Proposal for Extending Funding for Analytics Working Group Operations

naoufel · March 2, 2023, 4:50pm

Purpose:

This proposal seeks to secure funding for the Analytics Working Group (AWG) for the period of January to June 2023. The funding will be used to sustain the AWG’s critical functions, which include providing dashboards and key metrics on Inverse and other protocols’ markets, user website interactions, and an alerting system.

Background:

The AWG has been operating successfully for the past months, and its services have been essential in providing important insights into the DAO’s operations. However, the AWG’s funding has been delayed, and this proposal aims to extend its activities for another six months. The previous proposal from the Mills era in June 2022 (Proposal 52) supported the AWG’s activities for six months, which will now be followed up with this new proposal.

Activities:

The AWG’s primary objective is to provide valuable analytics services to the DAO, including dashboards and metrics. The AWG has been working on transitioning its alert system to a platform that would allow the RWG and TWG treasury teams to build their own alerts without depending on the AWG’s technical expertise. This transition has incurred additional costs, including a Quicknode premium subscription ($299/month) and backend, frontend, and database hosting services (now on Digital Ocean instead of Google).

The AWG has also been working on an in-house data analytics platform that would replace Dune Analytics, which has changed its terms of usage. The AWG has found that the benefits of Dune Analytics’ premium accounts are no longer worth the expense. This in-house tool will provide dedicated indexing, querying, and charting services and share infrastructure cost with the new alerting platform (1,000 DOLA /month including 60% provision for increase in database usage).

The proposal does not include funding for Dune Analytics subscriptions.

Finally, the AWG plans to remunerate external contributions to its activities and consultancy fees, such as those from The Graph and ad-hoc analysts. The proposal includes an amount that can be used to pay for these services (2,000 DOLA /month of operation).

Multisigs:

The current structure of the AWG multisig operation will not change. @Karm, @Cryptoharry, and @Naoufel will remain as signers.

Conclusion:

This proposal seeks to provide essential funding for the AWG’s activities for the period of January to June 2023. The AWG provides critical analytics services that offer valuable insights into the DAO’s operations. The proposal includes funding for the alert system transition, an in-house data analytics platform, and external contributions to AWG activities. The AWG’s multisig operation will remain the same.

Important :

858 DOLA are remaining from proposal 52 funding request, they have been subtracted from the current total.

Currently the AWG multisigs holds more than 9,000 GRT token which would allow the service to continue undisrupted until end June. No additional amount to market buy GRT is requested for the time being.

On chain action :

Allow 17,142 DOLA to the AWG multisig

karm · March 10, 2023, 2:48am

Are there any ad-hoc services or consultations that are planned with the $2k/mo?

Can you provide some additional resources on what the $1000 /mo goes to for the in house dune replacement? It’s not clear what this is funding or how we plan to utilize this, We currently use dune in an extremely limited way and this is a rather large monthly cost. The 60% provision for increase in database usage isn’t clear either is this to upgrade our digital ocean package? I’m assuming it’s because the shared infrastructure will need to increase.

How do these costs $1000/mo compare to paying for Dune?

naoufel · March 10, 2023, 9:19am

Thanks for your feedback @karm .

There is plan to develop a subgraph for Firm on the consulting side, and the possibility to have an intern assisting me as an analyst has been discussed internally. This is where consulting expenses would mostly been spent since the AWG is still a one person working group. Although this is not 100% confirmed, this allowance leaves the door open for this.

Also, kind reminder that we do not pay Dune since December already, maybe the sentence is confusing but it means there will not be further payment to Dune and this is not to be included in a budget anymore.

1000$ /month are necessary to run inverse.watch if we want to add indexing capabilities:

300$ quick node subscription is already spent every month to access Blockchain data,
~150$ is currently spent for Digital Ocean Testing and Production infrastructure

So around 450 is already necessary to run the alert system, the remaining 550 would constitute a provision since the database load will increase when we will start indexing our own data. This compares quite largely to Dune where the plan we used in the past for 390$ has been increased to 1,337$/month : Pricing

The possibility of having our own indexing service doesn’t relate only to cost but also integration and the possibility to publish chart or report with a higher flexibility on the format and integration, and the possibility to apply stronger data analysis framework with Machine Learning in Python for instance.

karm · March 10, 2023, 9:18pm

Thank you for the detailed response, much more clear now. LGTM

naoufel · May 4, 2023, 4:22pm

MAny things happen since this proposal was originally posted. From R3gen arrival in the DAO to Dune rolling out new paid plans. Please find an updated version of this proposal here :

Background:

The AWG has been operating successfully for the past months, and its services have been essential in providing important insights into the DAO’s operations. The previous proposal from the Mills era in June 2022 (Proposal 52) 1 supported the AWG’s activities for six months, which is now followed up with this new proposal.

