Skip to main content

For The Win (FTW) Impact Program

The Infinite Game FTW Program aims to collect ongoing donations, and redistribute those donations to any engineers working full-time on the 0L platform on a monthly basis (collectively the FTW).

Address: 3A6C51A0B786D644590E8A21591FA8E2

Problem Statement​

There are two types of contributions needed for the success of open-source projects:

  1. Isolated tasks which can be delivered independently without extensive coordination nor holistic view of the platform. Those contributions are a good fit for bounties, and this is customary in open-source projects.
  2. Another type of contribution requires intimate knowledge of a wide range of system components, and can only reasonably be achieved with a high commitment of hours over the long term. Bounties are generally not a good fit for these contributors since they do not provide continuity, sustainability and predictability.

#1 is a largely solved problem. For #2 above, there are perverse incentives in the early days of a network.

In the early days, a prospective engineering contributor has a choice between A) running a miner plus contributing engineering and B) running a miner and not contributing. At the early stages of a network “B” is the rational choice.

Incorporating a social consensus of donating to such a program, plus redistributing to engineering could make “A” the rational choice.

Why not just use funds from an engineering bounty program also for full-time engineers? From the community perspective, funding ongoing contributions from bounties is expensive in early days. Bounties must compete with earnings from node operations (mining). As such, given that at the beginning of a network there is a combined need for an intense amount of work while the value of mining is high, any funds set aside for long term engineering efforts (e.g. over the course of a decade) could quickly become depleted. Additionally having a separate program allows donors more fine grained options for donating.

Design of this Program​

This is an experiment.

All donations that come into the Program during a given month, go out in the same month to the FTW - an open group of full-time engineers, committing code to the 0L source repositories.

To be considered a full-time engineer​

  • Commit a minimum of 20 hours per week, AND,
  • Have weekly high quality and high impact deliverables in: software, architecture, systems, project management. AND,
  • You attend the engineering meetings.

How rewards are split​

TLDR; The engineering group decides.

Currently (Sept 2021) the members of the group will vote to affirm if each individual’s contributions were above the hourly threshold AND constitute a milestone towards platform evolution and sustainability. Those whose contributions do not meet these criteria, will be gently and gracefully reminded of the objectives of the Program. The group can decide on how to split rewards on a monthly basis.

How do you enforce?​

There is no magic here.

The full-time engineers are a small group, and we can make honesty assumptions, and fraud should be easy to catch. Any individuals claiming payments from this address will have work that is publicly visible on github. Reports could be made based on that activity. Since the members of the fulltime group ultimately decide on the split, they have an incentive to enforce that their share of the donations does not get diluted.

Program viability presumes there is strong social consensus that FTW workers are needed by the community, and the donors will self-police prisoner’s dilemma scenarios. Donors will donate when they see value being produced by the group, and advocate for more donations. Donations will stop when the value is not evident.

Formalities​

Provisionally, the FTEP program was administered by iqlusion inc. until Q3 2023. Funds sent to this were intended to be pass-through; destined to iqlusion for onward distribution in the same month. Iqlusion has no claim nor fee on the funds sent to this address. Subsequently administration was transferred to Infinite Game LLC.

For transparency the destination address is managed by a smart contract called a “community wallet”. This allows any members of consensus validator set to review transactions sent from it, and delay and ultimately freeze transactions from the account.

What is Iqlusion?​

Iqlusion is a blockchain infrastructure company that has been building and operating infrastructure. We were one of the first Proof of Stake validator companies. We are currently primarily focused on protocol development.