c594B54FBA391Bd4E9604C803d17066dF1
Santiago - eth:0x918350a01A4C259FBCc94c6Fb2ca49A3753BDb86
2/3 Multisig
Previous Cycle
A summary of previous cycles accomplishment can be found in our monthly reports for February, March and April as well as our released article for Phase 1.
Scope
1. Managed dAPIs
The focus of this cycle will be on releasing Phase 2 – managed dAPIs. The following will describe what users will be able to purchase once we’ve completed this phase.
Compared to self-funded dAPIs, these will allow potential users to get access to aggregated data feeds as well as more parameters to chose from for their configuration. Self-funded dAPIs will be upgradable to their desired configuration on the API3 Market. A maximum amount of five configurations will be available:
- 2 Minute Heartbeat & 0.25% Deviation
- 0.25% Deviation & 24h Heartbeat
- 0.5% Deviation & 24h Heartbeat
- 1% Deviation & 24h Heartbeat
- 5% Deviation & 24h Heartbeat
Not each configuration will be available for each asset on each chain (e.g. we won’t be offering 2 minute heartbeats for ETH Mainnet). Another important factor is that there is a limit for how long a dAPI can be upgraded. For most chains this will be set at 6 months, meaning that if you buy today, the service will run out in 6 months. This consequently also means that e.g. if you want to extend midway in your service you will only be able to add an additional 3 months onto your service because of the max 6 months into the future limitation period. This limitation is being introduced mostly because of the intensely volatile nature of gas consumption.
The longer we sell a service for, the more risk the API3 DAO takes, hence the more expensive a service gets, as this risk is being factored into the costs. If a data feed costs 100$ to operate today, and we’d allow somebody to purchase for 3 years, the risk multiplier would force us to charge multiple times more than what we’d actually consume to account for e.g. a 10x gas increase during a bull market. Limiting how far into the future a service can be bought for effectively reduces the risk the DAO takes on an allows us to price services closer to what their actual consumption is. This consumption and estimation will be updated on a month-by-month basis, meaning that services will reflect market conditions in near real time (cheap during bear markets and get gradually more expensive during bull markets). The limitations per networks are currently (pending potential changes obv):
- Ethereum Mainnet: 1 Month
- ETH L2s: 3 Months
- All others: 6 Months
After the selection of the desired managed dAPI configuration a user will be able to add this selection and others (on the same network) into a cart and proceed to payment. Payments are made in the native currency of the chain that the dAPI is operated on (e.g. MATIC on Polygon PoS). After successful payment the dAPI team will begin the upgrade of a dAPI and complete it within 3 business days. At this stage the managed dAPI is available for anyone to read for “free” as the operational overhead was already covered by one entity/person. This makes it especially lucrative for networks themselves to take on this cost as they can effectively offer free oracle services to all dApps on their network.
The API3 Market will display the managed dAPI configuration (e.g. Deviation & Heartbeat), the providers that power the respective dAPI, it’s expiry date as well as a graph that shows the history in the last X hours.
2. Monitoring - API3 Sentinels
Monitoring is already an integral part of dAPI operations, but with managed dAPIs the task becomes even more important as this will be our flagship product that will secure lots of value. As such, we’re looking to introduce API3 Sentinels that will be tasked with monitoring various things to increase the reliability and our reaction time during critical situations. Apart from reliability and some common sense, there aren’t a lot of requirements for this position, and as such this position could be a steppingstone to get involved with API3 and potentially contribute in other areas once commitment and abilities have been proven. Our aim is to build a globally dispersed team that can cover the monitoring duties 24/7. If this sounds appealing to you, feel free to shoot us an email to jobs@api3.org with the title “API3 Sentinel”. You can find the full job description here.
3. Provider Payments
We’ve recently made a proposal to receive USDC for the provider payments. Since then 6 providers were paid for the month of March and 7 for the month of April, leaving us with 85,000 USDC from the intial 150,000 USDC. These payments were not included in the previous dAPI team proposal since the requirement and/or agreements were finalized after its passing. As such we’re incorporating these costs into this proposal going forward as it is part of the dAPI teams ability to actually deliver these services (e.g. we can’t pass dAPI team proposals and then get rejected on API provider proposals, as it will make it impossible to deliver the first proposal.)
4. General Notes
This proposal was made for 4 months instead of the usual 3 months, in anticipation of a very busy July & early August, where we most likely won’t find the time to post a proposal due to the rollout of managed dAPIs as well as other factors such as conferences and speaking opportunities.
| dAPI Team Budget | ||
|---|---|---|
| Amount (USDC) | Note | |
| Grants | 325,000 | See below |
| Signer Duties | 25,000 | 333$ p.P / Week |
| Overhead | 17,500 | ~5% |
| Provider Payments | 200,000 | 5,000 p.P / Month |
| Sum | 567,500 | |
| Unspent from Last Cycle | 18,247 | |
| Unspent from Provider Payments | 85,000 | |
| Total Ask | 464,253 | |
| Team and Grants | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Team member | Role | Basis | Monthly Grant (USDC) |
| *Ugur | PO & Fund Mgmt | FT | 8,750.00 |
| *Aaron | Developer | FT | 8,750.00 |
| *Santiago | Developer | FT | 8,750.00 |
| Vekil | Developer | FT | 8,750.00 |
| Jiri | PO | FT | 8,750.00 |
| Markus | Developer | FT | 8,750.00 |
| Cris | Developer | FT | 8,750.00 |
| Sentinel 1 | API3 Sentinel | FT | 4,000.00** |
| Sentinel 2 | API3 Sentinel | FT | 4,000.00** |
| Sentinel 3 | API3 Sentinel | FT | 4,000.00** |
| Sentinel 4 | API3 Sentinel | FT | 4,000.00** |
| Sentinel 5 | API3 Sentinel | FT | 4,000.00** |
*The destination will be a multi-signature wallet address managed by Ugur, Aaron and Santiago.
** This is the maximum compensation for this role and not an indication that it will be paid out flat. The actual payout will depend on the individual, their commitment, and skills.
Expenses
Similarly, to our last proposal, our expenses are minimal and should be covered by the overhead. There will also be expenses in the form of on-chain transactions for disbursing grants payments and such as creating proposals, which will be reimbursed. Transaction IDs will be retained for these and produced at the end of the cycle.
Any unspent amount will roll over to the next cycle. A supplementary proposal will be made if the team foresees any larger-than-estimated number of expenses.
Explanation of Proposal Parameters:
Target contract address is the USDC token contract address, which is 0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48
Target contract signature: transfer (address, uint256). This is the function to call on the target contract, which triggers a transfer of USDC tokens.
The parameters stated include the address these USDC are to be sent to, which should match the proposal address, followed by the number of USDC. USDC has 6 decimal places, and solidity is unable to deal with decimal places - hence we add 6 zeros after the proposed USDC number. The number of decimal places can be verified on the USDC contract page of Etherscan - $1.00 | USD Coin (USDC) Token Tracker | Etherscan
