Proposal: Grants for Terrand oracle

Governance & Proposals
#1

Terrand is helping to secure multi millions of dollars protocols on Terra Blockchain since one year.

What is Terrand?

A unique and the only decentralized oracle smart contract available on Terra Luna to get distributed randomness beacon. Verifiable, unpredictable, and unbiased random numbers as a service.

Why Terrand ?

This oracle brings Drand randomness to Terra Luna! This will be interesting to see a community-building project around this great oracle. - @0xantman:person_juggling:

The ability to generate randomness is the foundation of many security protocols. - @ eprint.iacr.org

Generating public randomness is a common problem, supporting the desire to build a dedicated service that can be more efficient and (potentially) offer higher security against manipulation. Many interesting applications require random values that cannot be predicted before being generated but are made public after generation.

The drand project aims to create a random number generator that has all five of these properties.

  • Unpredictable: you can’t predict the next number to come out of the generator.

  • Publicly-verifiable: anyone can verify that a random number is a legitimately random number.

  • Bias-resistant: you can’t lead the generator one way or another.

  • Decentralized: a set of independent parties produces random numbers.

  • Always available: the system must always be able to provide random numbers.

Why grants?
We accelerated the developments of new Dapps on Terra for 1 year! While Chainlink, Band protocol, or other oracles are not available on Terra.

Glow, MintDAO, RandomEarth, Terrafloki, Terra Vegas, Deviants Art… And much more…
They are all using or planning to use Terrand for randomizing their contract securing millions of dollars in protocols FOR FREE.

Our team needs funds to continue contributing, we need funds to hire and grow. I think a grant is well deserved…

Oracles, the most expensive software on the planet?
I think it would be good to check Top Oracle Coins by Market Capitalization - CoinGecko and see the market cap of oracles.

We can easily say Billions of dollars protocols will run in the future with the need of oracles for proper functioning. Saying that and according to the number of Dapps growing each day on Terra Blockchain with Terrand being an essential part of the proper functioning. I think we can evaluate our contribution between 1.5 to 5 million dollars.

Our team is one of the first contributors to Terra blockchain and we never deserved any attention or recognition we need funds to grow we have plans to build public goods like Encrypt data and Decrypt data on-chain in a future period allowing temporal privacy on Terra.

Address recipient of the Grants
terra1th7wznjznnyck42v3eyma6cukqvrttsq75cu5a

Thank you

3 Likes
#2

overall I am supportive of the general idea.
but the proposal is lacking some key details to make it hard to actually approve.

what exactly are you asking for?

I presume it is funds to

  • help SW development (1 dev? @ 2x salary perhaps?)
  • run the oracle bot? (how much does this cost per month?, gas, infra, etc.)

how do you want to get paid ?

are you looking for some lump sum,
or an endowment type grant (say $x/month for 12 months upon which you will resubmit?)
my preference is a monthly deposit.

who are you?

how does this group know that the person who is putting this proposal up actually is in charge of drand?
any chance you can use a keybase identity to generate a signature of this, and a multisig to deposit the funds into (so it lessens the ability for one person to just become rich and be tempted to just go silent?)

2 Likes
#3

these projects are all for-profit.
have they contributed to the success of your project ?

3 Likes
#4

Hi! Thank you for asking,
what exactly are you asking for?

We are studying the possibility of officially making Terrand a public good for Terra.
Transferring ownership of the repos to terra-money Github, with the idea of making the contracts public and available for all.

We want you guys to understand we have not much choice around Terrand or we start changing the business model around Terrand from free-to-play → pay-to-play or we get a grant and let it as free-to-play as we always planned.

how do you want to get paid ?
Terrand is already alive and working product for ~1year now. I think a lump sum makes sense but we are open to discussion.

who are you?
I’m 0xantman-Github at the beginning of 2021 we started developing LoTerra (decentralized lottery) but we front of our biggest issue, without a decentralized and trusted randomness it would useless and not possible to build what we wanted even if Terra is an awesome blockchain, oracles open infinite possibilities. I started to talk with CosmWasm guys and with the collaboration of Simon Warta and help from Nicolas Gailly from Drand and protocol.ai we finally built Terrand. Terrand is based on Drand.love a public trusted source of entropy where everyone can verify the result.
Contracts verify on-chain with complex calculations based on Bitcoin elliptic curve used also in drand to ensure the validity of this randomness this is why adding a randomness cost ~1UST of fees. I needed to split also in a two-part contract since we reached the blockchain limit allowed per contract and I can say we were lucky because it worked. We finally released Terrand oracle bringing trusted randomness on Terra Blockchain.
Within this doc accessible to all https://docs.terrand.dev and the ability to integrate fast to your contract Terrand via https://crates.io/crates/terrand

The team was putting all their efforts to make the randomness available to all on Terra Blockchain accelerating the development of new Dapps requiring randomness. Since Chainlink and Band protocol were not helping much on Terra because multiple Dapps are still waiting for them to offer the service on Terra. We think this contribution helped and continue to help Terra’s ecosystem the Dapps community continuously grow and offers competitive Dapps on Terra closing the gap with Solana or others Blockchain thanks to the ability to integrate the randomness to their Dapps.

