To reach the milestones we plan to parallelize the research and implementation phase to already benefit from first findings in the implementation that reflect back to the research. As common in exploratory research we will work with an hypothesis driven approach to quickly gain quantifiable results.

We have already done extensive knowledge gathering, information aggregation and laid out the technical basis for prototypes. Following our philosophy of transparency we have shared the most relevant resources online under ephema.io. Furthermore we built-up the relationships with the most knowledgeable researchers and developers in the space. We have further defined the necessary research hypothesis that we aim to verify or falsify. This will be a continued process as we work in an adaptive approach given the fast-paced nature of the field and the high level of uncertainty.

The defined research hypothesis will be the foundation for the data dashboard of milestone 1. Defining the key elements of the data dashboard will be the responsibility of the research lead, as it will be the foundation for the future research and implementations. 

The prototype for the blob merging is currently in development. We have one research scientist giving input on the theoretical side and a software engineer as well as a protocol engineer are working on the implementation. 

The gas price futures marketplace is the main responsibility of the second protocol engineer together with a part-time research advisor. To ensure a timely delivery the team will receive support from the other protocol engineer after the finalization of the first version of the blob merging protocol as well as from the research lead.

The blog post / whitepaper on general findings, blobspace market predictions and price discovery will be a joint effort by the research team under the guidance of the research lead. It will include the findings from the different research areas as well as the implementations of the two prototypes and their ongoing development.

For software development, we will start with a minimum viable product (MVP), building a prototype and then continuously expanding on it. Our objective is learning as much as possible in as little time as possible about the problem and its implementation (lean method). The team has years of experience working with this process and it has proven to be most productive. For task management, the team will work with the agile methodology using Notion and GitHub as the main tools to avoid further system costs. 

To ensure a strong focus on the project goals we have set-up internally a bi-weekly review meeting in which progress towards the addressed project goals is aligned and potential hurdles and bottlenecks are addressed in advance. Further, the bi-weekly meeting includes a team retrospective discussing the highlights and lowlights of the last two weeks. This ensures that we continuously optimize the working processes within the team. Overall, this approach has been proven successful for the team in the past to successfully complete larger and complex development projects.