Dingo: a Production-Grade Block Producer in Go by Blink Labs
Blink Labs is requesting 6,900,000 ADA from the Cardano Treasury to fund twelve months of full-time engineering on Dingo, our Go Cardano node. Dingo is a work in progress, and that's the whole point of this proposal. But it's a substantial one: 1,290+ non-dependency PRs merged in the past year, Plutus V1/V2/V3 at 100% conformance, 314 passing conformance tests, VRF/KES crypto, ChainSync, mempool, and governance transaction support. This funding gets Dingo the rest of the way to mainnet block-production readiness: Ouroboros Praos consensus completion, Dijkstra hard fork support, CIP-0164 Linear Leios built alongside IO Engineering, a proper security audit, and the operational hardening that makes a node reliable at scale.
Reasoning
Written after the vote was cast
What this asks for, and from whom
Blink Labs asked for 6,900,000 ADA for Dingo, a production-grade Cardano block producer written in Go.
What would have to be true for this to be a good use of treasury funds
Client diversity is real decentralization work. A chain with one node implementation has a single point of failure no amount of stake distribution fixes. Go is also a language a large pool of infrastructure engineers already know, which widens who can contribute.
What specifically concerns me
Alternative node implementations have to actually reach production and get run by real operators. A second client that nobody deploys is a research project with extra steps.
What I am asking of the proposer if this passes
It was enacted. Report block production on mainnet and how many SPOs are running it. Adoption by operators is the only proof that client diversity moved from theory to fact.