IOG Catalyst Team: Detailed breakdown of project’s milestones

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

To achieve our goals, we have outlined the following roadmap:

Milestone 1

Open Source Activation

Delivery Time: Approx. 1 Month

Cost: ₳75,000

To meet and exceed the open source requirements required of Catalyst Systems Improvements, the first milestone will deliver fully Open Source public repositories of the Hermes and Athena projects.

The appropriate licenses to all code and documentation from the project's inception will be published and all development will be conducted in public.

Full continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) will be deployed in our testing environments. Each milestone will be community-operable and with reproducible tagged releases.

The initial versions of each application will be functional enough to test assumptions from which we will apply iterations for all future work.

Milestone 2

Hermes Foundations

Delivery Time: Approx. 2 Months

Cost: ₳325,000

Hermes Foundational Work will be a minimal implementation of Hermes to incorporate the basic internal APIs that the Athena application will require, such as time; chronological event generation; logging; basic hashing, and basic cryptography functions. Hermes allows the WASM modules it runs to call these APIs. Still, the runtime will be highly simplified only to allow testing of the APIs. The APIs created in this milestone will be documented for ease of use by any application developer designing programs to run on the Hermes Application Engine. It will also include a Rust implementation of a basic Cardano Node follower and its integration into the Hermes node. This follower will only supply the necessary features required to deliver Project Catalyst Voting for Athena and will serve as the basis for future features that are out of scope for this proposal but which would enhance Cardano Integration, generally.

Milestone 3

Hermes Essential Modules

Delivery Time: Approx. 3 Months

Cost: ₳487,500

Module essential to Hermes' operation and to deliver the Athena (Distributed Project Catalyst Voting) application include:

1. Secure and sandboxed Database Handler.

2. Secure and sandboxed application package and local file manager.

3. HTTP Gateway.

4. P2P networking and IPFS Integration.

We will deliver each of these as modules within Hermes. They will include documented APIs. The Hermes runtime will allow WASM application modules to react to events generated by these modules and call APIs published by them.

Milestone 4

Hermes runtime and Athena voter registration/Voting power tracking.

Delivery Time: Approx. 3 Months

Cost: ₳487,500

This milestone will deliver the functionally complete Hermes runtime and run the Athena Application, which will consist of the first Athena Module. The first Athena module will track Catalyst voter registrations from transaction events detected on the Cardano blockchain and save that data in a local database. A second Hermes module will calculate registered voters' historical stake address balance. Together, these modules form a decentralized and permissionless data source for registered voters and their voting power and replace the current Voting power snapshot tools.

Milestone 5

Completed Hermes and Athena Products.

Delivery Time: Approx. 3 Months

Cost: ₳625,000

This final milestone will deliver the fully functional Hermes and Athena application demonstrating fully distributed voting for Project Catalyst. It incorporates the following sub-modules:

1. P2P distribution of the Voting Event Database

   1. Including an API where a local application can query the latest Catalyst Voting event data without reliance on a central server.

2. Trusted publishing of Voting Event database updates.

   1. Allowing an authoritative source of Event Data to publish updates for distribution by the peer network securely.

3. Secure casting of votes directly over the P2P network.

4. A ballot box to securely collect all Cast Votes for the tally.

5. A locally deployed UX to demonstrate the current catalyst voting event, see the available choices/proposals, and cast votes.

   1. Athena will deploy its UX as a browser application. Still, it will be served directly from a locally running Hermes node, not a central Web2 Server.

   2. The Athena UX will ONLY have access to the Hermes node and will not access any public Web2 systems.