The “Times” just published an article about RugDoc.io and provided a more in depth view of the golden standard amongst DeFi KYC’s, for those who are interested.
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so what’s going on with this grant? it’s huge opportunity for harmony community
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We are patiently waiting for any question from The Harmonauts! In the mean time our platform is getting increasingly more mainstream recognition.
In this article published today by Yahoo Finance, you may find some quotes straight from The Rug Doctor.
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I hope Harmony core team will fund this instead of blue apes and low TVL DeFi(Hermes). We really need this to add security in our DeFi protocols and to attract more users in our network.
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That’s very kind of you to say Nathan! We (and with that I mean every single one of us on the team) really strive for more DeFi safety. We are big fans of Harmony as you might have read in the proposal.
Can I perhaps ask you a question, as I have noticed that you are quite new on the forum? What is that you are looking for in (more) security in the DeFi protocols of Harmony? Would love to hear this from your perspective.
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My conviction to this ecosystem will soar high if most, if not all, of DeFi here in harmony will be monitored and reviewed by rugdoc. I also love your emergency withdraw tool.
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Thanks again @NathanFarms for the kind words! I’ll make sure to pass that on to the responsible people who are working on that tool.
Well your conviction is what brought us here! We really hope our proposal is what you would expect from a proper Harmony partner. We don’t see this as a one off but as a partnership that lasts in perpetuity!
For those who are interested in reading our thoughts on the report stating that investors have lost over $1.22 billion to hackers in the first three months of the year (nearly eight times more than the $154 million lost in the first quarter of 2021) please read this fresh publication on Yahoo Finance, where our CEO was asked to comment on the security deficit in DeFi.
This might give a better understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish together with Team Harmony in a future partnership.
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We are just waiting for the Harmony team to review and let us know what they are looking for in a collaboration!
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Also important to note, we would like to hear from you all, which elements of our proposal sounds the most interesting to you as a Harmony community member.
Perhaps we can further elaborate here on the forum on an element you might want to know more about 
No matter what happens, we keep building up our profile and become more mainstream. Our goal is to make DeFi safer for people who have no clue what to expect in Crypto.
We want to gap that bridge and introduce them to Harmony as a safe partner. That’s why we work hard and get mainstream media recognition. Read the latest article on RugDoc here:
I will preface this saying that rugdoc does have reputation in crypto, is often used as first stop to check on new projects and is even a way to find and advertise on new upcoming projects. That said, I have a lot of umbrage with this:
- Being doxxed to Harmony means nothing as far as user’s safety goes. It is only used for tax purposes by Harmony (as admitted by them). Showing your face on video call also means nothing. Projects in both categories have shown to rug fervently just like anon teams. Stephan from Nyan has happily sung songs for us on YouTube before running away to mountains of Croatia. Xenon was KYC’ed with Harmony and rugged two days ago.
This is even beside the point that genuine anon teams delivered products and solutions despite being anon, so all in all KYC don’t mean much (to me). What does raise a red flag that you promote KYC as a safety instrument while not willing to be KYC’ed yourself. Hypocrisy.
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I have read through the proposal incl. google docs and I do not see anything special that would warrant $3M price tag. Educational videos are mandate for dozens of DAO’s already. Rugdoc should be motivated by profits and core business to expand to Harmony on its own already. Which it already did, I can find Harmony projects reviewed by Rugdoc, like for example Holygrail, which received “some risk” rating and (semi) rugged. Launching vaults… we already have vaults with Farmers only and even beefy. Other than that, it’s plenty of fluff and unquantifiable deliverables. Example: work with Harmony to bring awareness to scams. Plus some of those deliverables, beside that fact that they are just what rugdoc is doing. Example: Provide consultation, provide KYC. So in this instance, in essence you are asking Harmony to pay you money for partnership so that you can charge more money to the community. Duh
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This will be somewhat petty but I want to point it out: Rugdoc has indeed started as community project, I was there when it was almost a golden standard during defi summer. You have since turned into for-profit business as evidenced by your cash hungry proposal. You are charging money for your services (which is only the right thing to do), there is however still “donate” button on your website. It just doesn’t vibe well with me.
All in all, my opinion is that Rugdoc should not be given $3M partnership grant (that’s 1% of TOTAL grant allocation), it’s definitely not worth it. I am sure they have knowledgeable members among their team, their brand however is diminishing. They could apply for $50k launch grant that would be more suitable.
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Thanks for your comments.
- As to your first point regarding being doxxed, you’ll see that first, RugDoc and Paladin have been around for far longer than a year at this point, continuing to provide our core services and expand on new ones as community needs develop. We cant rug as we dont have a token and cant steal anyone’s funds. You’ll actually see as written about in a recent VICE article on me (to which this journalist as well as many other journalists, organizations, and people who hear me talk at crypto conferences clearly know my full and valid identity) we regularly save user funds behind the scenes and repeatedly return them to projects or help projects patch their problems before an exploit can ever occur. If we were going to steal funds, we have had countless opportunity to over the years and have not. Instead, we continuously work for the overall community good and making DeFi safer.
