Martin Rue
New member
Hello everyone,
After running a proposal last year to fund the development of our proposed system for crowdfunding, we're really pleased to have now launched the system and able to return with a second proposal.
Any comments on the proposal would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks folks.
---
Hello MNOs, I’m Martin Rue, one half of the team behind DashRoots – a new crowdfunding platform we have built exclusively for the Dash network. Please allow me to introduce the project.
PROJECT SUMMARY
DashRoots is a crowdfunding platform designed exclusively for the Dash community. DashRoots helps Dash continue to attract grassroots talent by providing a system for people to raise funding for smaller ideas directly from the Dash community itself.
Currently a budget proposal costs 5 DASH to create, or ~$800 at current price. The fee works well as a spam mechanism and keeps MNOs focused overall on a smaller set of better, well-formed proposals.
But on the other hand, many people at the grassroots level cannot access the system at this cost. Moreover they may require less than 5 DASH in the first place to launch their idea, speak about Dash at a conference, produce some advertising content, etc. This leaves many smaller projects and individuals, that could otherwise contribute to the Dash ecosystem, doing it on their own, or not at all.
We believe that Dash will continue to succeed as long as the utility and use-cases of the network continue to grow. For that to happen, we need to be attracting great people and encouraging them to bring their skills and ideas to Dash first, at every level. We want to see Dash continue to attract the same kind of talent that originally created, and today continues to evolve the Dash project. Such talent is essential in order to continue creating new and exciting content and projects that will cement Dash’s position in the market further.
Last year, prior to any development, we ran a proposal to seek funding in order to build the system. Unfortunately we didn’t receive quite enough yes votes to fund the project. However, since then we have self-funded the development costs to continue the work we proposed.
On 10th October 2018, after many months of hard work and determination, we launched the first version of DashRoots, which is now live at https://dashroots.fund. Our official release announcement can be found on the DashRoots blog: https://blog.dashroots.fund/2018/10/10/launch. DashForceNews also covered our launch here. After absorbing all costs to date and depleting our budget to reach this stage, we’re now returning with a second proposal to raise funds for continued development.
In light of a stretched budget and many other valuable proposals, we have worked hard to keep a very lean project and a sensible proposal at a minimal cost to the network. We hope our work to date and plans for the evolution of the system sufficiently de-risk our second proposal, and will gain your support to fund continued development of DashRoots.
It is our primary goal that DashRoots becomes an important part of extending the appeal of Dash to those who can help grow it from the edges; to all those small projects that one day could become huge.
As a nice demonstration of the potential of DashRoots, the 5 DASH fee for this proposal itself was crowdfunded via DashRoots, which you can see here: https://dashroots.fund/#/proposal/official-dashroots-proposal/1641ab4c-399b-4177-832a-a7af57fc922a
PROGRESS TO DATE
Here’s a breakdown of all functionality we have built during the last 14 months of development time, all of which is now live in the latest release:
COMPARISONS TO EXISTING SYSTEMS
Main Dash Treasury
The main Dash treasury system is a crucial part of what makes Dash function as a network. Applying part of the coin emission to fund teams/projects is still something Dash does very effectively compared to competitors, and underpins why we strongly believe in the long-term sustainability of Dash.
That said, the issues mentioned above regarding cost of access remain an issue for smaller, grassroots projects and teams. DashRoots complements the main treasury system by widening the possible set of options to fund new projects, providing a means to crowd-fund directly from the Dash community.
DashBoost
Shortly after our first proposal, DashBoost was announced to help with micro proposals and we were pleased to see it funded by the network. We were encouraged that MNOs supported this sort of work, as it’s a valuable extension of the set of ways people can get projects off the ground in Dash, and similarly that principle is also core to DashRoots.
DashRoots differs from DashBoost by providing a direct crowdfunding model. Where DashBoost has funding rounds, where majority consensus is required to fund proposals, DashRoots is a system that allows people to seek funding directly from the community – perhaps even just one other person.
This has important implications in terms of the types of projects that can thrive via DashRoots. For example, if you propose a hyper-local idea using other systems, it may be more difficult to gain majority consensus. With DashRoots, one or two people, who perhaps identify with the local goal/problem, may decide to support it fully themselves.
