End Of DEXBot WP2 6 Month Report
Permie
30/06/19
Introduction and Objectives of WP2
The goal of WP2 was to spend 6 months maintaining the basic functionality of the open source market making robot and to develop new arbitrage features. The CEX-DEX arbitrage feature was a key goal for the project and steps to optimise this feature would be taken. WP2 aimed to be managed in such a way to mitigate all risks to the bts voters and their Reserve Fund.
DEXBot WP2 has received ~3.1million bts and sold them for a total of 1.1Million bitCNY ($160k) at an average price of 0.36bitCNY/bts in periodic sell orders at ~1% above the ask.
Of this 1.1Million bitCNY ($160k):
628k bitCNY ($94k) has been spent.
336k bitCNY ($50k) is held in a 60-day reserve.
145k bitCNY ($21.6k) is on hand for increased spending over the next 6mo.
The project accounting is in USD but the assets on hand are bitCNY, due to the unstable nature of bitUSD at the onset of WP2.
DEXBot WP2 is funded by the BitShares Reserve Fund. Every day 400,000bts are hard-coded to be permitted to be spent on BitShares development as determined by bts voters. DEXBot’s Worker Proposals and WP2 specifically were decided to split into 6 month lengths so that the amount of daily bts required to sustain the project could be periodically evaluated. This gave the bts voters security against a too-high bts payrate being designated for a single project. If the bts price rapidly rose to $1, for example, the number of bts required per day to sustain the DEXBot project would be far fewer.
The Cabinet who secure the DEXBot project act to protect the bts voters and Reserve Fund from mismanagement of funds. The Cabinet and the Project Manager will take prudent steps to ensure that adequate spending reserves are kept so that all eventualities are accounted for.
The 60-day Spending Reserve is an essential feature of the DEXBot project management strategy as it allows the Project Manager to offer DEXBot developers and potential new contractors 2 month contract security against outside circumstances. BitShares is a business and the Cabinet are ensuring that DEXBot, and therefore BitShares, is a good business to work for.
DEXBot WP2 planned:
To continue cooperating with token exchanges to help them encourage and use DEXBot on their markets. DEXBot cooperates specifically with all exchanges who use BitShares’ products and features to run their exchange business.
To increase the size of the team and hire new staff. Specifically, to hire a dedicated Quality Assurance Developer, a Dedicated Windows Developer and GUI visualisation developers.
To begin conducting Networking activities to make contacts with influential people that could bring DEXBot the attention of a wider audience.
To maintain an active community of market makers and users around the DEXBot Project to share information and learn as a community.
To maintain a twitter presence to attract new users.
To begin crowdsourcing PR work among the DEXBot community to share the workload and allow the talented members of our community the chance to participate.
Project Scope
DEXBot WP2 has achieved:
Four more talented developers have been headhunted and recruited to the team. DEXBot’s 13-member team now represents >25% of the 45 member BitShares team website page as collated by Murda_ra and Ross Walker.
A Windows Install Wizard.
Refactor of DEXBot core to increase the speed of the bot in preparation for CEX-DEX arbitrage feature.
CEX-DEX arbitrage development using ccxt - allowing connection to 100+ CEX’s. (Beta)
King of the Hill feature developed (currently being unit tested prior to release).
Single Account Multiple Workers feature developed (currently being unit tested prior to release)
Asynchronous development of pybitshares and pygraphene to enable more efficient calls of the BitShares blockchain (Expected Mid July).
Graphing capabilities using DASH for account visualisation charts integrated into the DEXBot GUI (beta).
A new logo.
Twitter PR campaigns including announcing market making opportunities available on the DEX with Gabriel’s arbitrage picker.
DEXBot’s third party exchange coordinator CryptoKong has established multiple new DEXBot Discord communities within multiple DEX-based UIA exchanges.
BitProfessor our Quality Assurance Engineer was hired to unit test the entire existing code and to test all future development prior to release.
Re: 1.7 - It was determined that the project was not yet ready for full Networking efforts due to the refactor of the code which was necessary for an optimum arbitrage strategy feature. CEX-DEX arbitrage allows DEXBot to interface with the products of our competition and when it is completed will be a good foundation for Networking efforts. The $800/month budgeted for Networking activities has been set-aside and saved so that it can be spent in WP3.
