Catalyst network technology stack

1.   General Information

Project Name: Catalyst

License: Contribution

Contributor (Company, Organization or individual name(s)): Atlas City Global Ltd

Existing OSS Project? (Yes/No): Yes

Source Code URL: https://github.com/catalyst-network

Project Homepage URL (if different): https://catalystnet.org/

Project Transfer Signatories:
Full legal name and email address required of the individual(s) with the authority to transfer or contribute the project to the .NET Foundation. Note that if you'd prefer not to include this in the public application, it can be submitted via e-mail to contact@dotnetfoundation.org (referencing this issue number).

Darren Charles Oliveiro-Priestnall
darren.op@atlascity.io

2.   Description

Please provide a brief statement about your project in terms that are understandable to the target consumer of the library or project, i.e. an elevator pitch for the project:

A framework and growing family of modules for decentralised ledger, file storage and compute based on the Catalyst protocol. The goal of the protocol is to allow organisations to quickly plug together components such as consensus, mempools, runtimes and ledgers in different combinations to create public and private networks. A blockchain typically just supports simple structured data, Catalyst extends this to support a richer range of data sets and compute functions. This makes Catalyst an ideal basis for Web3.0 applications as well as business services.

Please provide a 1 sentence (<140 character) summary of your to help users when searching the .NET Foundation projects

.NET based project to enable the deployment and running of public and private blockchain, decentralised file storage (DFS) and decentralised compute services.

3.   Project Governance

Please complete this section about who will be maintaining the open source project and how it will run.
Project Lead:
(Who is the primary contact point for the community and the .NET Foundation when discussing governance of the project.)

Name: Darren Oliveiro-Priestnall
Email: darren.op@atlascity.io
GitHub Profile URL: https://github.com/Switch1983

Committers:

Which individuals have commit / write access to the repository, what is their GitHub ID and who is their employer (if contributions are on behalf of an employer)

https://github.com/orgs/catalyst-network/people/nshCore
https://github.com/orgs/catalyst-network/people/Switch1983
Both from Atlas City Global Limited

Governance Model:

Please describe how new code changes are proposed to the project, how those changes are reviewed and how a decision is made to accept proposed changes. Also describe the process for identifying and appointing new committers.

The process is set out at https://github.com/catalyst-network/Community/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Code changes are submitted and reviewed by members of the Catalyst Technical working group who will feed back or accept the submitted code change. https://github.com/catalyst-network/Community/tree/master/governance

Anyone can apply to join the Technical working group with the decision whether to be accepted made by peers within that working group. The process is conducted in a transparent manner to ensure that valuable conbtributors all get the opportunity to join and work within the group.

CLA

If already an OSS project, was a Contribution License Agreement in place for contributions accepted? How does the project check who has signed one?

Yes and uses the CLA assistant bot to automate the process.

CLA Notification Alias
Provide an email address that will receive CLA related notifications from the .NET Foundation CLA automation

Info@catalystnet.org

Project Transfer Type

Projects may join the .NET Foundation in one of two ways and you should chat with your .NET Foundation contact to discuss the best mechanism for your project. You can either a) assign the copyright of the project's source code to the .NET Foundation or b) contribute the project source code to the .NET Foundation under an open source license. Assignment is the preferred approach, but licensing a project to the Foundation may be more appropriate for longer running open source projects that have not previously had a contribution license agreement and have accepted contributions from many different sources.
a) Assignment
b) Contribution

Contribution

4.   Repository Layout

The .NET Foundation host guidance for new projects and details on recommended structure here:
https://github.com/dotnet/home/tree/master/guidance

Note that the open source repository should be the master where changes are made by the core development team using the same PR process that is used for non-committer contributions.

Please define below any changes you would want to make to your repositories as part of the process of joining the .NET Foundation

No changes planned but open to discuss changes with the .NET Foundation.

5.   PR Plan

Please summarize the public relations plan for the announcement when joining the foundation (and releasing as open source if appropriate). What is the main story we wish to promote, through what channels, what issues should we be aware of?  For significant news events then please also work with your .NET Foundation contact to ensure a full PR plan is developed.

All Catalyst Network and Atlas City Global social media channels
Both the Catalyst and Atlas City websites
Our community blog
Our community newsletter
Paid press release in the city of London
London .NET Communities and Crypto AM newspaper
Our list of media contacts. We write numerous articles and provide news guidance to numerous outlets will use these to raise awareness of the submission to the .NET Foundation.
Hackathons which we run including one currently running over a number of months for universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL and KC.
We are creating our own partner page on the London Stock Exchange website to support listed companies and we would include this as part of that listing and awareness building on the exchange.

6.   Infrastructure Requirements

Please describe any infrastructure requirements for the project. For example, how will build servers be operated? Any web hosting or service hosting requirements? Do we need to set up SSL certificates or provide Authenticode Code Signing arrangement for releases?

We use Azure build pipelines for continuous integration and so there’s no hosting requirements outside of Azure. If the foundation is able to provide hosting so that Atlas City doesn’t have to would be very useful.

7.   Additional Notes

Please provide any additional information required or use this area for notes during the onboarding process. If this open source project has similarities with any other projects in this space then please detail them and why this project is different. If there are any potential issues that you feel the project might need help with early on then also state them here and discuss with your .NET Foundation Contact.

There are other blockchain projects such as Hyperledger under the Linux Foundation but very few are open to the extent that they encourage integration and contribution of other blockchain technologies. For example, Catalyst has contributions from other blockchain projects including Nethermind’s EVM work from Ethereum and the .NET version of IPFS.

We would particularly welcome contributions in two areas.

Firstly, in consensus. We have some research papers and other materials around a new public consensus mechanism that’s still to be developed and so this would be an ideal project for the community to work on with the current contributors.

Secondly, distributed compute which is an extension to the KVM runtime work to allow more complex .NET Core based logic to be called and executed inside containers using promises.

There are also sponsored hackathon projects running in areas such as developing a Web Assembly compiler for the project.