This proposal itself is possible because just 7 people decided to make it so, supporting our DashRoots proposal to raise the 5 DASH fee.
FUTURE CHALLENGES
Looking forward to the future of DashRoots, we have a couple of obvious challenges we need to tackle to ensure the long-term sustainability of the system:
Decentralised Escrow
DashRoots uses the same model as exchanges to manage funds. DashRoots acts as an escrow for deposited and pledged funds, releasing them to the proposal owner if the proposal is successful, or returning them if not.
This choice was made for two primary reasons:
Getting the UX around this correct is the most challenging element. It’s important that everyone can easily participate in DashRoots. Making a pledge should not require deep knowledge of signing and not broadcasting transactions, for example. Proposal owners need to be safe in the knowledge that the total pledged funds will be available, if their proposal is successful – not worry that transactions may have turned into double-spends during the lifetime of the proposal in which they were not broadcast.
We’ve had some encouraging conversations with folks on the Core team about mechanisms to enable this workflow, and we plan to continue working in this direction to gradually introduce these features. The end goal will be to have no third-party risk within DashRoots at all, but it will be a process, one that must balance UX and decentralised functionality.
Open Source
During development of DashRoots, we have paid careful attention to the eventual goal of open sourcing the project. It is necessary to have a wider conversation about whether the network would want this, particularly when thinking about the increased risk of duplication that it would enable for competing coins.
Overall however, we believe open sourcing DashRoots would be an effective way to enable it to live beyond a single team and become an asset owned by everyone collectively, and so we are preparing for that possibility early.
Funding
While we have developed the core of DashRoots and reached this first release milestone at zero cost to the network, we have reached a point where we need support to continue its development.
At the same time, we’re very aware of the DAO’s overstretched budget in this climate, and of developing a general over-dependence on the treasury to survive.
One remedy we have employed so far is to remain as lean as possible – our team of two has developed the system on a shoestring budget, and our cross-functional skill set allows us to avoid certain costs such as expensive hosting, expensive design agencies, etc. We intend to remain as lean as possible in order to best ensure the continued survival of DashRoots.
Looking to the longer-term future, DashRoots may also be able to support itself (even partially) using other methods, such as: running proposals on DashRoots itself, other kinds of community-based donations (similar to Dash Central) and an array of other ideas. We believe open sourcing the project would help a lot with this as well, by eventually having members of the community make open source contributions to avoid growing an expensive team.
NEXT 3 MONTHS
Looking shorter-term to the next 3 months, here’s what we intend to build and deliver. The following features are crucial to the overall functionality and value of DashRoots.
We are structuring the proposal into a 3-month batch of work. This is based on our understanding of where we’re at now and where we need to be. Please see the costs section immediately following for the breakdown of financials.
Discussions
While a DashRoots proposal currently contains all the required information to understand the work proposed, the deliverables, and the timescales, it doesn’t currently provide a means of discussing and refining those things further with the proposal owner and other DashRoots users.
During this work period we’ll deliver a discussion system that will provide a threaded discussion section for each proposal, allowing people to have conversations about the content of the proposal. The discussion system will include a voting mechanism, allowing users to up-vote and down-vote comments, much like Reddit and similar systems, allowing better to content to rise to the top, and help prevent spam.
Discussion is crucial to enabling 2-way communication between the owner of the proposal and current/future backers. Through these discussions, we expect proposals will improve as issues are able to be discussed back and forth on a per-proposal basis. Discussion data will also play into future reputation scoring, something we’d like to think about in the future.
Delivery Voting / Reputation
The primary aim of DashRoots is to help grassroots projects and teams get off the ground by crowdfunding from the community, but that’s only the start of the process. Once a proposal reaches its target, the responsibility to deliver that work now sits with the proposal’s owner.
DashRoots will ensure that after the proposal’s specified work period is reached, the proposal owner will supply evidence of delivery of the proposal’s stated goals. The proposal’s backers will then be invited back to vote whether the proposal has delivered what it said it would. A proposal can be then be defined as delivered or failed, by the consensus of its backers.
During this work period we’ll complete development of the voting system so that it will be in place for all future proposals. It will also operate retrospectively for existing proposals that have occurred during the development period.
