Council Participation Report, 02.11.2020.

As promised, what follows is my regular councilor activity transparency report. This report details votes cast and discussions participated in from Oct 27th to Nov 2nd.

Polkadot

Elara v0.2 - Polkadot's Infura

I voted Aye on Motion 33 to approve Treasury Proposal 18, funding the next milestone of Elara by Patract Labs. Elara is being developed as Infura for Polkadot, meaning free public goods infrastructure for people who need RPC access to full Polkadot nodes. The Web3 Foundation and Parity both run public nodes for both Kusama and Polkadot, but these are throttled and shouldn't be relied on long term, so having more infrastructure options is always good. I'm not personally a fan of giving developers Infura-like shortcuts, but we need to draw in more developers, and better public infrastrucutre is the key for that.

Patract say they won't charge for the service except if a customer needs extraordinary amounts of requests served, so I supported this proposal based on their plans for development and maintenance.

Knowledge Tip Authoring Tool

As per my last report, I have submitted the Knowledge Tip Authoring Tool treasury proposal 17 for rejection.

Referendum to Force-transfer the DOT from a scammer's wallet

I voted against Referendum 10 with a 1x conviction, and will increase conviction if needed.

The referendum hopes to take back funds from a scammer's account - a month or so ago an elaborate and popular scam originating on YouTube caused many people to lose their DOT. I sympathize with the victims, but cannot endorse forgiving the lack of due diligence - the details of the incident reveal the victim's carelessness and impatience, and I believe this is an expensive lesson they need to learn.

Coupled with a dubious precedent such an operation would set and combined with the fact that the scammer could just move the funds from this account a few blocks before the referendum is enacted makes the referendum a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.

Discussions

• I voiced a soft support of LocalCoinSwap's integration of DOT. The more on/off ramps, the better.
• I'm still conflicted on Ramp network's proposal and will wait for more information. It's clearly a for profit venture, but they seek funding for adding DOT. I would be more comfortable with them submitting a seed or profit sharing agreement with the Treasury, rather than the Treasury flat out funding their soon-to-be for-profit venture, but their representative has reached out with more information that has given me material to think about. I'll follow up on this in the next post after I've had time to think.

Kusama

• Tip 0x2248...4bb4 seeks to reward a community member for educating the community about scams. I requested more info before supporting it - I have no reason to distrust the submitter, but this metric is easy to game (make a lot of scam accounts on Telegram, then pretend to report them) so I'd like more information.
• Motion 232 which started as discussion 297 which I've voted Aye on previously has not reached majority support and returned into Proposal status. I will support it again when it eventually reaches Motion mode again.
• Discussion 335 proposes the deployment of a cargo-remote service for Substrate devs to speed up compilation times, which can generally range upwards of 30 minutes, an hour on weak laptops. I do think this is necessary, but the price (45k USD) seems steep, and there's no firm plan for long term support. I also don't know how much of a speedup we can really expect if most people start using this server. I'll need to look into the details about this in more depth and will report back in the next Council Report.