Slothunter

• Team Name: hack-ink
• Payment Address: 0xccd79b2b77e71292924e85de130bfb1c03d94522 (Ethereum) USDC
• Level: 2

Project Overview 📄

Overview

Slothunter is a Rust CLI program.

It's goal is to help teams/users to participate in the Polkadot auction more easily and efficiently.

Ecosystem Fit

I noticed nobody realized there was a slot action, and no one participated in it until Kusama's 58th auction ended.

This could help small teams to catch the chance.

And this also could help teams/users to bid/contribute automatically.

Details(spec)

Slothunter will be implemented in Rust, ensuring efficiency and stability when running as a system service.

This grant comprises 7 parts:

1. Monitor the auction state.
   1. The program will run as a system service.
   2. It will fetch and cache the chain state periodically.
2. Calculate the current winner.
   1. Based on the latest on-chain data, the current auction winner will be calculated.
3. Email and webhook notifications.
   1. The notifications will inform users about:
      1. New auctions starting.
      2. New bids/contributions.
      3. Stopping bids/contributions and the reasons.
      4. Current block winners.
      5. Auction endings.
   2. Email and webhook addresses are configurable.
   3. Notifications will be logged in the terminal by default.
   4. Users can enable or disable email/webhook notifications. e.g., Some users may find emails annoying.
   5. All notification content will be presented in JSON format.
   6. Webhook notifications can be integrated with Slack, Telegram, etc., e.g., a Telegram bot will provide a listening address, and Slothunter will push notifications to the bot periodically.
4. Auto bidding/contributing.
   1. The bot will auto bid/contribute when there's a new winner and stop if the new winner's price exceeds the maximum acceptable value in the configuration file.
   2. Proxy accounts can be used for bidding/contributing.
5. Customize bidding/contributing strategies, including:
   1. Setting a maximum acceptable value.
   2. Setting bidding/contributing increments.
6. Provide a config.toml to configure:
   1. Relaychain.
   2. Bidding/contributing account.
   3. Bidding/contributing target, amount, and maximum acceptable price.
   4. Notification email sender and receivers.
   5. Notification webhooks.
7. A Telegram bot that can be easily deployed on any Ubuntu 20.04+ server.

Teams/users can start the bot before the auction, and everything should proceed as expected. Teams/users can deploy the Telegram bot and receive the latest auction status in a group.

Team 👥

Team members

• Xavier Lau

Contact

• Contact Name: Xavier Lau
• Contact Email: xavier@inv.cafe
• Website: https://linktr.ee/aurevoirxavier

Legal Structure

Personal. (no legal structure entry)

Team's experience

Xavier Lau

• Six years of experience in Rust.
• Three years of experience in Substrate.
• Darwinia Network core developer, since 2019.
• Actively at Substrate StackExchange.
• Grants contributor, Subalfred.

Team Code Repos

• https://github.com/hack-ink
• https://github.com/hack-ink/array-bytes
• https://github.com/hack-ink/githuber
• https://github.com/hack-ink/subalfred
• https://github.com/hack-ink/unescaper

Please also provide the GitHub accounts of all team members. If they contain no activity, references to projects hosted elsewhere or live are also fine.

• https://github.com/AurevoirXavier

Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/xavier-lau-b0655310a

Overview

• Total Estimated Duration: 5 weeks
• Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1 FTE
• Total Costs: 11,000 USD

Milestone 1 Slothunter CLI tool

• Estimated duration: 4 weeks
• FTE: 1
• Costs: 10,000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
0a.	License	GPLv3
0b.	Documentation	There will be a guide to tell people how to use this.
0c.	Testing guide	There will be a docker file and a guide to tell the auditor how to run the tests. It will guide you how to setup an auction and do the tests.
1.	Auction winner calculator	Based on the 0c., run the binary, you should see the current winner from the terminal log.
2.	Notification component	Based on the 0c., run the binary, you should receive these notification correctly.
3.	Auto bidding/contributing component	Based on the 0c., run the binary, you should see you are bidding/contributing your parathread from the Polkadot Apps.
4.	Slothunter configuration component	Based on the 3., you can customize your bidding/contributing strategy in a toml file, you should see your bidding/contributing behavior works the same as the strategy defined.
5.	Releases	Linux, macOS, Windows prebuilt binaries, and crates.io release.

Milestone 2 Slothunter notification Slack/Telegram bot setup guide

• Estimated duration: 1 weeks
• FTE: 1
• Costs: 1,000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
0a.	License	GPLv3
0b.	Documentation	There will be a guide to tell people how to use this.
0c.	Testing guide	There will be a guide to tell the auditor how to run the tests.
1.	Telegram bot.	A telegram bot program to receive the auction notification and easy to deploy on any Ubuntu 20.04+ server.
2.	Workshop repository	Follow the tutorial in this repository to setup the bot, and you should see the notification appear in Slack and Telegram.

Future Plans

• Keep connected with the community/parity and make it better.

Additional Information ➕

We could talk about the bidding/contributing strategy. It's really flexible. If anyone got more ideas. I can integrate them into the program.

I have talked to some teams few months ago. Because they ask me what script did I use during the bidding. Can I share it? Actually, I set some proxies accounts and share them with my team members. Then we watch the auction manually. If there is a new winner we could bid immediately.

As I said before, there is even an empty auction in Kusama. This is not friendly and not good for the ecosystem. So, I decided to develop this. And I think it is valuable.

How did you hear about the Grants Program? GitHub.