2024 Q2 Roadmap update

Greetings anon,

Glad to have you here! We have a few MACI roadmap updates to share.

Before we hop into our Q2 plans, let's take a look at what we did in Q1:

Q1 in review

In our kickoff of 2024, we aimed at a few major Q1 goals that all tied together:

✅ Release MACI v1.2

We completed a significant refactor to simplify the codebase and improve developer experience. After an internal audit and revamped documentation, we released a new MACI version - see our MACI v1.2 release post to read up on the details of that upgrade.

✅ Support clr.fund upgrade

clr.fund, a quadratic funding (QF) project which has distributed millions of dollars to Ethereum public goods, is the longest-running production application built on MACI (since 2020!). Thanks primarily to the hard work of their core dev yuetloo, clr.fund successfully upgraded from MACI 0.x to our fresh v1.2 release. Nicely done!

✅ Support ETH Latam QF round

We teamed up with ETH Latam to help them run a QF round using the clr.fund stack (running on MACI v1.2). Over 60 conference attendees participated (using Zupass tickets as the gatekeeper to the faucet and round) to distribute over 30,000 DAI to public good projects across Central America and the Carribean - view the round results and learn more in ETH Kipu's ETH Latam recap post!

✅ Support ETH Colombia QF round

The ETH Colombia team ran a QF round for their community - view the round results here.

✅ Community engagement via events

We participated in our first hackathons (ETHGlobal Circuit Breaker, ETHGlobal London, ETH Latam, ETHTaipei and ETHDam) and distributed over $10,000 in bounties. We had a blast engaging with hackers from around the world, receiving feedback, and seeing innovative project ideas on MACI come to life. Thank you to all those who participated!

Q2 Roadmap

Now let's look at what we're excited to build over the next few months:

🎯 MACI-RPGF

Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF) has been building momentum over the past few years and really took the crypto space by storm after Optimism's recent round of 30 million OP.

In February we proposed MACI as a solution for Optimism's RPGF tech stack, thanks to MACI's strong guarantees of correct execution, censorship resistance, privacy, and collusion resistance. Since releasing a demo of our full-stack MACI-RPGF implementation in March, we've received positive feedback and interest from various communities in running RPGF rounds on MACI.

This quarter we're excited to keep building out MACI-RPGF with additional functionality and improved UX. Our efforts will include supporting community organizers who want to fork and operate MACI-RPGF rounds in production. If you're interested in running a round for your community, please get in touch!

🎯 MACI Coordinator Service

From years of supporting QF rounds on MACI we've learned a lot about the pain-points of community organizers. The blunt truth is that many technical barriers still exist - in order to operate a MACI poll (whether in a QF round or a simple voting application), you essentially must be a developer to deploy the smart contracts, execute on-chain transactions, and run tooling to generate zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the integrity of a MACI poll. This is no trivial feat, and as a result, MACI is simply not a viable option for many communities to use today.

We're aiming to change this by building a "Coordinator Service" to simplify the role of the coordinator, automate tasks, and remove technical barriers to running MACI-RPGF (and all MACI) rounds. This will include a web interface to deploy and operate MACI instances as well as a server to generate proofs and submit them on-chain. We're confident this tooling will accelerate community adoption by offloading the technical overhead and domain knowledge currently required to use this technology stack. More details to come on this soon!

🎯 MACI Core Protocol Improvements

After our thorough refactor of MACI's code, which led to the release of v1.2, we're now in position to add new features and improvements to the core protocol. As always, we are open to suggestions from the community, so please let us know what ideas and feature requests you have!

Currently, we have a couple of focus areas:

Unconditional Privacy

As of now, MACI's coordinator can track user key changes, which allows them to associate voters with their respective votes, and thus potentially collude with bribers to deanonymize users. We're investigating ways to prevent this possibility. The 3227 team implemented a proof of concept using El-Gamal to remove the link between a new MACI key and their original key. Furthermore, there is a proposal under discussion on how to implement anonymous poll signups, which would provide the same benefits of the El-Gamal protocol, though with a much better user experience.

Deployment Improvements

MACI's deployment process can certainly be made easier and more efficient. We will explore ways to improve this, for instance making it cheaper to deploy MACI by implementing patterns to only deploy contracts once if they can be reused across MACI instances. We aim to make it more user-friendly as well by providing a better interface to deploy MACI instances.

🎯 Support Gitcoin Allo protocol integration

In our initial 2024 roadmap we outlined our plans to engage more with the broader Ethereum ecosystem in order to validate the value of MACI by exploring integrations and gathering input from community developers. Gitcoin is a great example: we've been in discussions with them to explore a MACI integration into their Allo protocol - the smart contracts that power Gitcoin Grants Stack - in order to increase user privacy and bribery resistance in their public good funding infrastructure.

We're already in the process of supporting this integration, thanks to Nick Lionis and Tse Lao and their ETHDam hackathon project. We're excited to see this integration come to life in production and to support Gitcoin in their efforts to improve public goods funding on Ethereum!

🎯 Support ETHDam hackathon QV round

Given the privacy focus of ETHDam, we're excited to support a private quadratic voting (QV) round for the hackathon, powered by MACI. Conference attendees will use clr.fund to vote on their favorite hackathon projects in order to allocate $10,000 to hackathon projects building novel privacy and security solutions in the ecosystem. The round is live at ethdamqf.com, so stay tuned for results!

🎯 MACI starter kit

We're teaming up with Buidl Guild and the Scaffold-ETH team to build a MACI starter kit: a web app that integrates MACI in order to run polls. We expect this to be a useful template for any developer prototyping on MACI or just looking for a simple reference implementation. Whether you're a dev that prefers reading through code vs. documentation, or you're a builder who merely wants to understand how the MACI user flow works, we hope this will be a great resource for you!

How does that sound?

Questions? Concerns? Ideas? We’d love to hear from you!

If there is a feature you think we should work on, or an initiative you'd like to collaborate with us on, please let us know! We welcome input from anyone in the community. The best ways to get in touch are to hop in our Discord (#🗳️-maci channel), tag us on X or create an issue on GitHub.

Onward and upward 🚀