A $49k 60 day Reserve has been accumulated and the DEXBot $35k Emergency Fund from WP1 has been maintained unspent.
$49k is currently held as 336,000bitCNY in the cabinet-multisig-dexbot-wp2 3of6 Cabinet multisignature account as a 60-day reserve to be spent on continuing DEXBot development in the event of losing WP funding.
The under-budget spending in February, March and April allowed the accumulation of 30 days of the reserve budget. An additional 30 days of the reserve budget was attained by the bts price being 30% above the $0.04/bts price at which DEXBot WP2 can be fully funded.
DEXBot Worker Proposal 3 will keep this 60 day reserve and WP3 funding will be used for immediate development, subject to it being voted-in on time.
Alternatively should there be a delay in funding, the $49k reserve will be used to continue development for a further 60+ days to give voters additional time or to allow for BitShares-beneficial strategic-voting.
The robust nature of the project allows for non-support of WP3 as a healthy $35k Emergency-budget has been retained so that essential maintenance will continue.
WP2 Monthly Expenses Summary
January $400 - Waiting to accumulate funds from the Reserve Pool.
February Total $16k
Early February - GitHub housekeeping and fixing the known DEXBot bugs.
Late February - DEXBot testing UIAs, bug fixing and cli refactor.
March Total $19.5k
Early March - Cli refactor, Quality Assurance Developer hired and began unit testing
Late March - Cli refactor, Unit Testing, GUI Staggered Orders Visualisation Mockups, TDD for the refactor of DEXBot: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IXnhskQfVWMD2w-hryom5D72RLWXEDDVmS1kwrrsduc/edit#heading=h.gdegugvu56ll
April Total $18k
Early April - Unit Testing, Chinese DEXBot PR and telegram channel, BitShares-based Exchange Cooperation to get DEXBot in front of new users, Dedicated Windows Developer hired, Windows bugs fixing.
Late April - Unit Testing, Code Review and refactor planning.
May Total $22k
Early May - Unit Testing, Code Refactor, BitShares-based Exchange Cooperation.
Late May - Unit Testing, Code Refactor, CEX-DEX arbitrage feature development, Second GUI Visualisation Developer hired for Relative Orders tracking and order history analysis, PR - The bugfixing and refactor was progessing satisfactoily so some early stages crowdsourcing of PR to the DEXBot community was conducted. Articles/testimonials for DEXBot.
June Total $29k
Early June - Unit Testing, Core Refactor, BitShares-based Exchange Cooperation, CEX-DEX arbitrage development, Video Tutorials in negotiations.
Late June - Codaone dev Joel was retained for a one-time additional 60hrs development. Ccxt Engine dev, Unit Testing, pybitshares asyncio development.
https://www.dexbot.info/2019/06/04/dexbot-worker-proposal-wp3/
Conclusion:
The refactor of DEXBot-core is complete and released to the community. The refactor of the core and of pybitshares and pygraphene allows faster calls to the BitShares blockchain and provides a solid basis for all future features to be developed upon. This refactor is intended to sufficiently serve DEXBot for the foreseeable future. Now that the refactor is complete efforts can be focussed on feature development in WP3.
The CEX-DEX arbitrage feature is started.
Spending has been ramping up from conservative to more liberal as DEXBot WP2 saved up a 60-day funding reserve to mitigate losing WP funding for short periods.
BitProfessor our Quality Assurance Engineer has completed a full unit test of the code and provided the development team with useful information on how to fix minor bugs.
A 1.0.0 stable release of all audited work up until this point will be maintained in order to keep a version as bug-free and stable as possible.
The DEXBot Team has come together well and everyone has settled in to the amount of hours that they have available to DEXBot. With 5 months of time to analyse the budget it is now known confidently that there is room to hire extra developers. A decision to hire more staff would have been particularly rash in February or March as the full 60day reserve had not been accumulated.
The DEXBot Project Management strategy has worked to avoid the inability to pay developers for work they have already completed. The reputation of the WP system and Bitshares as a whole is at stake. DEXBot has kept the reserves necessary for the project and team to be held together long enough to smooth out the bumps in the WP system. This has allowed the DEXBot development team to work most efficiently and continue to develop DEXBot at a good pace.