MACI 2024 Product Roadmap #859
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As QFI is now a community led project it would be nice if you could stop using our [exact] website (or change the branding) to make things less confusing. While I appreciate you forking the project for EF quadratic funding rounds (this was the goal) it would make things less confusing moving forward! Happy to help there. *moving conversation from discord here As the roadmap mentions my project (QFI) several times think it’s a good a place as any to discuss taking credit for my work on the MACI roadmap (mentioning my work as part of another project’s roadmap is wrong). While I’m glad for the PSE Fork (https://github.com/privacy-scaling-explorations/qf) it does not mean that everyone who hits the fork button on GitHub suddenly helped plan, code and execute 17 QF rounds. I hope you understand; I would say the same for anyone else trying to fork the project to pass off the rounds I organized with other community leaders as their own. Sorry to call you out here Sam 😅, but think it’s better to be transparent and honest here. I’m glad you enjoyed the Sabbatical, but it’s time to get on the same page now and run your first QF round. Happy to help in what ever you need for this initiative and welcome the new MACI team to apply to the QFI Spring cohort! |
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There has been and continues to be a QFI team within PSE which works to empower community organizers to run QF rounds. We're not using your website. We have been using our website since early 2023. Our team created the content on that website, and I have the receipts to prove it - I personally wrote much of it and deployed it. If your initiative intends to do the same things, that's excellent for the ecosystem and we are all for it. In fact, there are many things we can probably collaborate on. However, that should not include wholesale copying of our content and claiming it as your own - your website at qfincubator.org looks to be nearly a complete clone of ours, to the extent that your "Join our Discord" link still links to our PSE Discord.
I'm not attempting to take credit for the work you or other members of the MACI team worked on. I merely mention QFI on the MACI roadmap because it's been a project of the MACI team. You, however, with your "my project" claims, do appear to be taking sole credit for it, despite the public commit history that clearly shows contributions of other MACI/PSE team members. |
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Sam, there's no need for gaslighting. I started QFI and led the "internal" team you keep speaking about within the EF as well as the MACI and P0tion teams, you follow the business process I wrote and inherited the team I built, you are making it seem like I wasn't the one to recruit you to PSE, or support your Blackrock sabbatical internally 🤘, which feels dishonest. QFI, which has been a community effort with contributors from QF organizers around the world, is meant to grow and promote more QF organizers, not take credit for their rounds or as a PR stunt (this is in part why I work anonymously) ; there are a majority developers and contributors outside of PSE - I think it's important to put away the ego here. I don't think there is a way forward here that untangles the past to the full satisfaction of everyone involved, unfortunately. The code is obviously open source and you are free to fork it and continue working on it in parallel with the QFI team at PSE. The relationships are similarly non-exclusive in nature. EF leadership has asked how to make the parallel path easier for me after leaving EF, and this would be a simple way as you obviously have more resources here. I see the case studies you mention (content we created) also as an opensource public good which you are free to use, similarly re. the Notion I created which feeds the website. To be clear attribution is important and most of the credit goes to QF organizers who are more than a footnote to doing any/all of this. For transparency, the QFI project is heading in two directions. One lead by me outside of PSE in a community driven manner and separately my original team driven and funded by PSE to support EF Family QF rounds [which is it's own monster and bureaucracy, but still, in the literal sense, using all of the code/designs/workflows I built]. This is not ideal for me for obvious reasons and I hope to have your continued support on my community lead fork to continue to bring QF to grassroots communities given our history of working together. |
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Here’s one potential vision for Q1, which I think aligns well with our overall 2024 product roadmap. Feedback welcome! High level goals
Why?Timing of:
…seems like these events could all line up really well! What needs to happen?1) MACI v1.2 release
2) clr.fund MACI v1.2 integration
3) ETH Latam QF round
Potential new features?
Why not?
