Please Vote NAY. Replaced with https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/1699

Hello, I have two questions:

1. What will happen with the Gosaamer client? Will they continue to provide maintenance or will that require additional funding?

2. I'd like to know if Parity already has staff assigned to cover the ongoing development of the existing Rust-based SDK implementation and what your specific relationship will be with that team?

Thanks

A few questions:

1. The proposal requests $815K, which should cover the work of 9 engineers for 6 months with the an average hourly rate of $94.37/hour, reflecting the team’s expertise and responsibilities.. I assume that these 9 engineers have worked on Gossamer in the past and therefore should have some expertise in Polkadot. However, according to the Gossamer github statistics in the past 12 months only 7 people contributed more than 100 lines of code to Gossamer. So, do you really have 9 engineers with the necessary expertise to be working on the scope of proposal or you just increased engineering count to make a higher request to the treasury?
2. According to Bill's comment in the last referendum you have failed to deliver the promised scope in the past. In general, despite working on Gossamer for several years and spending a lot of treasury money ($2mln + $2.9mln), there were no significant results (Gossamer validator never went line on any network). Now, you are going to work on the Polkadot-SDK, which is written in Rust instead of Go, so this work should be even harder for your team. Why do you think you are a good fit for the given scope and community should keep supporting you?

PolkaWorld votes NAY

1. According to Bill’s comment in the last referendum, the team previously received $4.9M from the Treasury ($2M + $2.9M) to develop Gossamer, yet the client has never gone live. And since Gossamer is written in Go while Polkadot-SDK is written in Rust, does the team truly have the capability to take on core Rust SDK development?

2. Is any of this work duplicating efforts by Parity? Or is this work something that Parity should be doing in the first place?

I’m struggling to understand the rationale behind this proposal.

The Polkadot-SDK repository is owned by Parity, which itself is founded by the Web3 Foundation. Part of that funding is explicitly meant to cover the maintenance of this repository.

If Parity wishes to delegate certain areas of the maintenance to an external team, the logical and accountable approach would be for Parity to hire that team directly and establish a formal agreement (e.g., an SLA) to ensure these responsibilities are properly fulfilled. This would provide clear oversight and maintain alignment with Parity’s ownership of the repo.

If Parity believes its current funding from the Web3 Foundation is insufficient, then it should be Parity submitting an OpenGov proposal to request additional resources. However, that seems inconsistent with reality, as Parity is actively hiring, an indication that they have sufficient funds.

What doesn’t make sense, in my view, is for an external team to approach the treasury “on behalf of” Parity to secure a substantial sum for maintaining a repository that Parity owns and is ultimately responsible for. This approach bypasses accountability and creates an unnecessary layer of indirection between the treasury and the actual owner of the repo.

Dear Proposer,

Our vote on this proposal is NAY, as we understand it is being replaced by #1699.

Kind regards,
Permanence DAO
Decentralized Voices Cohort IV Delegate

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