spazcoin apply for Strategy Sub-Fellowship

Hello Bifrost Fellowship!

I’d like to apply to membership of the Fellowship. I can give input to the Technical and Infrastructure Sub-Fellowships, but my passion projects currently align best with the Strategy Sub-Fellowship because I want to further develop Bifrost products and integrate them into Polkadot DeFi applications.

About Me

I have 19 years experience in electrical engineering and embedded software, designing products in the medical and power electronics industries. Although I started with C++, for the past decade I’ve had a passion for DevOps, using Python to automate the automated build, verification, and documentation for our embedded devices. I manage a team of 20 and teach people how to use Jira, git, and Jenkins.
I first discovered Bitcoin in 2013 while living abroad and loved that you could use cryptography to prove asset ownership and reduce costs for international transfers. I've been involved in the Polkadot ecosystem since 2021. As a member of ChaosDAO, I organized investment opportunities such as a MOVR collator and a GLMR collator. I became a DAOist and shaped our ChaosDAO policy to have more democratic voting internally as well as creating a public voting proxy account to represent our collective voice on-chain which people now delegate to. I also contributed to the Python-based subscrape tool, which can extract substrate and EVM-based chain transactions for an account of given filter criteria.

Infrastructure Experience

I learned from the pros how to run servers and now run Interlay vaults and collators on Mangata, Basilisk, HydraDX.

Governance Experience

Occasionally I'm called on to help lead initiatives and this spring the Interlay team reached out to get community help creating governance proposals. I've now created about 20 governance discussions/proposals on Interlay, Bifrost, Astar, Centrifuge, HydraDX, Phala, and Polkadot. I've learned how to craft XCM calls to help parachain governance control their funds on other chains and how to use Chopsticks to test each proposal to ensure successful execution. My recent DeFi passions have been opening up money markets on Interlay and encouraging parachains to use some of their treasury funds as "Protocol Owned Liquidity" in the HydraDX Omnipool.

Bifrost-related governance proposals:

• Bifrost discussion #44 and Hydration ref #145: Deposit 1.25M additional BNC into HydraDX Omnipool
• Interlay ref #101: Add BNC to Interlay DEX and Lending markets
• Hydration discussion #195: Register Bifrost Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) vGLMR, vASTR, on Hydration and add them to Omnipool
  NOTE: I agree with adding vTokens to Omnipool, but we needed to work through where initial liquidity would come from, offering that vBNC and vASTR were the best first targets. I’ve talked to Oyster/TheDefiGuy about GLMR liquidity for vGLMR
• Bifrost ref #25: Close HRMP/XCM channels to Equilibrium
• Bifrost ref #26: Initiate opening 10 XCM channels to other active parachains

Other Hydration Omnipool-related proposals:

• Centrifuge 102: Deposit additional 750k CFG into HydraDX Omnipool
  NOTE: execution in CFG ref #55 demonstrated the first time that any protocol governance has completely independently transferred tokens and managed their own Omnipool deposit without assistance from Hydration governance. I worked hard on that XCM transaction.
• Astar and Hydration ref 144: Deposit 5.54M additional ASTR into HydraDX Omnipool
• Hydration ref 151: Register Darwinia RING. System remark to "Add RING to Omnipool"
• Darwinia discussion 1489: Deposit additional RING liquidity into HydraDX Omnipool
• Hydration ref 185: Ratify Criteria for Listing a Token in the Omnipool
• Hydration discussion 194: “Add PLMC to Omnipool”
  I evaluated newly listed project Polimec and found their governance, blockchain explorer, token distribution, and price discovery insufficient to be immediately be listed in the Omnipool.

Other Interlay gov proposals:

• Interlay ref 95: Add HDX to Interlay DEX and Lending markets
• Interlay ref 99: Adjust USDT and USDC lending market params (within jump rate 50% limit)
• Interlay ref 98, Phala ref 66 and 68, Interlay ref 104, Interlay 117: open XCM channel between Interlay and Phala and cross-register INTR, iBTC, PHA
• Interlay ref 106: Close HRMP/XCM channels to Equilibrium and Parallel (but leave Parallel->Interlay open)
• Interlay ref 118: Add Stellaswap stDOT to Interlay Asset Registry
• Interlay ref 120: Initiate opening 12 XCM channels to other active parachains
  NOTE: when I first started creating XCM governance proposals, some worried that you couldn’t batch any transactions or else it would fail. With this proposal I’m pushing the limits showing that as long as you have DOT in your child acct you can mass open channels within a single referendum, to accelerate how quickly we can integrate chains and cross-register assets.

Polkadot gov proposals:

• Polkadot discussion 263 and Polkadot ref 714: Incentivize Interlay iBTC capacity as a Polkadot common good
  NOTE: This hotly contested referendum received the highest voter turnout of any Polkadot referendum so far (more than Chainalysis). It would have heavily depended on VDOT as part of the delivery solution to optimize use of treasury funds.

As a heavy user of Chopsticks, I'm contributing fixes such as separate Bifrost Kusama vs Polkadot chain configs: https://github.com/AcalaNetwork/chopsticks/pull/792

Vision for Bifrost

I'm a big believer in VDOT and Bifrost’s LST solutions. I think the Bifrost stats page using Grafana is pretty cool. My current goals for Bifrost are to get more of Bifrost's vTokens listed on Hydration and Interlay's money markets. I could also see Bifrost's Loop Stake being expanded to encompass non-VToken money markets as another Polkadot generic lending platform. Bifrost should update runtime to 1.25.0 and integrate the new CheckMetadataHash extension to support the Ledger Generic App, and perhaps integrate Hyperbridge's pallet-ismp and pallet-hyperbridge in order to utilize another bridge to other ecosystems. Beyond that, I’m sure that we’ll come up with further projects to develop Bifrost and integrate its products into the overall crypto ecosystem.

Contact info

Hydration: https://hydration.subscan.io/account/7K3iNyXPEC1Er9dahpaxNMH84YpqQ6rDb8eK4zaZ9MzsCvYp
Interlay: https://interlay.subscan.io/account/wd8x3ESVHmYM42D1PWo9bwacVvLEgZZdcvRQrZoqPH88HFBr3
email: [email protected]
X/Twitter: https://x.com/spazvt
Discord: spazcoin (preferred)
Telegram: spazco1n
GitHub: https://github.com/spazcoin