Bandada 2024 Roadmap

[aguzmant103]

We're eager to make Bandada more open, in tune with what the ecosystem needs, and collaborative with everyone. To bring in more input from our open source community, we'd love to hear your thoughts on our 2024 product roadmap!

Bandada Overview

Bandada is an infrastructure to create and manage privacy-preserving anonymous groups of individuals with a layer of credentials. This is useful as a method to provide sybil resistance & reputation to anonymous environments, as well as providing a solid UX for voting, QF, QV, gated communities, etc for developers and non-developers alike!

Vision

• Make Bandada the de facto onchain/offchain group-management infrastructure.

Strategy

• Bandada will focus on:
  • providing great user experience
  • building key integrations to other protocols
  • enabling extensibility through modularity and great DevEx
• Bandada will expand beyond Semaphore groups.
• Position Bandada as a credential groups for anti-sybil mechanism and reputation layer.

Principles of:

• Modularity, extensibility, customizability, friendliness and easyness of use. (UX / DX)

Key words:

• integrations, modularity, customizability, credentials, user-friendly, infrastructure, web2/web3, abstraction, management, dashboard.

2023 year in review

In 2023, Bandada achieved a significant milestone with the successful public launch of Version 1 (v1.0.0-alpha) after milestones 1-3 and releases (v.1.X till v.12.X.0). Then followed v1.0.0-beta with many improvements and suggestions from early users.

At a high level this allows the following features:

• Creation of manual, invitation and credential offchain groups and manual onchain groups.
• Both API, SDK and GUI support
• Boilerplate example applications, tutorials and community engagement artifacts.

The project gartnered attention from internal (Discreetly) and external developers, (organizations like Verax) and privacy-conscious individuals. However, it hasn’t gathered significant adoption yet.

Bandada was presented in the following events:

• Zuzalu: brief mention at Montenegro
• ETHRome: post cards and conversations
• Devconnect: presentation and workshop
• zkMonth: online presentation
• PSE Project Showcase: online presentation

The following incentives and education resources where built to onboard users to Bandada:

• GitPOAP
• Blogpost
• Postcards
• Good First Issues with 7 new contributors
• Demo app
• Boilerplate
• Tutorial

Challenges:

In 2023 three expected internal use cases for Bandada were sunsetted, these are: Sugesto, Zkitter, EigenTrust.

2024 Goals (Specifics we want to achieve)

• Validation: keep iterating to solidify Bandada’s value proposition to the ecosystem

• Production-ready: become a production ready by completing the roadmap (M4-M5) and a security audit.

• Adoption:

  • by end 2023, have 3-4 early user teams and projects
  • by mid 2024, have ~10 early users / projects.*
  • by end of 2024, have +10 early users / projects.

  *Consider a 6 months “hybernation” if mid 2024 target is not reached. This “hybernation” is to have the ecosystem time to catch up and mature, and for us to reflect where/how to pivot to achieve adoption targets next time.

Bandada 2024 Project Plan

Our efforts can be divided into 3 main categories:

🤩 Developer Experience (make it easy aka Roadmap/Features): documentation, CLI, boilerplate, templates, SDK

🏍️Technical Improvements (make it better aka Research & Experimental): research, performance, new feature

🎓Adoption, Education & Community (make it used aka Ecosystem & Community): website, hackathons, talks, tutorials

2024 Q1

Features Roadmap:

• 🏍️ Supporting p0tion Integration of Bandada as anti-sybil
• 🏍️ New credential provider: EAS
• 🏍️ New credential provider: SIWE ("blockchain provider")
• 🏍️ Design the mechanism to enable "logical operators" on credentials (AND, OR, () )
• 🤩 Building an SDK demo and a Boilerplate Demo
• 🤩 Creating a Docs website using Docusaurus
• 🤩 Creating a new GitHub org to organize Bandada's different repos
• 🎓 Enabling GitPOAP 24' - encouraging and supporting new contributors
• 🎓 Support Optimism Mission Request for ZK Private Infrastructure

Product Research

• 🏍️ Study different protocols in the space that can be integrated into Bandada
  • For example: POAPs, The Badge, Verax, Zupass, Jubmoji, etc.
  • For example: Anon Klub, ZKEmail, TLS Notary (permissionless proof of Twitter/Github)
  • For example: The Badge,Reclaim Protocol, Unirep
• 🏍️ Study different protocols in the space that do a similar functionality to Bandada
  • For example: Gitcoin Passport, etc.
• 🏍️ Expand GH Discussions on additional features for group settings

