EARTHFUND PLATFORM UPDATE 08/08

More platform development, partnering with Coinshift and hosting a Twitter Space with Never Alone

Last week, we were head down building out the platform, hosting a Twitter Space with Never Alone, and announcing our partnership with Coinshift.

👋 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 #6 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.

A lot of hard work on the backend development 💪

From the outside, building technology looks easy. You come up with an idea, you dev it out and then it ships.

In reality, it’s much harder. That’s why our team is working hard 24/7 to make sure we get it right and that our platform doesn’t just work, but is built to be scalable and work with any ideas and improvements we have in the future.

On top of that, what we’re doing — creating a house of world-changing DAOs that also has exchange functionality (to convert donations and swap 1Earth to DAO governance tokens), accepts donations and automatically sets up DAOs with everything they need — hasn’t been done before.

So we have no roadmap to refer to and no best practices to follow. With every new feature, we’re breaking ground and laying the foundations for something completely game-changing.

But, as Johnny Ive, the genius behind a lot of Apple’s innovations, once said:

If you are truly innovating, you don’t have a prototype you can refer to.

Johnny Ive, Chief Design Officer of Apple Inc 1997–2019

Fixing Reality.Eth integration bugs ✅

During the Testnet testing, we found some bugs that affected bond collection and the proposal queues.

The team got their heads down and squashed the bugs and the integration passed all tests at the end of last week.

This week, we’re going to run another round of tests to make sure there are no outstanding issues with the implementation and no bugs slipped the net.

Nailing a complicated donation flow 💪

Last week, we started work on the donation proxy contract.

Initially, our plan was to launch donations last month. However, the process of donating, converting and rerouting all of the funds to the cause treasury proved to be a little more complex than we planned.

Essentially, because the donation works like a transfer and an exchange, we need to “wrap” the donation in an extra contract so that it goes like this:

Donate in ERC-20 token → convert to USDT → send to treasury.

Without the innovative wrapper, the standard flow for this goes:

Donation in ERC-20 token → convert to USDT → send back to user → users sends to treasury.

On top of that, the wrapper-free donation requires you to sign 3 transactions with your wallet which is just bad UX and is likely to create a barrier to use.

And as donations are the lifeblood of every cause on the platform, it’s important we get it right from the start. (Not to mention, we’re dealing with people’s money, so we can’t be too careful.)

As soon as it’s all tested and 100% buttoned-up, we’ll give you an ETA.

DAO factory v.1 has been built ✅

Last week we mentioned that the EarthFund subDAO Factory — AKA automating the way world-changing DAOs are created — has entered into the detailed planning and scoping phase.

Well, in just a week, it’s been built and ready to test. 🔥

That means that when a cause proposal is approved by the EarthFund DAO, it’ll automatically be set up with:

• ERC-20 governance token pegged to 1Earth
• ERC-20 smart contract
• Gnosis multi-sig wallet
• Snapshot governance system for gasless voting
• ENS subdomain

(There are more features too, but we’ll focus on them in an in-depth post in the coming weeks.)

This week’s product development focused on two things:

• automation → building the DAO-in-a-box wizard that lets causes get set up with everything they need automatically
• autonomy → designing a DAO management system that lets DAOs run autonomously and manage their own tokens

Designed v.1 of the Start a DAO wizard ✅

We’ve talked about the lessons we’ve learned from Web2.0 a lot. And while Web2.0 gets a lot of stuff wrong on the backend — centralization, icky privacy violations, user as a number, lack of autonomy — they really do nail the front-end usability.

So when you’re building a platform that takes something as complex as starting a DAO and makes it easy, it makes sense to draw from Web2.0’s learnings.

Chief among them: wizards — AKA step-by-step setups — are waaay better for users than complex forms.

The human brain sucks at multi-tasking and spinning multiple plates. Breaking complex tasks down into simple steps smoothens the whole thing out and makes even the most daunting tasks seem easy.

So, that’s what we’re building for DAOs. A wizard that takes you from “I have no idea what to do” to “Let’s launch this DAO” in no time.

It’ll take you through every step of the process, from choosing a name (with tips on choosing a brandable name with available social handles) to setting up your token to getting everything exactly how you want it.

Here’s a sneak peek 👇

Designed v.1 of the DAO Dashboard ✅

Starting a DAO is one thing. Managing it is another.

So, to make things easier, we’re building an easy-to-use DAO Dashboard that lets you manage every aspect of your DAO.

You can pay your team, release more tokens, list on a DEX, update CoinMarketCap, manage your treasury, sign transactions… all from one place.

It’ll be hooked into Gnosis and Coinshift too, so everything will be super simple.

More information to follow as it gets built out (we’re still exploring some possibilities to make it as useful as possible) but here’s a quick look at early wireframes👇

(Copy and images are placeholders. We’re figuring out functionality before we polish.)