Regarding making my identity easy to find publicly, my identity as explained above isnt hidden, but Im not keen to make it easily known given that quite a bit of the activities we do in DeFi are preventing bad actors from capitalizing easily. I dont particularly want every hacker we’ve stopped quickly finding my name and location. I doubt you would either in my position.
- This proposal is clearly broken down in several segments to pick and choose from. The largest component is hosting a multi day conference and hackathon. Removing this portion would drop the price tag substantially and there are several options to whittle down services further as desired by Harmony or to work with Harmony to create the best services for them. Ill also add that we started working with Harmony on this proposal approximately 6 months ago. We clearly havent been funded by them, so what we should or should not receive is a bit of a moot point, at least thats my operating assumption, particularly given current market conditions.
Our vaults proposal is also substantially novel in that it is a true multichain one click system as outlined. We envision and are actively working on a project which will allow users in one click to exchange and bridge as needed any asset they hold into any whitelisted vault of their choosing. For example, someone who holds AVAX would in one click be able to choose a vault on Harmony with specific compliance parameters met on our site, convert the AVAX, bridge it to Harmony, convert it to ONE, and then stake it on the pool of the user’s choosing. That user would then be able to when finished remove their stake and receive their funds back in the form of any asset on any supported EVM chain of their choosing. We are already actively developing this. It’s going to cost far more than $50,000 to develop and launch.
- All of our user facing products are free, as they will always be as we are a community project and will always be one first and foremost. That said, our team is large and highly skilled. We charge for specific services because we are a team of approximately 30 technical employees and that entails high overheads to keep our community products free and available to anyone. As for the donate button, you’ll find we’ve only ever amassed a grand total of $1500 in the time we’ve existed which is enough to pay perhaps two moderators for a month. This is why we abandoned our donation model and started to provide more technical services for a fee to support our community coverage- donations were never going to be able to adequately cover our costs and we wanted to be sure we could continue to expand our team and services to meet the needs of DeFi as it changes and grows. That said, yes, at this point we should remove what is essentially a useless “Donate” button. Its leftover from our early days and clearly no one uses it (which is fine as we’ve grown to accommodate our needs through alternatives).
While Im obviously partial to the company and community we have built at both RugDoc and Paladin, I feel instead of diminishing we have only been growing in our coverage, skill, and notoriety since our inception. But Im always happy to hear how we can serve the community better and welcome any criticism and comments on what is needed. I host a weekly segment on staying safe in DeFi with Bancor every Monday at 12pm PST, and Im happy to chat directly with you, or anyone in the community, then as its an open forum discussion I genuinely enjoy having with anyone who wants to drop in.
We can obviously agree to disagree on some points so I don’t want to “argue” for the sake of arguing. I’ll just point out:
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I don’t have doubts in your case that you would rug, this point wasn’t an accusation. Nor do I care about or doubt validity of your identity. This is not the point. It’s that you (your team) is not willing -for valid reasons- to KYC while you want to KYC other projects. Side note: I wish Harmony made it clear too, what the KYC is for and how it’s used. And if Rugdoc or another auditor does KYC it should be clear how it is to be handled in event of malicious activity by KYC’ed party.
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With a product that you want to launch, like vault — IF it was to be approved, why not apply for launch grant? This is more fitting as I said. As for the cost, Foxswap, local protocol which has vaults already and they only got 50k (I think they got just recently paid 10k of it), and they also delivered FAR more than just vaults (DEX and escrow, honestly they delivered more products that others are asking for funds separately). Beefy, which is more in position like yours expanding TO Harmony did that without any grants. If you can’t do it without more grant funding, idk what to tell you… change business model.
In general, I am not saying that Rugdoc should not be expanding to Harmony or that it is unwelcome. I think it’s (by far) not worth $3M.
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I like your side note on #1 
which is pretty similar to what I suggested to Harmony team recently. Here is the link: Project KYC with Harmony for funding proposal/application
Hi 
@Sbae (in my mind I see you sprinkling salt 
due to your name) thank you for restarting the conversation and I agree, let’s not argue for the sake of arguing but focus on what can be better.
@TheRugDoc if I may…
A part of our core team is definitely willing to doxx with Harmony, but not to the wider community. We don’t even know who some people are among ourselves, just that they do great work and have proven to do so on a daily basis (quick shout-out to those who are reading along!). It definitely helps them feeling more comfortable doing their job without facing the danger of becoming target of hackers and other malicious actors in our crypto space. I see from your comment 
you understand that sentiment very well.
KYC
Our KYC process is something I’m very proud of personally. If you have more questions about that please ask, or read up here:
Well, fun fact we initially approached team Harmony for that grant, but as we told our story, it was suggested by Team Harmony to apply for a partnership grant instead, hearing all our endeavors on DeFi safety.
As we want to be fully transparent, we carefully crafted a modular partnership plan to test with the Harmony community. Maybe not everything adds value, but hopefully some of our modules do! I appreciate all your feedback and if we can do better, do let us know.