KAGOME is a C++ Polkadot Host implementation that provides an alternative to Polkadot-SDK to run relay chain validator client. In this treasury proposal, the Quadrivium team is seeking further funding for the development and initial security audit of KAGOME.
With KAGOME and other client implementations, we bring clients diversity to Polkadot, which allows for:
To learn more about KAGOME and the importance of client diversity in the Polkadot ecosystem, you can:
Accoring to Polkadot’s Co-Founder Robert Habermeier: “The 2.0 era will be defined by a decentralized collective of developers designing and building in the open. This marks a transition from a few agents building software to many agents - sometimes competing, sometimes collaborating, but all working to move things forward” (source)
Moreover, in the recent announcement by Parity technologies it was announced that “Parity will be zeroing in on delivering Polkadot's next-gen technology, improving the developer experience, and fostering a strong developer community” and emphasized importance of diverse builders in ecosystem.
The KAGOME team has proven to be one of the most experienced and competent teams in the ecosystem, when it comes to understanding how the Polkadot protocol works. This fact reduces the dependency on a single team developing Polkadot protocol.
Our team has remained relatively unchanged over the past 3-4 years, allowing us to develop the most advanced alternative relay chain client. Today KAGOME:
This is the resubmission of Referendum 146, which did not pass despite receiving much positive feedback highlighting the team's competence and the high quality of our previous work. Therefore this proposal was adjusted with the following changes:
The proposed scope is already being implemented. The full scope of the proposal is following:
Requested DOT: 168432
Please review the full proposal with detailed tasks descriptions and price breakdown:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZmueuaMjXY3_SRBHxWtKNHzpLNtSd_KGVfeTII6Nbc/
Quadrivium is a team of original C++ developers who developed KAGOME and C++ Libp2p while being part of Soramitsu. Soramitsu received a Web3 Foundation grant and a Kusama treasury proposal to develop KAGOME. In August 2023, the entire development team spun off from Soramitsu to form Quadrivium, which will continue the development of KAGOME.
SRLabs is a Security Audit company that will be conducting an initial audit of KAGOME. SRLabs already has years of experience in auditing Substrate, which makes it a perfect fit for checking KAGOME In addition, Web3 Foundation will be participating as technical advisor and will provide mentoring and technical support to ensure the completeness of milestones and conforming the specification.
KAGOME is a new way to run a validator client for Polkadot. It helps reduce risks and brings innovation to the Polkadot ecosystem. KAGOME is aligned with the Polkadot 2.0 vision and is developed by the Quadrivium team. The team has remained unchanged for the past few years and has developed the most advanced alternative relay chain client. The team is seeking further funding for the development and initial security audit of KAGOME. The proposed scope includes asynchronous backing, BEEFY, a new WASM engine, security audit, general maintenance, and minor improvements. Quadrivium is a team of original C++ developers who developed KAGOME and C++ Libp2p. SRLabs is a security audit company that will be conducting an initial audit of KAGOME.