Nirvana has a grand plan with Stellar, we would like to do it in phases: 

1) community activation: provide a single endpoint to an ecosystem partner in the stellar foundation pipeline (ie Zettablock) 

2) then we'd like to apply for the community award, in which we develop a product directly with the Stellar Foundation team for "1 click node" deployment on our cloud. 

3) finally, for the infrastructure ongoing grant - we'd like to do a global roll out of RPC nodes in multiple locations with auto-sizing and auto-routing features to compliment your existing public rpc infrastructure

Nirvana would like to build a public RPC endpoint for use for key infrastructure players in the Stellar ecosystem like Zettablock. We are asking for this activation award to subsidize the first POC node with Soroban support on our proprietary cloud and give the endpoint to Zettablock for testing. 

Please refer to the link in our project URL - in which we discuss in depth the product, what it solves, how its different, who our key audience is, and what the benefits are. Here it is as well: https://stellarnirvana.super.site/ 

The main point is, Nirvana is different in almost every component when compared to traditional RPC providers, which are built on top of 3rd party providers like AWS, Cloudflare, VMWare, and Datadog.

Nirvana is not reliant on ‘big cloud’ - in fact, we have built our own proprietary cloud from the ground up, which can be reviewed here: https://docs.nirvanalabs.io/docs/introduction-to-nirvana-cloud

This node will be run on our proprietary cloud, weaning Stellar off the reliance on big cloud like AWS and GCP. Adding decentralization and redundancy to your chain and network. 

Deliverable One: 

- Nirvana will build and prepare a dedicated endpoint in a USA region for a Stellar RPC Node 
- Nirvana will enable the endpoint and open it up for public testing, primarily to pass to Zettablock for their testing 

- Zettablock can confirm independently to Stellar Foundation the performance and acceptance of the endpoint 

- The PoC will be delivering the endpoint to Stellar’s ecosystem partner Zettablock for testing and confirmation of the robustness, cost effectiveness, and performance of the node — to be referred back to the Stellar ecosystem team. 

Timeline: 

We expect the timeline to be 3-6 weeks from confirmation of the grant through to delivery and testing and confirmation. 

Budget: 

We would be asking for $36k worth of XLM which will cover the build out and 1 year cost to run the node for Zettablock. 

Key Current Employees: 

• Crypto Natives from BitGo - Dan Burke - CEO 
• Blockchain Engineers from Aegis Studios - Devin Bandara - CTO 
• Blockchain and Backend Engineer from Aegis Studios - Vin Patel - Lead Backend Engineer
• Cloud and data center specialists from AWS - Joe Mclaughlin - Senior Cloud Architect
• Networking specialists from ATT - Graham Laye - Senior Solutions Architect 
• Hardware from Apple/Google, ex-Founder with exit ($25M raised) - Jeff Wehner - COO 
• Front End Engineers from Yahoo - Liang Huang - Engineer