xGov-53 Subscriptions! Recurrent Payments & Contract Calls Platform

[kylebeee]

Hey everyone!

Very excited to make this proposal, let me know if you have any questions. I'm excited to discuss

-- Kyle aka krby.algo

[algoanne]

Hi! This sounds useful.

I would personally like a more fleshed-out "How it Works". For example, it's not 100% clear to me whether the payment is automatic (e.g. with a delegated logic sig) on a monthly basis or whether the user has to sign again every month.

Will the contracts be open-sourced?

Does the amount asked for include the cost of an audit? Or will the contracts be community-audited somehow?

[kylebeee]

Hi Anne!

I was trying to keep the how it works section as simple as i could. Happy to discuss much more technically about them, initially i wanted to use delegated signatures to create a UX as smooth as what we're used to in web2; however after speaking to Taylan and others it became clear none of our wallets have plans to support them. I decided to use an escrow based system and overtime the design grew on me quite a bit.

Payments from the escrow account are automated and triggered by a scheduling program that will watch the chain. For added redundancy there's an economic incentive that the account that triggers the payment will receive 0.5% of the payment. So no need to sign on payments from the escrow to the merchant, just to mint the contract & 'top up' the escrow account occasionally depending on how much runway you're comfortable allocating to it.

I have no plans to open source the PyTeal at the moment but Im not opposed to doing it in the future. The main reason is that these contracts represent a substantial investment of my time/effort/energy and since we have no funding my concern is that someone else ( with some funding ) could swoop in and jump off my code. Basically; the source code represents a small market advantage in my eyes and id like us to get more established with our service offering before we give it away.

As far as audits go, my experience is that getting something audited often represents a massive sum of money along with a multi-month waiting period while the company that checks your work offers no guarantees about the security of your contracts. The amount I'm asking for is roughly 33k USD; as far as i know thats not enough for an audit. The plan is to rely on rigorous testing and peer review from both devs in the space and foundation developers. The contracts in their current state have already been reviewed by multiple foundation devs and pass about 34 automated tests. One of the other benefits of using an escrow here is that the only funds at risk are those that you've put in for your runway.

Thank you for the questions Anne, i appreciate the opportunity to elaborate on this stuff. Let me know if anything i said is confusing or needs more elaboration.

[SudoWeezy]

Hello.
Please update your proposal to match the template provided here.
https://github.com/algorandfoundation/ARCs/blob/main/assets/arc-0034/TemplateForm.md
Thanks.