LRP - JSKitty

Name: LRP - JSKitty
Term: 3 Cycles
Cycle Amount: 30,000
Total Amount: 90,000
Author: JSKitty
Receiver: JSKitty
Address: DGPDRQLWihNdNJquEs2foN2ZySruRLo3LW
Created: 08-09-2023
Status: Active
Vote Hash: cfd7dab01f6870ff3e5e7dbe786c1b9f74446d856bb90e4b33bd54fed293e9c0

Hello curious PIVian or Labsian!

I'm JSKitty 😺 - Full-time Project Lead of the PIVX Labs team, and collaborator at PIVX Core.
Who is this? Click to get up-to-date on my last proposal.

This is my fifth proposal, in the form of an LRP (Labs Recurring Proposal) to renew my perpetual position in continuing to push PIVX to the next level.

I am the Project Lead of PIVX Labs, as well as a full-time developer for MyPIVXWallet.org - I manage the networking of Labs, assist in marketing efforts with both the PIVX Core marketing team and the growing Labs independent marketing team, as well as cultivating the Community Development sector of PIVX to assist small aspiring leaders or developers to build their PIVX projects to their full potential.

This proposal, while I would've preferred not to; is raised to compensate for the differences in price since I first started at Labs in early December, although it's generally wavy and unpredictable long-term, if all continues to go well at PIVX, by the end of my term I'll be able to re-adjust accordingly! 💜🌿

What have I done in these last cycles?

• MyPIVXWallet Development

The following are my Pull Requests that have been submitted to MPW during these cycles:

**Important Pull Requests (with notable features or fixes):

• Add the MPW 'Contacts' system: Implements a new Labs-built feature, Contacts, for easy, address-less, QR and URL based payments.
  - New Account Database structure: Accounts had a full rewrite after various dataloss issues were found, now resolved, with a massively robust DB.
  - Add Advanced Mode + Better Mnemonic Handling: MPW's onboarding UX was simplified, now with advanced features gated behind 'Advanced Mode', Seed Imports also improved.
  - Add 'Change Password' button: Users can now change their password, making MPW re-encrypt their keys with the new password under the hood.
  - Governance UI Improvements: MPW had some large Governance improvements; a new sleek UI, and clearer submission process.
  - Add CSVs and improved scaling to PIVX Promos: PIVX Promos can produce CSV files for bulks of codes, and now handles larger quantities without lag.
  - Add Cold Staking customisation UI:** Users can now customise their Cold Staking address, instead of using only the Labs Cold Pool.
• Add new Landing Page: MPW now has a new impressive Landing Page designed by @sh_rn, which I implemented in to MPW.
  - Update i18n system, add Portuguese and Brazilian: This PR adds hundreds of translatable keys, as well as the PT-PT and PT-BR languages.

Less Important Pull Requests (with less noticeable features or fixes):

• Add Balance Decimals setting: Added a setting to allow users to customise their preferred decimal count, defaults to 2, suggested by @SiggeB
• Finalise v1.2.0 translations: This PR updates ALL translation files in cooperation with the international community, in prep for the release of v1.2.0.
• Silence warnings for empty DB keys: This small fix silences the DB's warning when keys are missing, since the DB already has measures to self-correct once an update applies.
• Track Stake Inputs for post-stake invalidation: This fixes a bug in which UTXOs would appear to 'duplicate' after stakes, due to the stake input remaining in the wallet.
• Clarify Dashboard Send/Recv buttons: This adds a well-requested change to use Text instead of abstract Icons for the Send/Receive menus.
• Improved CoinGecko stability: The CoinGecko integration can now gracefully handle offline situations, as well as relying better on local cache if possible.
• Improved i18n system: Rewrites how translations are applied in MPW, allowing for dynamic text, and a Fallback to English upon missing i18n sections.
• Fix intermittent Cold Staking failures: This fixes a bug in which Cold Staking and GUI Sending would fail due to errorneous satoshi rounding.
• Fix and improve Debug Mode: MPW's Debug Mode was fixed, and had a small revamp to it's logging for extra verbosity and debug utility.
• Fix major proposal bugs: This fix prevents a total failure of the Governance System during proposal submission.
• Fix openExplorer() bugs: A function to open explorers in MPW regressed after a new feature, these bugs were resolved.
• Release v1.1.1: This PR was the release of v1.1.1, with the Changelog updated and internal Version bumped.
• Release v1.1.0: This PR was the release of v1.1.0, with the Changelog updated and internal Version bumped.
• Move Country flags to footer end: Adjusted the position of each country's flag (non-English) to the End of the footer.
• Disable Analytics: This PR temporarily disables the analytics system, until we have a new system online in the future.
• Add Filipino language: Adds a new language.
• Add French language: Adds a new language.
• Add German language: Adds a new language.
• Improve Password handling Security: Various improvements to securing MPW's use of sensitive data, such as wiping memory fully post-use.
• Fix delayed syncs after Import: Small fixes to ensure MPW synchronises faster after wallet imports.
• Modal alignment and button improvements: Minor design improvements for Popup Modals.
• Fixed multiple UI-related errors: There were some common errors annoying users related to the UI, these were resolved.