Ecosystem and community

• 🎓 Participate and sponsor 1 hackathon in this quarter (Circuit Breaker, ETHDam, ETHRome, Devcon, ????)
• 🎓 Deliver 1-2 showcasing Bandada in this quarter (30DaysWeb3, Circuit Breaker, ETHDam,
• 🎓 Target ZK learning communities and web3 dev communities to create learning paths.
  • Alchemy University
  • ZKU (zk university from Harmony)
• 🎓 Publish and maintain our roadmap on GitHub discussion.

2024 Q2

Features Roadmap:

• 🏍️ Complete current roadmap with Milestone 4 and Milestone 5:
  • This adds onchain “invitation and reputation groups” Bandada - Features Roadmap
  • This will enable most feature parity between onchain groups and offchain groups
  • The goal is to: understand how they work and discover how to add value by differentiating from and integrate some of these protocols.
• 🏍️ Updates like: ether.js, support several networks for blockchain credentials
• 🤩 Add create/remove groups with API key logic
• 🏍️ Integrate 2-3 high value protocols selected from the research in Q1.
  • This might include: EAS, POAPs
• 🤩 Standardization of additional data structures for creating membership proofs
• 🏍️ Create onchain groups without having to be logged in
  • With API, just a library, etc). Allow people to create their groups even if they are not on the platform as users.

Ecosystem and community

• 🎓 Explore integrations with DAOs tooling like MolochDAO or Aragon DAO
• 🎓 Participate and sponsor 1 hackathon in this quarter (ETHDam, ETHRome, Devcon, ????)
• 🎓 Deliver 1-2 showcasing Bandada in this quarter.

2024 H1 “adoption target deadlines”.

Decide if hybernating and waiting for ecosystem to catch up and/or considering pivoting to another value proposition direction.

2024 Q3

• 🏍️Consider future ideas like: supporting more anonymity sets, composable logic with credential providers, etc.
• 🏍️ We can create reputation (in off-chain and on-chain groups) by combining different protocols, for example using Github, Twitter (now X), Poap, etc.

• 🤩 Standardize reputational validators and make it even simpler for external developers to extend them.
• 🤩 Provide a comprehensive SDK with a set of libraries that simplify the integration of Bandada.
• 🏍️ Build modular infrastructure:
  • Bandada becomes more protocol-independent from Semaphore
    • For example: “use Bandada with zk-kit instead of semaphore directly.”
  • 🏍️ Make the infrastructure scalable and flexible enough to be easily replicated in various contexts.

Ecosystem and community

• 🎓 Participate and sponsor 1 hackathon in this quarter (ETHDam, ETHRome, Devcon, ????)
• 🎓 Deliver 1-2 showcasing Bandada in this quarter.
• 🎓 Explore possible institutional adoptions: Infura, Quicknode, Alchemy, etc.

2024 Q4

The following items are deprioritized for Q1-Q3 but they can be prioritized in Q4 if there’s need/feedback/and user adoption:

• 🏍️ Easyness of deployment (containers/serverless)
  • We need to validate first,
    • 1. how many users want to self host it vs using SaaS
    • 2. how will the users would want to self host it
  • Some ideas on how to do this:
    • 🤩 Support and expand container deployments with Docker.
    • 🤩 Explore and integrate Serverless functions scaling into Bandada
• 🏍️Security audits
  • Perform a full security audit of Bandada codebase.
• 🏍️ Rust / Performance Optimizations
  • Perform performance optimizations for large group management actions and queries.

Ecosystem and community

• 🎓 Participate and sponsor 1 hackathon in this quarter (ETHDam, ETHRome, Devcon, ????)
• 🎓 Deliver 1-2 showcasing Bandada in this quarter.
• 🎓 Create a new Bandada Discord server.

Key Ideas to keep in mind:

• Bandada feels more like a product / more like a startup instead of a protocol like Semaphore. If we build something useful, people will use it, otherwise it might not.
• Bandada is user facing application to handle groups. Under the hood it could have several other protocols (Semaphore, Sismo, EAS, etc.)