<aside> 🚨 NOTE: You must first click DUPLICATE in the top righthand corner before starting.

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GRANT INTRODUCTION

Grant Name

Please provide a descriptive name to help the community understand your proposed, unique approach to decentralized mining pools.

<aside> ➕ Stack Casimir: User experience focused Mining and Stacking pools. Stacks brings a unique opportunity to Bitcoin to increase its capabilities beyond a stateless protocol to become a a truly programmable money. Introducing a secondary token on the Bitcoin base layer brings its own set of considerations and risks, noted already by the Stacks team, and Stack Casimir proposes to build a Stacking and Mining pool designed with these risks in mind. Many of these issues can be resolved to User Experience. The complexities of cryptocurrencies, in general, are a barrier to adoption for many users. When pools/swaps/lending/etc are introduced it can become overwhelming. This not only limits adoption but introduces risk both technically as well as towards the consensus mechanism. To solve the technical risk, specialized miners operating at high skill levels work to build superior mining ability as well as improve the user experience through simplicity. This improves the User Experience in the short term but will concentrate network control in the hands of a few miners in the long run. To combat this, the Casimir platform is designed to aid users to simply and safely Stack with competent miners, using open informatics to nudge users to Stack with smaller yet capable miners to keep Stacks decentralized. Unlike many solutions that just create a long excel style list, the Casimir platform will provide a simple Stacking UI that prioritizes smaller, high performing miners (allowing more experienced users to drill down and search miner criteria as desired) to keep the network decentralized.

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Total Duration

How many hours of work total should this project take to complete?

<aside> ➕ 2200 hours: 400: Design/Discovery 800: Pool Smart Contract Design and Creation 500: Front End Design and wallet integrations 500: Testing, Audits, Bugs, Deployment

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Total Budget

Take the hours above and multiply by $75/hr. If your project requires any third party fees, add those as a separate cost outside of development time-related costs.

<aside> ➕ $165,000

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Required Applicant Skills

**Please note the complexity of this project will likely require a team of people working together. We ask that only teams with a proven track record of delivering projects at a high level TOGETHER apply.

You are a good candidate for this grant if your team has …**

a) Deep understanding of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Script

b) Deep understanding of Clarity, Proof of Transfer, and Stacks Mining

c) Deep understanding of contemporary front-end technologies.

d) Deep understanding of all required backend / middleware technologies & infrastructure.

e) Experience with being a mining and/or stacking pool operator.

f) Track record of shipping production-level products in Stacks (e.g. related to Stacking or infra level), relationships to work with Stacks entities.

g) Please note having product development, business development, and fund-raising experience would be seen as a value add as Stacks Ventures has expressed interest in investing in this product upon completion.

<aside> ➕ Type your answer here…

• Consensus Networks’ main offices are in South Bend Indiana, close to Chicago. Our team is US based, around the country from New Hampshire to Texas.
• We’ve worked in the cryptocurrency space since 2018, across a variety of projects from Bitcoin and the Lightning Network to Ethereum Smart Contracts and Proof of Stake. We have experience with Bitcoin Anchoring protocols as well, working with Factom in the past. Our team has deep experience across the technology stack from Front End design, cloud and on-prem DevOps and infrastructure deployments, to Smart contract design. We still run all of our production infrastructure on-prem for security and key management.
• We believe that Bitcoin is the core of Cryptocurrency technology and development so are excited for the opportunity to build Bitcoin based solutions. We feel that too much in the space has been a “number go up” mentality and not enough focus on the use cases and usability. For this reason we’re excited to see the Stacks ecosystem develop.
• Our Casimir platform is designed to improve user experience for cryptocurrency users by focusing on creating simple decentralization tools. We’re finishing a Staking Pool project with Ethereum currently and due to the centralizing nature of Proof of Stake in general, have worked extensively with smart contracts, user experience, and blockchain informatics to improve decentralization. The complexity of Ethereum staking and pooled stake contracts are somewhat comparable to Stacks and although there are significant differences, we have worked on and built decentralized smart contracts for pooled funds before.
• Casimir is designed to be a self funding project. We will take a small fee from the Stack smart contract mining rewards to fund our operations but are focused on expanding beyond just a pool managing tool. We believe that there is enormous opportunity to build a tool to allow users to access the many emerging Web3 use cases. We envision Casimir to be a trustless Web3 “browser” that allows users to easily navigate from DeFi, to NFTs, to IoT, and beyond. Although there are many potential use cases, starting at the protocol level, particularly Stacking, is where market demand lies and where we begin today. Lastly, as noted, we’re open to a multichain world. Our work with Web3 users tells us that they are open minded and curious, and our hope is that we can introduce Stacks to our Ethereum Stakers who might think Bitcoin is just for hodling. </aside>