Aside from my own work, I've spent hours dedicated to reviewing, testing and providing feedback to dozens of other developer Pull Requests; this is necessary to catch bugs early, prevent accidental (or even purposeful!) exploits or backdoors, and apply general Quality Control to the codebase.

• PIVCards, a new Labs Experiment

PIVCards' mission can be summarised by:

Spend PIV at any store, in any country, from any wallet, in total privacy.

PIVCards enables the spending of PIV directly in to thousands of global giftcards, in various regional areas, each with their own selection of giftcards available.

• So far, I've built the entire backend of PIVCards solo.
• PIVCards has a REST API available for any developers that wish to help build with it.
• PIVi, the Labs AI, also has full PIVCards integration, allowing users to utilise PIVCards fully from within Discord.
• PIVCards has a frontent web UI in development, this is handled by @BreadJS, and is awaiting completion.

PIVCards is an experiment to test the demand for PIVX as a spendable currency, currently, PIVCards was built in less than 4 weeks of work, and currently runs in a semi-automated manner.
To complete PIVCards and enable it as a real-time service, it needs further development, and for that, a separate proposal will be launched to outsource PIVCards development to external developers (vetted by Labs, such as the PIVX Poker team).

If PIVCards is successful and it's in clear demand by the PIVX community, and acquires necessary funding for development, we'll continue to push PIVCards, including a full integration with MyPIVXWallet.org, to allow purchasing any items in the world, straight from your wallet.

If PIVCards shows a clear lack of demand, lacks use, and can't obtain further funding, then PIVCards will likely 'wind down', this is by design as PIVCards was designed to fill a gap that had not yet been filled, and why I decided to cap the development time to ~4 weeks. The adoption of CoinsBee and other merchants means PIVCards may not be a necessary service, and thus funding and development could be spent elsewhere.

The community decides all, the destiny of PIVCards awaits!

PIVCards volume since launch: 1,660.94 USD

• Other Labs Missions

The launch of the Quality Control Programme
After a few weeks of brainstorming, I've decided to launch a full, funded Labs programme to build and maintain a strong Quality Control team, primarily for MyPIVXWallet.

This comes after some fairly major dataloss-related bugs hit MPW, causing an expedited patch release and a complete rewrite of the Accounts DB, this issue would've been caught very easily with an active QA team, as such, we'd like to expand our formally voluntary Quality Control team, to a largely automated, reward-based scheme.

I built 'Prodder' with PIVi, a micro-service that watches for Pull Requests, waits for them to contain testing instructions and specify a reward, once found: Prodder will notify the Quality Control team with full testing instructions, a reward bounty for completion, and the devs associated with the Pull Request, this system ensures a workflow that is consistent and clear, streamlining Quality Control at Labs vastly.