Announced our partnership with Coinshift

It’s been a long time in the making and last week we announced our partnership with Coinshift, the leading treasury management and infrastructure platform that will help every DAO on the platform manage their treasuries with ease.

Here’s what Coinshift’s CEO, Tarun Gupta, said about the partnership:

We couldn’t be happier to have partnered with EarthFund.

We’ve always believed in the transformative power of DAOs and EarthFund could be the platform that takes DAOs mainstream.

Every step of the process — from onboarding all the way to treasury management powered by our V2 — is intuitive and simple for even new crypto users, without sacrificing the power of decentralized communities.

And as the platform partners with more causes dedicated to making the world a better place, we’re proud to play a role in helping these decentralized communities fund projects that can make the world a better place for everyone.

We’re going to be working with them not just on making treasury management easier but on co-marketing opportunities.

And we kicked that all off last week with a press push that saw the partnership featured in CoinDesk, Business Insider and Pyments.

Watch this space 👀

Hosted a Twitter Space with NeverAlone and X2AI about Web3.0, AI and Mental Health

On Thursday last week, our founder Adam hosted a Twitter Space with Gabriella Wright and Poonacha Machaiah of the Chopra Foundation and Never Alone, and Michiel Rauws and John Sorrell of X2AI (the company developing PIWI, the mental health chatbot funded by the Mental Health and Wellbeing Cause) to discuss mental health, the NeverAlone DAO and how technology can help prevent suicide.

In the build-up, Poonacha shared some interesting data on how PIWI is already changing and saving lives:

And the money from the NeverAlone community isn’t just going to go towards improving the app, but translating it and spreading it around the world too.

In a way, this first project epitomizes what we hoped EarthFund would be: a dedicated community funding an exciting project that helps improve the lives of people all around the world.

Missed the Space? You can listen to the Twitter Space again here.

But if you’re in a hurry, here are a few of our favorite quotes:

“This can really be a grassroots movement where anyone in their community, if something’s happened and they want to take action, they can very quickly raise money and then steer our awareness to that area.”

Michiel Rauws, founder of X2AI and Cass.ai

“I’m excited about a world where no one feels helpless or hopeless, and that’s really the power of the technology and the power of the platform.”

Poonacha Machaiah, co-founder of the Mental Health and Wellbeing cause

“We have this incredible partnership with Earthfund that we are honored and very grateful for, because we are discovering and paving the way for nonprofits in the web3 space.”
Gabriella Wright, co-founder of the Mental Health and Wellbeing cause

We’ve noticed more project-related questions popping up in the Telegram channel, which is great. We love that you’re all getting into the weeds of the project.

However, due to the perfect storm of a busy team and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nature of Telegram, we know that some things get overlooked.

So each week, we’re going to start answering a few of the best (or most common) questions here in this post.

Community question #1: Will the fundraising in September fund development of the project and reduce the need to sell tokens?

We can’t speak too much about fundraising right now because it’s all being discussed, strategized and poured over by our legal team.

However, we can confidently say that fundraising will give us a lot more flexibility on how we fund the development of the platform and give us the ability to fund from investments rather than selling tokens.

Community question #2: How do rewards work? Why am I rewarded for staking rather than voting? Doesn’t this encourage people not to participate?

This is a great question because it draws attention to the choices we have to make behind the scenes.

Brass tacks: it’s currently not possible to reward users for their participation without having voting on-chain. However, voting on chain is pricey. (Depending on Ethereum and the L2 solution used, it can be anywhere between $0.50 and $5.)

And let’s be honest, even paying $0.50 to vote every time is prohibitive to growing the platform. It’ll cause people to only vote for certain issues or stay quiet during bear markets. Not to mention it adds a whole layer of complexity to voting. (Checking your ETH, adding some for gas, etc…)

So we opted to integrate with Snapshot so that on the EarthFund platform — just like in a fair society — using your voice to speak up is completely free. And smooth. And easy. And quick. And a whole host of other benefits that make it ready for mass adoption.

However, right now, it isn’t technically possible to reward users for off-chain voting.

So we compromised on the rewards for the sake of having active communities chiming in on every decision.

Our hope is that early adopters will not need to be incentivized to participate because they believe in the cause. And in the meantime, we’re exploring ways to improve the process without adding prohibitive gas fees. (Michael Fellows, our lead dev, is exploring some ideas and Snapshot has some interesting potential solutions in the works.)

Help us spread the word

• Follow us on Twitter and give our posts a like/retweet → this would be huge for us. Our Twitter profile is key to spreading the word beyond crypto and into the kind of spaces that future DAO members (and maybe even founders) hang out.
• Join our Telegram community (if you’re not a member already)
• Talk about EarthFund in EarthFund-adjacent spaces (maybe mental health communities or carbon/climate change communities on Twitter)
• 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

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.

CoinTelegraph

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