Please describe your proposed solution.

We want to utitilize Orcfax's oracle protocol to do trustless attestations of Filecoin storage. There are various architectures to achieve attestations of external events in a system of blockchain nodes. Unequivocally, is is simpler to have an extraneous party provide these attestations as making the nodes attest each other introduces highly complex dynamics.

Implementing this means medium scale changes to almost all Permanentum components and the creation of a Filecoin storage attestation oracle by the Orcfax team.

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The Oracle introduced for Permanentum will also be available for use by other developers. Further decentralizing attestations means that Permanentum can address the critique of its dependence on a trusted oracle feed. Integrating decentralized Orcfax oracle feeds will encouraging more usage of the protocol and democratize it.

This Orcfax feed integration will introduce another novel application of the Cardano Open Oracle Protocol and provide practical use case examples for other integrators.

Orcfax's unique data source triangulation design will mean that Cardano will have the most trustless, high-quality Filecoin attestation datum available on-chain, compared to any other L1.

How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

This proposal's success can be evaluate based on the success of the collaborating projects, Orcfax and Permanentum.

Success itself for Permanentum is measured in GBs secured (the volume of data being covered by storage bonds) and GBs retrieved (how much data would have been lost and was reinstated by pulling from the permanentum backups into IPFS again)

Orcfax counts success metrics based on data feeds integrated, their respective usage and integations with web3 projects.

Furthermore, finding usage of the Filecoin oracle by other projects should also be considered a success indicator.

Importantly, this proposal has also an indirect success aspect which is the strengthening of the developer ecosystem. By implementing this proposal we demonstrate

1. How to make dApps more decentralized and resilient to tampering
2. How to make non trivial collaborations in the Cardano developer ecosystem
3. Integration patterns for how to integrate decentralized oracle feeds into mission critical dApps

All these points can also be seen as success factors.

Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Permanentum is completely open source.

Any significant insights will be shared in:

1. Blog posts
2. Catalyst town hall presentations
3. Engagement with the Cardano dev community

The Orcfax project has a dedicated community management team that reports regularly on technical and business developments. The Orcfax team will share the outputs and results of this project via its Twitter and other social media accounts, as well as publicize it in Orcfax Twitterspaces and YouTube interviews.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

evolute.software has been active in Cardano since 2020 with a variety of projects. We have a history of delivering software. Kiriakos Krastillis has over two decades of professional IT experience, either as a developer or as a manager. evolute.software is well networked in the software development and it security domains. We casually bring on domain experts to add extra depth on advanced topics but on our own we also are formidable devs.

Orcfax is a next-generation oracle platform that completely decentralizes data collection and validation in a permissionless manner while providing full audit logs for the flow of data through the platform. The Orcfax team is quickly become an influential player in the Cardano DeFi ecosystem as more projects and users begin to understand and see the need for standardized, trustless oracle feeds in their Cardano dApps. Orcfax is led by founder Peter Van Garderen, a renowned free and open source software developer in the digital heritage community.

What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

1. Create the Orcfax oracle feed
2. Launch the Orcfax oracle feed
3. Update the storage provider code
4. Update the smart contract to accept attestations from Orcfax feeds
5. Upgrade the Permanentum testnet
6. Launch Permanentum-Orcfax integration on mainnet

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

1. Create the oracle: Orcfax develops the oracle
2. Establish trustless data collection criteria to verify IPFS storage allocations
3. Test Filecoin node and API capabilities
4. Develop decentralized Filecoin "block readers"
5. Develop Filecoin attestation feed schema
6. Integrate the Filecoin feed into Cardano Open Oracle Publication and Arweave archiving
7. launch the oracle: Orcfax launches the oracle on preprod with a pre-selected group of peers
8. Testnet node deployment / installation
9. Testnet peer tests
10. Update the storage provider code
11. Update for the storage provider's challenge mode: challenge mode is a mode where storage providers can challenge each other when they find out a data outage happens in a contract. The storage provider will have to switch from blindly trusting evolute.software to trust the Orcfax storage attestations
12. Update the storage provider's confirmation mode: confirmation mode is the mode where a storage provider asks the oracle to attest specific storage. This will need to switch the to the Orcfax oracle
13. Update the smart contract to validate attestations based on Orcfax fact statement datum
14. Upgrade the permanentum testnet
15. Launch the oracle on mainnet
16. Upgrade permanentum mainnet

Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

1. Create the Orcfax oracle feed:
2. Requirement specifications for Filecoin attestations
3. Filecoin feed schema
4. Filecoin "Readers" - open-source software component (Python)
5. Launch Orcfax Filecoin feeds on Testent
6. incl. Orcfax audit logs for Filecoin attestation feed collection, validation, and publication
7. Update the storage provider code: Updated storage provider logic to use the Orcfax oracle pool
8. Update the smart contract to accept attestations from Orcfax: Updated smart contract that accepts the Orcfax values
9. Upgrade the Permanentum testnet: preprod runs without dependency on the evolute.software attestation oracle, monitoring is updated, debugging tools are updated
10. Launch the Orcfax IPFS/Filecoin attestations oracle on mainnet using its decentralized validator network for source data collection.
11. Upgrade Permanetum mainnet: mainnet runs without dependency on the evolute.software attestation oracle

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Orcfax developers, analysts, and managers:

28 hours per week (.75 FTE - split between up to 6 team members)

x 16 weeks (4 months)

x $75 USD per hour = 300 ADA per hour (assuming 0.25 ADA/USD)

x 134,400 ADA.

Evolute.Software

M3: 6 Person days

M4: 6 Person days

M5: 7 Person days

M7: 2 Person days

Support for the Orcfax team M1 & M2: 3 Person days

Evolute Person Day rate: 760€

VAT: 19%

Total Person Days calculated: 24

₳/€ = 0.26

Ada: 76527₳

Totals

Total: 210927₳

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Kiriakos Krastillis: permanentum developer, founder of evolute.software

Peter van Garderen: Orcfax Founder & CEO

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Implementing this proposal successfully will

1. Allow Permanentum to become a fully decentralized and "unstobbaple" cardano protocol in the future
2. Bring another highly interesting data source into Cardano via the Orcfax oracle
3. Showcase how opensource projects like Orcfax and Permanentum can benefit from one another is a significant win for the ecosystem