An example of 'Prodder', configured for MyPIVXWallet, in action:

The Programme's eligibility requirements are:

• Must be in the PIVX Labs Discord, and hit the "Quality Control" opt-in role.
• Cannot already be paid by the DAO (members paid by the DAO can not earn Quality Control rewards).
• One reward per-PR (only a single test per-session is rewarded, subsequent tests are not qualified for rewards).

Rewards range between 10 PIV to 100 PIV, depending on the severity and depth of the tests at hand.
If a major exploit or bug is caught for a bounty of 100 PIV, that is WELL worth it, testing cannot be done voluntarily, members show very fast burnout, leaving Labs Devs solo to handle testing, which slows the entire progression of Labs down.

A proposal for the Quality Control Programme will go live shortly, as an LRP.

Labs' PIVX.Poker: Progressing!
PIVX Poker continues to progress, now with SHIELD integrated, and a notification system for players when new games have started, PIVX Poker becomes more playable and enjoyable by the day.

The notification system was designed by me, in this Pull Request, all other work was accomplished by Poker developer **Luke!

**

Labs Twitter (X)
I have continued to maintain the PIVX Labs Twitter (X) account, posting updates for PIVCards, MyPIVXWallet, and various other developments and updates for PIVX.
I also create my own in-house graphics, with a mix of GIMP and PIVi's AI, examples of such are:

• our monthly MPW release graphics.

• the 'Oppenheimer' graphics to catch on the Oppenheimer trend:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1683178357796614144

• the 'Big Brother' graphics to catch on the Worldcoin trend:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1683818968077803521

• the 'Contacts' announcement teaser:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1696169224056545747

... and many more.

What will I continue to do for the next three cycles?

Continue what I've done for the last 11 months, of course!

Shield, as with before, was delayed due to lacking developers to polish and finalise the implementation, this month; Duddino and Rezzi should be available again, and if so, we can easily finish the Shield integration with all three working together, along with a feature freeze to prevent Shield conflicting with parallel MPW developments.

To be specific, in these next cycles, my points of interest are:

• Completing and releasing My PIVX Wallet v2.0: the second generation of MPW; with full, 1:1 feature parity to PIVX Core, such as full SHIELD integration, and more; detailed below.
• A full MPW implementation of Coin Control, allowing users in 'Advanced Mode' to exercise fine-grained control over their UTXOs, addresses, Cold Staking outputs, owner addresses, proposal receivers, and more.
• R&D on implementing PIVCards or external Swap Sites in to MPW, depending on if PIVCards continues as a service or not, to balance priorities accordingly.
• Continued efforts to revamp MPW's design, focusing on UX, colour schemes and MPW's ease on the eyes, we want the app to be as beautifully simple to install, setup and use, as possible.
• A re-implementation of Labs Analytics from scratch, allowing us to collect highly anonimised, privacy-first data to analyse the general growth of MPW, it's common countries, it's most and least used features, etc.
• Continuation in outsourcing, directing, and assisting with the development of PIVCards, depending on how funding goes.
• R&D in using the latest in AI to automate Labs Quality Control and Social Media (X/Twitter, Medium Articles) to use less dev-time than necessary, and remove the need for outsourcing writers at Labs.
• Continue implementing user-suggested features and fixes in to MPW, these vary in size and complexity, so cannot be predicted in advance, I will balance priorities accordingly between New Developments and Feature Requests.
• Cultivating the PIVX Labs team & community: PIVX Labs is the primary community besides "Main", we'll continue growing with independent values.
• ... various other Labs projects & MPW improvements that I cannot predict ahead of time: goals change, priorities shift, but work will always happen.

... want to add your own ideas for us to build?
[Join and let's get it done!](https://discord.gg/zTScGaGtgv)

I, and the entire Labs team + community, thank everyone who have supported our work thus far, and allowed us to prove that we can get shit done without too much messing around - we have some fun, it's what keeps us sane and grounded, down-to-earth, but we keep our direction the same: build, and do it right.

Thanks for reviewing my proposal, now's your choice:

Purple Pill (Vote Yes) | Red Pill (Vote No)

• JSKitty 😺 🔧