🌍 BEHIND THE SCENES
EarthFund platform update 07/18
Learn more about everything we’ve done in the last seven days, from technical Web3.0 development to DAO votes to more work on fixing crypto’s UX problems.
👋 We’re EarthFund, the decentralized platform using blockchain, DAOs, and crypto to give you more of a voice in the shape of tomorrow.
This is post #3 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.
Getting ready to accept donations in 30+ ERC-20 tokens
Building on last week’s progress, our development team spent the last week getting the donation and grant router ready for deployment.
That has meant making some changes to the Solidity contract based on the advice of the security auditors. (No concerns were found in the contract, just a few minor tweaks to make sure it’s as secure as possible. We’ll be sending it back to the auditor this week for further review and will amend it as necessary.)
In other news, the deployment scripts have been completed in preparation for the Mainnet launch. 🙌
You can use your voice to vote
The Snapshot integration has been fully completed. That means that you can now vote on every proposal made on the Mental Health and Wellbeing cause (if you have the NeverAlone tokens).
And because our custom comment functionality was launched last week too, it also means that when you vote on any proposal through the EarthFund platform, you can add comments and share your thoughts.
This is huge. Here’s what we said last week on why that’s so important 👇
This is a big feature. Voting yes/no on projects doesn’t allow for nuance or improvement.
Projects rejected because they don’t quite make the cut are treated the same as scam projects or projects with no merit.
To build an ecosystem that places a premium on quality proposals, we’ve built a custom comment functionality on the EarthFund platform that lets you add a comment or rationale every time you vote.
(Note: comments aren’t a built-in function within Snapshot, so we’ve developed a custom solution. Another first for a DAO platform. 🙌)
Improved Snapshot proposals
Snapshot is great. It allows for gasless voting and decentralized governance without a ton of hassle.
However, when you look at most Snapshot proposals, they’re all the same.
Very little formatting. Hard to read. No images.
But we wanted every EarthFund proposal to be engaging. We wanted every project that needs funding to be able to submit images of their work, infographics, etc…
And, of course, we wanted them to be readable.
That’s why we build a Snapshot integration that pulls all of your formatting from the EarthFund site directly into Snapshot as Markdown language and adds your images directly to the proposal.
That way, even if you review proposals on Snapshot, you’re still getting the complete experience.
Want to see the difference it makes?
Check out this proposal from Aave. Then check out this proposal from EarthFund.
Just another way we’re focusing on improving UX everywhere to make Web3.0 more accessible.
This week: Zodiac + Reality implementation
ELI5: This whole section is a bit technical, so here’s a quick breakdown courtesy of our lead dev, Michael Fellows:
We need to use a decentralized source of truth to move off-chain votes on chain.
Why?
We need the data from Snapshot (gasless, but off-chain) to be moved on-chain so that we can verify that the funding was executed. This is where Zodiac and Reality.eth come in.
This week, we’re starting work on implementing Zodiac and Reality.eth.
Once a proposal has been voted on, a transaction will be submitted to the Ethereum Network. Once it’s on the Ethereum Network, then it’s considered on-chain.
The movement of a transaction from off-chain to on-chain isn’t as straightforward as you might think. In EarthFund’s first implementation, we will be using a Reality.eth Oracle, allowing the platform to Move the vote’s outcome to the blockchain.
Once on-chain, the vote can be actioned on-chain as well. The Oracle service allows the community to confirm the outcome collectively to avoid centralization. As soon as it’s confirmed, the funds are paid out to the project and the community is rewarded.
This week: implementing transaction calculations
In order to automatically send out grants to projects when the votes have passed, we need to make sure the platform calculates transactions correctly.
However, it’s a lot more complicated than doing a simple transfer. (For starters, a simple “if yes then transfer funds” would be extremely vulnerable to attacks and ignores the complexity of things like a funding queue.)
Instead, the grant transaction will be submitted (as a result/transaction) to the bespoke infrastructure behind EarthFund that will govern and manage the transfer out of the treasury.
This includes functions such as generating an on-chain queue system that makes sure every proposal is funded in the order that they are approved by a community vote.
As a result, the funding cannot be manipulated and is completely visible and transparent to the world.
(On a more technical level, we’ve also had to write some hashing to ensure the integrity of the transaction along the way. All of this will happen automatically thanks to the EarthFund platform.)
Building the EarthFund Discord bot 🤖
For launch, we used the Collab.land bot to scan your wallet for NeverAlone tokens and add you to the exclusive Discord community. This keeps the community free from scammers, spammers and wen lambo-ers.
We think these communities are going to become the heart of the EarthFund platform. While you review projects and vote on the platform, having a safe space to chat informally and bond as a community (like our EarthFund Telegram channel) is crucial for having the kind of conversations that lead to a group of people that can really change the world.
The only problem was: Collab.land only allowed you to be added to the community for one token. And as EarthFund grows, we want to add hundreds of causes to the platform, each with its own token. So there’s an obvious problem there.
So, our in-house team has started building our own custom Discord bot.
The EarthFund bot is currently in development and testing, but it will work like this:
Step 1: Join the EarthFund Discord channel
Step 2: Click an emoji on the welcome message
Step 3: Connect your EarthFund profile with your Discord profile
Step 4: You’ll be automatically added to every Discord community related to the governance tokens in your wallet.
💡 If you get more tokens or join another cause, the bot will add you to those automatically. You don’t have to do a thing. Likewise, if you leave a cause, the bot will automatically remove you from the channel.
We’re super excited by this. It’s another way we’re making the whole experience ready for mass adoption.