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If improving the mobile experience is a priority, perhaps we should be exploring clrfund as a PWA with an embedded wallet option? Something like Capsule might be an option worth exploring (haven't played with it yet, so honestly not sure). |
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Closing this out with a Q1 update. Please refer to #1381 moving forward. Q1 in reviewIn our kickoff of 2024, we aimed at a few major Q1 goals that all tied together: ✅ Release MACI v1.2We completed a significant refactor to simplify the codebase and improve developer experience. After an internal audit and revamped documentation, we released a new MACI version - see our MACI v1.2 release post to read up on the details of that upgrade. ✅ Support clr.fund upgradeclr.fund, a quadratic funding (QF) project which has distributed millions of dollars to Ethereum public goods, is the longest-running production application built on MACI (since 2020!). Thanks primarily to the hard work of their core dev yuetloo, clr.fund successfully upgraded from MACI 0.x to our fresh v1.2 release. Nicely done! ✅ Support ETH Latam QF roundWe teamed up with ETH Latam to help them run a QF round using the clr.fund stack (running on MACI v1.2). Over 60 conference attendees participated (using Zupass tickets as the gatekeeper to the faucet and round) to distribute over 30,000 DAI to public good projects across Central America and the Carribean - view the round results and learn more in ETH Kipu's ETH Latam recap post! ✅ Support ETH Colombia QF roundThe ETH Colombia team ran a QF round for their community - view the round results here. ✅ Community engagement via eventsWe participated in our first hackathons (ETHGlobal Circuit Breaker, ETHGlobal London, ETH Latam, ETHTaipei and ETHDam) and distributed over $10,000 in bounties. We had a blast engaging with hackers from around the world, receiving feedback, and seeing innovative project ideas on MACI come to life. Thank you to all those who participated! Please refer to #1381 for ongoing discussion of our roadmap! |
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As part of our efforts to make our core team's work more accessible and to foster more collaboration from our open source community, we're seeking feedback on our 2024 product roadmap!
2024 Roadmap Draft
This document aims to outline the 2024 core team & product roadmap for MACI & QF initiatives.
Note: we've included longer-term plans in order to set context & gather feedback, but the focus here is primarily on our plans for 2024 (particularly the 1st half of 2024). We’ll re-assess our roadmap towards the end of Q1 2024 once we have a clearer picture of our team members & size, resources available, and our velocity as a team.
Team description
The MACI core team is a small collaborative team building various projects within PSE. Our sustained focus is on MACI: a protocol that allows users to have an on-chain voting process with greatly increased collusion resistance & privacy. Additionally, we allocate a significant portion of our time to support the practical adoption of this technology by grassroots community leaders around the world using it to secure Quadratic Voting (QV) & Quadratic Funding (QF) events.
MACI mission & vision
MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) is a public good & a potential core piece of infrastructure for many Ethereum-based applications to support privacy-protecting on-chain governance. Using MACI, no voter can reveal how they voted yet voting results are published publicly and verified with cryptographic proofs to prevent censorship, bribery, collusion, and other nefarious acts common in public polling processes. With MACI, you get the transparency you want as well as the privacy you need.
Long term, the MACI team’s vision is to build the most secure e-voting solution in the world.
Short term, our vision is to empower developers to build on MACI to create privacy-protecting voting applications, including quadratic funding platforms & DAO governance tools. Our goal is to provide an out-of-the-box solution for developers to quickly deploy & plug their applications into. MACI enables you to focus less time worrying about voting infrastructure & more time building the logic specific to your application.
High-level MACI ecosystem goals
2023: MACI integrated by 1 PSE project(✅, QFI)High-level MACI development goals
2023: build technical feasibility for 10K concurrent voters on the platform.(✅)QF mission & vision
We’re building technical infrastructure, operational expertise & a network of communities to create a scalable way to enable community organizers to run QF rounds. The mission of our QF project has been to serve as a reference implementation on how to integrate MACI as well as support the practical adoption of this community-funding technology.
