@garvit_electron.near [Posted on DevHub](https://near.social/#/devgovgigs.near/widget/Post?id=974) ## Idea: Funding Proposal for Maintenance of Electron ZK-bridge #### Background This proposal is made to request funding for the ongoing maintenance and general engineering work for Electron ZK-bridge. Electron ZK bridge is live on NEAR mainnet and powered by ZK Light Clients. This proposal will fund the ongoing operations to ensure bridge uptime. We have ensured that our budget only includes the minimum funding needed by the bridge, and only includes the cost of maintenance to keep it healthy, prevent downtimes, and ensure bug handling and important security features. #### Scope and Deliverables The required tasks for maintenance are - 1. Security 1. Setting up of CI using NEAR sandbox, and CD setup, and maintenance 2. Increase test coverage - Unit tests, integrations tests, E2E tests 3. Setting up of security monitoring infrastructure 4. Fixing known bugs and vulnerabilities in the ZK-circuits pointed out by zk-research community 5. Devops setup (cloudwatch logs monitoring and alert system, secrets manager etc) 2. Setting up of ticket based support for users 3. Indexer watchdog and general infrastructure for transaction monitoring, and explorer 4. Handling Ethereum and NEAR protocol and chain upgrades 5. ZK technology upgrades and optimisations 1. Optimization of ZK circuits to reduce the operational cost of the bridge 2. Execution of Power of Tau ceremony 3. Use of GPU based acceleration using ICICLE 6. Integrations 1. Solidity and Rust SDK for bridge integrations with Defi protocols 2. Front End wallet integrations 3. Integrations with General Messaging layer solutions so that they can deploy on NEAR 4. Integration with NEAR BOS 7. Expanding the tokens supported on our bridge. 8. Relayer speedup using multi-threading ##### Budget Requirements - $24,963/month The detailed budget breakdown on a per engineer basis for the next 10 months is given below - | Role | Annual ($) | | :---------- | :---------- | | ZK Engineer | $89,000 | | AWS Infra | $15,552 | | Solidity Engineer | $70,000 | | Rust Engineer | $75,000 | | Front End Engineer | $50,000 | | **TOTAL (annualized)** | **$299,552** | | Monthly | $24,963 | #### About Electron Labs Electron Labs is a team of ZK and protocol experts. We are a blockchain focussed, product first development team with a focus on shipping efficiently and solving practical infrastructure challenges in blockchains. We comprise of zk and rust engineers, and solid product and design folks. We have people from India’s top engineering institutes (including the world renowned IIT’s), engineers from deeptech companies, and folks who have built successful web3 products previously. On top of this, we have strong ZK-expertise and have created multiple deep zk-innovations, many of them being world’s first. As part of our goal to build the Electron zk-bridge, we invented the world's first zk-prover of Ed25519 signatures. Since then, our work has been incorporated into other zk-projects and referred to by research papers. Building zk tech is hard, and hiring zk engineers is even harder. Our domain-specific expertise gives us a MOAT and makes it almost impossible for others to replicate our solution. Github - https://github.com/Electron-Labs Twitter - https://twitter.com/labs_electron Website - https://electronlabs.org/ Product Link - https://mainnet.electronlabs.org/