Here’s a sneak peek at the onboarding experience 👇
Adding contributors to proposals
Contributors aren’t just a great way for proposals to add more weight and trust (by adding teammates, etc…), they’re also a great way to grow the platform’s users.
Every time a contributor from outside EarthFund joins the project, they need to set up an EarthFund profile.
So, of course, we made sure the onboarding was super smooth and intuitive.
Continuing work on more automation and user journeys
Our in-house product team also continued work on the improvements we outlined last week. (Like automated DAO setup, token swap UI, etc…)
You can read more about that here.
Two votes went live last week! 🙌
Vote 1: Funding development of PIWI, the AI chatbot to prevent suicide
The Mental Health and Wellbeing cause launched its first vote to fund further development of PIWI, a mental health chatbot that has already helped almost 100,000 people struggling with their mental health.
- A sample of 3,522 people were experiencing suicidal thoughts in their conversations with Piwi and were de-escalated through the help of on-call crisis counselors.
- 95% of those in need reduced their symptoms of anxiety and depression, equivalent to outcomes of 1 to 15 therapy sessions.
- 22% of people reported a 50% reduction in depression symptoms,
- 24% reported a 50% reduction in anxiety symptoms.
(Once development is finished, the project will be open-sourced too, to help people all around the world.)
Plus, the community has been commenting on the proposal as they vote, leaving comments like:
As somebody who works in the Psychology industry, I have seen the importance of AI chatbots for individuals experiencing low mood and Depression. It’s a life-changing, world-changing development, and with technology progressing now more than ever, a pandemic limiting social contact, and the popular use of social media, AI chatbots will be the next big thing for the new generation. I have also worked in a team where an AI chatbot was developed to reduce loneliness, and it truly helped hundreds.
You can see the proposal, vote, and check out the comments here.
Vote 2: Add Dr. Lucy Tweed’s Carbon Removal DAO to the EarthFund platform
Dr. Lucy Tweed has been working with EarthFund to shape the platform from the beginning. (Providing us with insight into what features activists, scientists, and cause founders would find useful and helping us raise awareness in the climate space.)
And now, she wants to launch her cause on the platform. 🙌
Here’s a little more information on her cause 👇
Dr. Lucy Tweed, an associate researcher with ties to Columbia University and Cambridge University, wants to launch a cause that seeks to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere and reverse the effects of climate change.
More specifically, Dr. Tweed wants to launch a cause that funds carbon removal projects run by (or with direct involvement of) communities that rebalance the carbon cycle by:
- Protecting existing carbon-rich ecosystems
- Restoring ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, mangroves, and sea-grass beds
- Regenerating soils through regenerative agriculture
- Piloting new approaches to carbon removal such as biochar and enhanced weathering
The Carbon Removal cause’s mission is to support communities around the world to reclaim the sovereignty of their land by funding nature-based carbon removal projects that put local livelihoods and environmental justice front and center.
For more information, you can read the Carbon Removal DAO investment deck.
More rollout with Chopra Foundation
Our team had another weekly meeting with the Chopra Foundation to get together on some initiatives and start organizing a regular co-hosted Twitter space.
We also discussed coordinating events and meetings at EthCC this week, where the Chopra team and Adam, our co-founder, will be meeting up and spreading the word about EarthFund and the NeverAlone token.
Getting ready for EthCC Paris 2022
This week, our co-founder Adam is in Paris at EthCC spreading the word about EarthFund, meeting with other co-founders and thought leaders, and syncing up with our PR agency to see if there are any opportunities to connect with journalists, etc…
Watch this space 👀
Gearing up to promote the Carbon Removal DAO
Last week, we had a call with our PR agency (that has also worked with Cardano, crypto.com, Consensys, Decentraland, etc… all the big dogs, essentially) to help promote the Carbon Removal cause in the press.
We’re also helping Lucy prepare social media posts and marketing activities to raise awareness of her cause.
(And her cause really couldn’t be launching at a better time.)
Help us spread the word
As always, you can:
- Get 1 friend to join our Telegram community
- Tweet about EarthFund or interact with us on social media (got to feed those social media algorithms!)
- Ask us questions — we’re always available to answer questions in Telegram. (And if our community team doesn’t have the answers, we’ll get them for you.)
- Leave a positive comment and bullish rating on CoinMarketCap
- Like 1Earth on CoinGecko
But our big ask for this week is to support Dr. Lucy Tweed’s cause
Unlike Deepak Chopra’s cause, Lucy doesn’t have a massive following (although, she has been killing it on Twitter Spaces) so it’s important that the EarthFund community gives her as much support as possible.
Here’s how you can do that 👇
Follow her on Twitter: @carboncauses and @CDR_DAO
Feed the algorithm: Like, retweet or reply to Dr. Tweed’s or the cause’s tweets
Ask questions: Jump into Telegram and ask questions about her cause (Lucy is in the chat)
Spread the word: got friends interested in climate change? Send them her deck!
Until next week, a massive thanks for being part of this journey with us!
Let’s build a better tomorrow, together.
New to EarthFund? Here’s everything you need to know 👇
Start a world-changing DAO with its own token.
Join a community of like-minded people.
Donate crypto to change the world.
All from one place.
EarthFund takes power of centralized organizations like governments and global charities and gives it to communities dedicated to causes.
It allows everyday people like you to affect change. And using crypto and the blockchain, it lets you have a voice in decisions and fund the causes you believe in.
Powering it all is the 1Earth token, an ERC-20 token that can be staked in exchange for governance tokens that give you a voice on the platform.
By buying the token and joining the EarthFund DAO, anybody in the world will have a vote on how the EarthFund treasury is used to fund planet-saving projects around the world.
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