Long term, our vision is to build the most widely adopted QF solution in the world, powered by MACI.
Our vision to eventually enable QF rounds, running e.g. every quarter, at the local, municipal, national and global scale. We want QF rounds to become the “default” place where projects are contributing funds to public goods
High-level QF ecosystem goals
2023: facilitate 15 QF/QV rounds(❌, 6 rounds)High-level QF development goals
2023: build QFI as a QV reference implementation for MACI v1.x(✅❓)Where are we now?
Despite the MACI project existing in some form for 4+ years now, we still see MACI & QF largely in the “research & development” stage. We’ve built an MVP and have shipped audited production products to market (starting with MACI v1.0) but we’re still in the stage of testing, iterating & refining. We’re looking to gain adoption from projects, whether experimental or in production, in order to gain product feedback & quickly iterate on improvements. We still have lots of potential research areas to explore in order to make MACI usable from the mass market.
2023 year in review
Overall, 2023 has been a turbulent year on the MACI team with up & downs.
A few major initiatives & themes worth calling out, which influence our 2024 roadmap strategy.
Successes in 2023
P0tion v1.0 release & early traction
Originally planned as tooling to support MACI’s trusted setup ceremony, eventually we generalized this project & codebase to provide infrastructure that supports any Groth16 Phase 2 Trusted Setup ceremony.
The project was publicly launched in August & has already seen early traction in the community. 4 ceremonies have already been run, including the MACI v1 Setup Ceremony! More projects continue to indicate interest, both by running ceremonies on our hosted infrastructure (ceremony.pse.dev) as well as forking the project to run their own ceremonies, which has attracted ~260s of contributions.
References
Community QF rounds
The goal of our QF project has been to serve as a reference implementation on how to integrate MACI as well as support the practical adoption of this community-funding technology.
This year we continued to build out our fork-able QF stack & partnered with a variety of Ethereum community organizers to run 6 successful QF/QV rounds, with a total of $58,000 of matching pool funds disbursed to community projects:
Learn more about some of community QF rounds in our case studies.
We also connected with tens of other grassroots Ethereum communities. Although other rounds “failed” to launch in 2023, we established relationships & opened doors to potential future rounds. We learned valuable insights about what makes a successful community partner, what level of skill & participation is required to make a round work. Other orgs we explored rounds with included ETH Rome, ETH Mexico, ETH Brasil, ETH Colombia & ETH Gunu.
References
Challenges in 2023
Lack of MACI adoption
Despite publishing the MACI v1.0 release over 2 years ago, not a single project has integrated MACI v1.x in a production environment (aside from QFI, the internal PSE project).
While attempts have not been well documented, we’re aware of a handful of anecdotal accounts of developer teams demonstrating interest in MACI, attempting to integrate it, but eventually giving up after weeks of effort due to a variety of issues (steep learning curve, poor documentation, lack of code commenting or readability, limited support from the MACI team).
MACI repo & community neglect
Although our core team has been working hard on various initiatives, our communication, priorities & activities have not been visible to the community. Most communication has been in private TG groups & collaboration on core team development has primarily been in closed GH project boards. This creates a lack of certainty around the investment in & maintenance of the project.
The MACI repo has been largely neglected in 2023. As of early October, there were >90 open issues & >30 opens PRs, many of which are months or years old, and most of which had no response from our core team. This does not inspire confidence from the community that this project is actively maintained, or that the core team is open to community contributions.
While we’ve had a public TG group (with >250 people), there’s not much activity from the core team there & we haven't reliably responded to questions or inquiries from the community.
Half-baked research & development
The team took on several ambitious areas of research & development (particularly research). While we made progress in areas, most of these projects have not come to fruition in terms of being published or integrated into the MACI product:
It seems team members were mostly assigned to their own independent initiatives, which led to these isolated workstreams. Individuals found it hard to gain feedback & support from the team. Moving forward, we want to align individual goals with larger team goals in order to encourage closer collaboration on the projects we push forward.