This proposal seeks to cover costs for the Analytics Working Group (AWG) for the period of January to June 2023. The funding will be used to sustain the AWG’s critical functions, which include providing dashboards and key metrics on Inverse and other protocols’ markets, user website interactions, an alerting system and automated twitter posts.

However, the AWG’s funding has been delayed, and this proposal aims to :

Refund @Naoufel for incurred costs from January to April and,
Secure funding for the months of May and June 2023

Activities:

The AWG’s primary objective is to provide valuable analytics services to the DAO, including dashboards and metrics. The AWG has been transitioning its alert system to an App that would allow the RWG and TWG treasury teams to build their own alerts without depending on the AWG’s technical expertise should the need arise.

This transition has incurred additional costs, including a Quicknode premium subscription ($299/month) and backend, frontend, and database hosting services (now on Digital Ocean instead of Google).

The AWG has also been working on an in-house data analytics platform that works very alike Dune but is able to leverage Dune API endpoint as well as other data sources in order to build more integrated dashboards and reports.

Finally, the AWG plans to remunerate external contributions to its activities and consultancy fees, such as those from The Graph and ad-hoc analysts or contributors helping to build the documentation.

This proposal includes an amount that can be used to pay for these services (2,000 DOLA /month of operation on average). Any unused DOLA will remain in the treasury.

Refund:

Naoufel is currently pending the following refunds :

January 2023 Google $ 317.16

January 2023 QuickNode $ 299.00

February 2023 Google $ 112.84

February 2023 QuickNode $ 299.00

March 2023 QuickNode $ 299.00

March 2023 Digital Ocean $ 269.63

April 2023 Quicknode $ 299.00

April 2023 Digital Ocean $ 565.59

An accounting error has been spotted while closing the previous budget and$ 351.95 needs to be substracted from the total, carrying the total refund to $ 2,109.27

Operations

While the previous months have requested a high server load to test and deploy the applications mentionned above, the forecasted infrastructure expenses without taxes for the coming months are the following :

Provider/Type/Project/App Name/Monthly Cost excl. taxes

Digital Ocean Database inverse-redash db-redis-redash 30$

Digital Ocean Database inverse-redash db-postgresql-inverse-redash 15$

Digital Ocean Database inverse-watch db-postgresql-inverse-watch 120$

Digital Ocean App inverse-twitter-alerts inverse-twitter-alerts 25$

Digital Ocean App inverse-coingecko-alerts inverse-coingecko-alerts 25$

Digital Ocean App inverse-redash inverse-redash-scheduler 12$

Digital Ocean App inverse-redash inverse-redash-frontend 50$

Digital Ocean App inverse-redash inverse-redash-backend 50$

Digital Ocean App inverse-watch backend 25$

Digital Ocean App inverse-watch frontend 12$

Dune Analytics/API - 399$

QuickNode RPC inverse-watch 299$

This would carry total AWG infrastructure cost to $ 1,049/month ($ 1,105 with taxes).

The AWG is planning to reactivate the Dune analytics subscription since the Dune team has rolled out a major revamp of their subscription plan. For context, we decided to stop to use the paid plan in |November when they increased the price from 390$ to 420$ while lowering functionnalities accessible to the same tier. The new 399$ plan is now including about 2,500 API calls that we can use on the top of their platform to integrate the report we are building with it to our infrastructure.

Monthly Cost Forecast

Infrastructure : $ 1,105 / month = $ 2,210

Contributions : $ 2,000 / month = $ 4,000

Refund : $ 2,109

Previous budget : ($ 858)

DOLA Allowance Requested : $ 7,461

Multisigs: