Grant: BlockAssist on Harmony

Web3 Bounties
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Overview

BlockAssist is an expanding set of blockchain monitoring, notification, and accounting services designed to help users track their assets and maintain clear records of cryptocurrency transactions. BlockAssist is currently operating in private beta on Ethereum with a management interface built in Slack and a web/SMS interface in development.

Problem

With the rapidly-expanding world of DeFi, NFTs, novel chains, interchain and layer two solutions, tracking and accounting transactions across a range of addresses and currencies has become very difficult. Development and adoption of these new technologies require users to transact quickly and experiment with an array of protocolos. We may aspire to pull up a spreadsheet and write an entry for each transaction that is made, but the reality is these details often fall behind. This lack of simple accounting makes for difficult accounting when taxes are due or in other instances where users require accurate records.

Our Solution

We’ve designed BlockAssist to be the friendly accountant watching over our shoulder and keeping good records. BlockAssist tracks your wallet addresses looking for new transactions to or from your accounts. Notifications can be sent via SMS, Signal, or Slack. We provide a quick and simple interface for annotating details of the transaction.

BlockAssist learns to auto-categorize your transactions based on your history so you don’t have to. It identifies common transactions that can be auto-categorized without needing user input.

Current Features

  • Monitoring of Ethereum and Polygon transactions
  • Users able to identify and monitor an unlimited number of addresses
  • Notifications and interfacing through Slack
  • Automatic categorization of publicly-known (CEX, DEX, etc) counterparties
  • Automated tracking of privately-entered counterparties
  • Filtering for common zero-value transactions (e.g. token approvals)
  • Filtering for spam/scam tokens

Pipeline

  • Q1 2022

    • Support for Harmony and BSC
    • Notifications by SMS and Signal
    • Extended DeFi transaction deciphering

  • Q2 2022

    • Bitcoin support
    • Notifications and interfacing with Telegram and Discord
    • Integration with popular crypto tax/accounting tools

Long-Term Vision

Beyond our initial accounting and monitoring product, we envision growing into a suite of tools to help crypto enthusiasts and dApp users streamline their workflow and focus on what matters. These tools include:

  • Robust and flexible all-in-one wallet with built-in accounting tools
  • Personal “bookmarking” of commonly-made transactions for easy access and repetition
  • Automated storing/broadcasting of transactions based on conditions such as gas cost
  • Token distribution tools
  • Natural language transaction builder (e.g. “Send 359 ONE to Peter”)

Proposal

We are requesting a $50k grant to implement BlockAssist on Harmony, advance our road map, and work with the Harmony team to co-design features which will provide the most value to the Harmony ecosystem.

This funding will be sufficient to bring us through our Q1 2022 development goals.

Team

Si Thacker - Founder, CEO

Si Thacker has been a crypto enthusiast and investor since 2013. He is an LP with Cluster Capital (investors in Harmony) where he has built chain analysis and accounting tools to assist a community of over 150 active investors.

Brian Vogelgesang - Founder, CTO

Brian Vogelgesang loves programming. He’s been programming in the professional world for 15-years and tinkering since he was a kid. Brian specializes in server-side development, dev-ops and automation, but wears many hats when it comes to full-stack development. He has been in the crypto space since 2015 and developing with Web3 since 2019.

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The Harmony community has been calling out for a tax / accounting tool. The monitoring and natural language portion is quite a bonus. We look forward to building this out as a bounty with your team.

Can we describe the Q1 deliverables in more detail? If we can pull in the integration of tax and accounting tools, it would be rewarding to Harmony community on the stateside before mid April’s tax day.

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Hi @Jacksteroo ,

Our flagship service is monitoring. We want to help users avoid a hellish experience at the end of the year when they have to pour over hundreds of cryptic transactions and try to remember what they were doing. By notifying the user through their preferred channel each time a new transaction is detected, prompting the user to take care of the accounting then and there, and making the process simple and painless, we can avoid later challenges.

In Q1 we will be prioritizing integrating Harmony into our monitoring solution (currently running on Slack monitoring Ethereum), and adding a simple mobile-optimized web accounting interface with notifications through SMS and Signal.

For an example, this is how our Slack interface currently presents when it detects a transaction:

blockassist_slack
blockassist_slack930×668 104 KB

Once we have integrated Harmony and fleshed out our core monitoring service, we can begin to build tools for automated transaction parsing of specific dApps/protocols (e.g. DEXs) on Harmony. It is difficult at this point to say how many we can easily support in an automated way, as this requires specific tooling for each, but we will work with the Harmony team and community to determine which to prioritize. For those that we cannot support automatically, we will have an interface for users to categorize the transaction components manually.

It’s important to note that there is no magic bullet for tax accounting. With so many dApps and complex transactions with multiple inputs and outputs, the user will always be required to provide some input. Our tool allows them to keep on top of that input. For historical transactions (including those looking at 2021 tax accounting), we can provide an interface, counterparty identification, some deciphering, and transaction exports for use in crypto tax software such as TokenTax, but the power user will of course still need to label and categorize certain transactions.

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Approved for a Bounty grant of $50K! :tada: Looking forward to the initiative built out on Harmony with the milestones above.

Meanwhile, to prepare receiving funds, email your identification documents to kyc@harmony.one and create a Gnosis Safe MultiSig wallet at https://multisig.harmony.one and using instructions below
:arrow_right: Setup Gnosis Safe with MetaMask & 1Wallet

Checkout the Funding FAQ for further info at Harmony Funding FAQ

We’d love :blue_heart: to see weekly updates on this channel to keep the community posted on this proposal’s progress!

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Thank you. Our development has begun, KYC is submitted, and we have set up our multisig for the first installment of $25k. Multisig address: 0xEA200c4350Ab7203dF45cb876e4CeC9382CAabBB
@lij

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the first installment has been funded: Harmony Blockchain Explorer

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Thank you @lij and Harmony!

We are making great progress on integration of Harmony into our existing Slack interface while simultaneously building out our mobile-first web and SMS interface. We expect to make the Slack interface available to our private testing group in the next week or two. For any Harmony community members who wish to be a part of this beta process and integrate our app into your Slack, please email us at hello@blockassist.io

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Wen blockassist!!!

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Hi @BlockAssist,

Looking forward to hearing more on this. Can you post most recent progress for the community.

Thank You

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We are pleased to announce the launch of our BlockAssist Harmony service with a new web/mobile interface! Users are invited to sign up at http://app.blockassist.io.

You can view a demo of BlockAssist here: BlockAssist - August 2022 Demo - YouTube

BlockAssist now tracks and notifies you for transactions to or from any of your addresses on Harmony or Ethereum, and can notify you by SMS or email to encourage you to easily maintain your transaction accounting as you go.

We learn from your transaction comments and categorizations to help predict and auto-categorize future transactions, so the more you use BlockAssist, the less there is to do. At the end of the year, or whenever you need, you can easily export a CSV with all your transaction data. In the coming months we will be working with popular tax accounting tools to export tailored CSV’s for their clients needs.

Our team recognizes that privacy is a high priority for many people in the crypto space. While your data is stored securely, we still encourage users to be thoughtful when storing or transmitting any identifying blockchain data. For instance, we recommend not using full names of counterparties in association with addresses, without permission of that counterparty. Consider using “John” or “John S” instead of “John Smith”.

Thanks for using BlockAssist! We look forward to hearing your feedback.

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Our GitHub repos are:

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BlockAssist is also still available for teams working within Slack who prefer to keep their accounting in one place. Please message us if you’re interested in using this service.

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The next features and additions in our roadmap are:

  • Historical transaction support

  • Signal Messenger notification support

  • Popular crypto tax software export/integration

  • Extensive automatic categorizations for popular Harmony dApps

  • Aggregate wallet accounting and analytics

  • Harmony Bridge support (when available)

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2nd installment Fully Funded: 0x50547a7e6eb1043d6909611b9027a666aad451a9d9b542a8d5b5bdff02af399c