Team turnover
In 2023 we lost some core team members which contributed to resource constraints, stalled projects, & general confusion within team around priorities. This also led to morale issues with productivity, frustrations & uncertainty of the future direction. Yet ultimately the team & project perseveres! We’re hopeful with the new structure & growth opportunities, we can achieve an impactful 2024.
2024 workstreams
To achieve our mission, we’re focused on 4 major workstreams that comprise our roadmap.
1) MACI Developer Experience (DX)
~50% of team’s total bandwidth
We believe that MACI is only useful to the extent that people use MACI & build on MACI.
As mentioned above in “challenges”, not a single project has yet integrated MACI v1.x in a production environment We view this as a failure, and we want to fix this. The goal of this workstream is to make MACI as easy to understand and easy to integrate as possible.
Initiatives within this workstream:
References
2) MACI Community Engagement
~15% of team’s total bandwidth
Along with poor DX, we believe one of the core reasons there hasn’t been ecosystem adoption of MACI is the lack of community engagement (which we touched on in “challenges”). We’ll create an open source community where integrations & contributions are actively encouraged!
This workstream relates closely to improving DX but focuses on areas that will require active maintenance, support & engagement from our team vs. improving code, documentation & educational resources that will be available online 24/7/365.
The hope here is that close interactions with integration developers & Ethereum community members will help us gather insightful user feedback that will help us iterate faster to improve MACI as a product. We’ll be rolling out an agile scrum development workflow that should allow us to rapidly respond to input from the community to guide our roadmap & product direction.
Initiatives within this workstream:
3) Quadratic Funding Experiments
~30% of team’s total bandwidth
Read context on on our QF initiative here.
2024 goal
Initiatives within this workstream:
References
4) P0tion support & handoff
~5% of team’s total bandwidth
A big team accomplishment in 2023 was building & launching p0tion. We’ve seen exciting early traction, with multiple development teams requesting ceremonies using our infrastructure.
For the rest of this year & early into 2024, we plan to hand off this project to PSE's Trusted Setup team for them to maintain. Our developers will continue to support the codebase & ceremonies as we train up that team on this project. For the foreseeable future, we expect to collaborate with that team to align on the vision of the project & direct a product roadmap.
References
Future areas of research & development
While not prioritized as an upcoming workstream, we think it’s worth calling out important areas of research & development that we’re excited to work on in the future:
MACI Coordinator Service
QF stack
MACI improvements
Resource requirements
Hiring
ASAP
Soon™ (2nd half of 2024?)
Audit
Design
QF matching funds
Event budget
Major decision points
Initiatives & potential events in 2024 that will influence our priorities & progress
1) QF landscape analysis
The results from this upcoming research initiative will influence our strategic direction in terms of
2) Ability to grow our team
Our success with recruiting & hiring will obviously influence our bandwidth & ability to execute
Our ambitious goals require the need for certain expert knowledge & skillsets
Major risks
Potential hurdles or challenges that would prevent our team from completing our priorities
1) Integration risks
While projects have already expressed interest (e.g. Gitcoin, Gnosis Guild), we have limited control over the ultimate decisions on community integrations. Projects may re-prioritize or determine they don’t have the internal engineering resources to push these initiatives forward.
2) QF event risk
Ultimately there’s macro events beyond our control that could cancel IRL events & QF rounds. As we continue to subtract ourselves in terms of the influence & control we exercise over QF rounds, we naturally will have less decision-making power over the outcomes of these rounds.
3) Technical complexity
MACI is a complex codebase that was originally built by expert cryptographers, most of which who are no longer with the project. Some of the research & development improvements we intend to make have some unknown technical complexity. Not all problem spaces are completely understood, which pose a risk of delaying or obstructing progress as we learn more.
Feedback
Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!
Feel free to comment here or reach out to our team in the PSE Discord (
#macichannel).Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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