I need to say I’m a little bit burned of Open Source it is not a pink world as we think the team never got any funding, gratitude, recognition or help from others protocols.

I am in contact with Simon and Nicolas and will have a meeting next week to talk about this.

Decentralized Oracles are an essential part of web3.0

1 Like
#5

Sadly NOT…

#6

I will support this proposal! The guys who build LoTerra are keep building on Terra and they deliver! Please make a better proposal with how much funds and grants you need and I will bring your message in front some terra investors who can support you!

3 Likes
#7

Thank you for the additional info.
I think this helps a lot.
I hear you about OSS projects. I personally still hold out a bit of hope, but it’s sinking.

#8

This is an amazing development and what a wonderful thing to bring to Terra (Luna) Network. It comes at a great time because the mainstream is suffering from RNG failures and now not only is LoTerra team building great decentralised services they have developed a system to solve a real world problem!

Read more about the recent Web2 failures here Well done. I love following this project team!

1 Like
#9

Shouldn’t you discuss the technical architecture of what you are building, why it is unique, what resources you need to continue building it?

It’s not easy to grasp why this needs a grant from the original post.

2 Likes
#10

We can speak about the technical part we described here in the documentation https://docs.terrand.dev we bring drand to Terra the smart contract is already built and live for one year now used by several Dapps who need Terrand for proper functioning and have chosen Terra blockchain and not another blockchain because they had a secure way to use randomness on their Dapps.

For the possible evolution of encrypting and decrypting data in another round, I’m personally in contact with one of the creators of drand Nicolas Gailly. In my latest conversation, they are planning to create a private testnet for us and it is something we will be able to test soon

It’s important to see the big picture and take a look at this article.

Filecoin will be the first protocol to use this production-ready version of drand to create decentralized, verifiable randomness for “leader selection.”
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/08/10/how-a-decentralized-randomness-beacon-could-boost-cryptographic-security/

Let’s be honest Terra is probably the first in my thought… We think Terrand deserves something, we opened infinite possibilities using a trustable source of randomness, I’m not speaking about the fact we closed the gap between others blockchains that have VRF ready. But securing multi-million dollars on-chain, allowing builders to build Dapps who require randomness, and opening new horizons on Terra. Terrand is probably one of our biggest contributions to Terra’s ecosystem. I personally don’t want to see this project going pay-to-play because doing Open Source without any funding or bounties it’s hard nowadays.

#11

I don’t understand why this is technically meaningful - doesn’t this just wrap the price feed from drand into something that is cosmwasm compliant?

Rough guess it would take a competent dev ~6hrs of work to write, test and provision basic docs

#12

I am all for open source development being compensated, and I rarely comment on community pool funding requests (though I am widely skeptical of many of them) but I just don’t understand why this is a public works project that takes meaningful time or skill level to build & maintain

#13

Contracts verify on-chain with complex calculations based on Bitcoin elliptic curve used also in drand to ensure the validity of this randomness this is why adding a randomness cost ~1UST of fees. I needed to split also in a two-part contract since we reached the blockchain limit allowed per contract and I can say we were lucky because it worked.

#14

Where’s the source code? theres no github link in the docs i could find

#15

I was also all for OpenSource don’t get me wrong. But after seeing multiple protocols using Terrand without any recognition or any contribution to the success of our project… It’s a little bit frustrating.

Repo is now private but I would be happy to give you a personal access

#16

“Rough guess it would take a competent dev ~6hrs of work to write, test and provision basic docs”

Time is relative. We didn’t count hours of work put into Terrand, but this is meanless since you can build something awesome that bring a lot of value to the Terra community ecosystem in 1 hour or build something useless for the Terra community ecosystem that cost 500 hours

#17

I have been following Loterra since their initial sale and something that comes to my mind when I think of them is how ambitious they are. I have also seen them progress and evolve but they have always been very poor in communication. Something that is very important and fundamental when trying to sell or in this case get funds. Rather than focusing on the complexity of the problem solved we should recognize that they are the first one to have brought this feature to Terra. Regarding technical aspects, I am not an expert and far from being it, but something that has come to my mind is the complexity of the code based on the audits. It seems to be simple and that makes me think that the Loterra team was new to Blockchain development in the beginning, something that would make the development of Terrand a bigger challenge for the team who wished to build a decentralized Casino.

#19

I would be hesistant to support community pool funding for a rand oracle that is closed source … sounds pretty dangerous imo

#20

Take a look at and let me know

1 Like
#21

Terrand seems to be a LoTerra project (present as so by LoTerra, code hosted on LoTerra GH, etc).
If I’m not mistaken, LoTerra has a token and did a public sale. LoTerra is also running lotteries and other games, probably generating profits along the way.

My first question is:
are you making this proposal as a member of LoTerra or as an individual?

If as a member of LoTerra:
Why would you need extra funding when terrand was built as a part of an already profitable protocol?

If as an individual:
As this was developed for Loterra, didn’t you get paid by them already for this development?