Microgrant proposal: Namada MASP Indexer Observatory

Fast Shielded Microgrants
1

**Live preview:** https://amada-masp-indexer-observatory.vercel.app/

## Why?

Namada light and mobile wallets sync shielded state through public **MASP indexers**:

namadac shielded-sync --with-indexer

```

When an indexer is offline, lagging, or silently stale, users and wallet developers cannot tell whether the fault is the network tip or the indexer tip.

Generic uptime tools only ask “is the host up?” They miss the metric that matters for shielded sync: **is the indexer tip current relative to live RPC?**

In **June 2026**, a ~$600K shielded-pool drain went largely unnoticed for a period because a **stale MASP indexer** kept showing balances that live RPC reported as zero. That is exactly the failure mode this monitor surfaces on every poll.

There is no neutral, public dashboard today that continuously measures MASP-indexer **freshness** across the community registry.

-–

## Live prototype (already running)

Against the full Luminara community registry (~27 MASP indexers), a typical poll shows only a handful reachable — and those that answer can still sit **≥100k blocks** behind the live RPC tip. Generic uptime tools would call those hosts “up.” This monitor flags them as **dangerously stale**.

Status model (keeps stale ≠ offline):

| Status | Meaning |

|--------|---------|

| green | Reachable, ≤50 blocks behind tip, under 3s |

| yellow | Reachable but stale or slow (including huge lag — still answering) |

| red | Unreachable / no height |

All probes are privacy-safe: public `GET /api/v1/height` + RPC `/status` only. **No keys, addresses, or wallet data.**

-–

## How much?

| Item | USD |

|------|-----|

| Milestone 1 — production engineering + deploy | 800 |

| Milestone 1 — domain + VPS hosting (12 months) | 200 |

| Milestone 2 — detail pages, alerting, operator tooling, upstream | 1,000 |

| **Total** | **2,000** |

- **Effort:** ~50 hours over ~3 weeks

- **Blended rate:** ~$36/hr = **$1,800** engineering

- **Infrastructure:** domain + VPS, 12 months = **$200**

- Final NAM / USDC amount set to the live rate at approval

-–

## What?

A neutral, always-on health dashboard + public JSON API for the public Namada MASP indexers listed in the community registry.

Tracks:

- Reachability of `GET /api/v1/height`

- Latency

- Height and **lag vs multi-source RPC tip** (freshness)

- Session trends now; durable multi-day history in M1

- Public JSON API + embeddable status badge

-–

## Milestones

### Milestone 1 — Production launch — Week 1 — $1,000

*(prepaid at kickoff; covers domain + 12-month hosting + core build)*

- Public MIT GitHub repo (README, methodology, contribution guide)

- Own domain + HTTPS + always-on VPS

- Production dashboard: reachability, height, lag vs RPC tip, latency, trends

- Multi-source RPC reference tip + fleet-consensus fallback

- Durable history → real 24h / 7d freshness %

- Public JSON API + Namada forum launch thread

**Acceptance:** live public URL; MIT repo; API returning real indexer data; continuous history recording.

### Milestone 2 — Durability, alerting & upstream — Weeks 2–3 — $1,000

*(on delivery)*

- Per-indexer detail pages + 24h / 7d / 30d charts

- Staleness growth tracker (lag over time)

- Opt-in alerting (Telegram / Discord / webhook) for red / stale indexers

- Operator tooling (“add / verify your MASP indexer”)

- Embeddable status badge

- At least 1 upstream PR / registry contribution

- Public incident log + handover runbook

**Acceptance:** detail pages + charts live; alerting demonstrable; ≥1 upstream PR; handover published.

Total: ~3 weeks of work, completed within one month of funding.

-–

## Outcomes

- Live, public, MIT-licensed monitor at its own domain for the community MASP indexer fleet

- First tool focused on **shielded-sync freshness** (indexer tip vs RPC tip)

- Public JSON API for wallet teams and operators

- Durable history, alerting, operator self-service, upstream contribution + handover

-–

## Why me?

Independent full-stack engineer focused on privacy-tech infrastructure (Node.js, HTTP/TLS probes, data dashboards). The working prototype linked above already probes the full community registry and demonstrates the freshness metric end-to-end. Running cost is a single small VPS + domain; everything ships MIT-licensed for community handover.

Happy to take feedback here — especially from wallet / indexer operators on thresholds, registry coverage, and alerting priorities.

2

Hey panagot, while I applaud any user initiatives on Namada, this proposal is not well aligned with current state of project including:

  • you are (if I understand you correctly), asking for usdc when the PGF treasury does not have any usdc and when nam is practically not tradeable / worthless (a few hundred usdc in liquidity pools)
  • this sort of monitoring while useful, is the type of thing community has been providing for free for a long time. If anyone should be compensated for such undertakings, it should be those community members first imo
  • see my other post here for current state of project, it is unrealistic to get compensation atm
  • if project was well and thriving, developed and had a meaningful treasury, I don’t think this proposal would be an unreasonable ask, but that is not the case currently
  • let me also note for completeness that Luminara has been disbanded and I don’t believe their community infra registry is being maintained
3

I think your app is useful but mainly as a replacement for the Luminara registry. I don’t think it warrants compensation atm given the factors mentioned above.