RE: PROPOSAL #164 - Hive Side Chain (HSC) Development Funding. Creating A Ethereum Virtual Machine Side Chain Enabling Decentralized Industry Standard Smart Contract Functionality on HIVE, Utilizing HIVE as the Gas / Base Token.

I've not got a working code-base yet sadly. Was doing most of the initial research and tinkering on a custom "Geth" version. Will work on getting a repository online for this before the end of the weekend.
By native gateways do you mean the ERC-20 <-> BEP2 bridging that's been worked out for it? Was certainly something that I came across in research and bookmarked but haven't fully looked into how it all works. It would be silly not to have something like this eh?
Started using GOlang although ideally something like C++ would be used down the road. Have looked briefly into NodeJS implementations of Ethereum but given Javascript number handling is basically aids likely going to shy away from that side of things..
Current project status: Exploring multiple implementations of the Ethereum protocol on a handful of languages in comparison and also as exploratory research. Awaiting bobinson to get back to me to look at an example of an already EVM stack running on graphene. Had a number of different node types built and running locally trying to find optimal block times.
The current funding will be going towards compensating developers putting active hours into the project development. Total cost to get the side chain running should not exceed the value of the proposal. As for cost of hardware to run nodes initially it should be low, although might become larger assuming developers use it like a DB as seems to be the case with ETH.
Absolute earliest I'd dare speculate the beginning of alpha testing occurring is a month and a half or two months from now. Might have something working earlier than that, likely will be running testnets during developing within the next 2-3 weeks.

"I'm already reading code all day man"

Bah, you said it! Needs more pictures and TL:DR's.. Noted!

Thank you for the questions. I know you're a busy man but if once I get a repository up and running here you want to hop in and throw some code around would certainly be grateful. More the merrier and in a day or so I'll have a better overview of who all is interested in giving the project development a hand then we can start attacking this thing to get it running and ready for testing.