Decentralised Escrow
During this work period we’ll continue to research the best way forward to introduce decentralised pledges, with the aim of having a concrete plan to deliver this fully in the next window of work.
It’s important to find a solution that best applies the technology we have within the Dash network, and combines it with a good user experience. We intend to solicit as much feedback as possible from Core and the wider community before proceeding with a concrete implementation.
---
Note: the COSTS and TEAM sections are continued below, due to the 15000 character limits on forum posts.
After running a proposal last year to fund the development of our proposed system for crowdfunding, we're really pleased to have now launched the system and able to return with a second proposal.
Any comments on the proposal would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks folks.
---
Hello MNOs, I’m Martin Rue, one half of the team behind DashRoots – a new crowdfunding platform we have built exclusively for the Dash network. Please allow me to introduce the project.
PROJECT SUMMARY
DashRoots is a crowdfunding platform designed exclusively for the Dash community. DashRoots helps Dash continue to attract grassroots talent by providing a system for people to raise funding for smaller ideas directly from the Dash community itself.
Currently a budget proposal costs 5 DASH to create, or ~$800 at current price. The fee works well as a spam mechanism and keeps MNOs focused overall on a smaller set of better, well-formed proposals.
But on the other hand, many people at the grassroots level cannot access the system at this cost. Moreover they may require less than 5 DASH in the first place to launch their idea, speak about Dash at a conference, produce some advertising content, etc. This leaves many smaller projects and individuals, that could otherwise contribute to the Dash ecosystem, doing it on their own, or not at all.
We believe that Dash will continue to succeed as long as the utility and use-cases of the network continue to grow. For that to happen, we need to be attracting great people and encouraging them to bring their skills and ideas to Dash first, at every level. We want to see Dash continue to attract the same kind of talent that originally created, and today continues to evolve the Dash project. Such talent is essential in order to continue creating new and exciting content and projects that will cement Dash’s position in the market further.
Last year, prior to any development, we ran a proposal to seek funding in order to build the system. Unfortunately we didn’t receive quite enough yes votes to fund the project. However, since then we have self-funded the development costs to continue the work we proposed.
On 10th October 2018, after many months of hard work and determination, we launched the first version of DashRoots, which is now live at https://dashroots.fund. Our official release announcement can be found on the DashRoots blog: https://blog.dashroots.fund/2018/10/10/launch. DashForceNews also covered our launch here. After absorbing all costs to date and depleting our budget to reach this stage, we’re now returning with a second proposal to raise funds for continued development.
In light of a stretched budget and many other valuable proposals, we have worked hard to keep a very lean project and a sensible proposal at a minimal cost to the network. We hope our work to date and plans for the evolution of the system sufficiently de-risk our second proposal, and will gain your support to fund continued development of DashRoots.
It is our primary goal that DashRoots becomes an important part of extending the appeal of Dash to those who can help grow it from the edges; to all those small projects that one day could become huge.
As a nice demonstration of the potential of DashRoots, the 5 DASH fee for this proposal itself was crowdfunded via DashRoots, which you can see here: https://dashroots.fund/#/proposal/official-dashroots-proposal/1641ab4c-399b-4177-832a-a7af57fc922a
PROGRESS TO DATE
Here’s a breakdown of all functionality we have built during the last 14 months of development time, all of which is now live in the latest release:
- User system (log in, sign up, forgotten password functionality, secure password storage, email-based account verification).
- User profiles, allowing users to write a short bio about their role in the Dash community, including location information. Users can also opt to participate in DashRoots anonymously from within the user profile section.
- User profiles currently show the number of pledges (not amounts) and number of proposals a user has created. This is the groundwork for more meaningful reputation scores in the future, based on votes received back from pledgers once proposals are delivered.
- Funding system, allowing users to manage deposit addresses, track deposit history, and request withdrawal of funds from DashRoots. The funding system talks to an instance of dashd, ensuring full knowledge of deposits directly from the blockchain (no risk of collusion from relying on any third-party APIs).
- Proposal create/edit workflow, allowing users to create new proposals, make changes to proposals, and view other users’ proposals within the system. The proposal editor includes a step-by-step process to create a new proposal, including a Markdown text editor for the main body of proposals.
- UX (user experience) work to ensure the site is as minimal and usable as possible, including responsive design all the way down to small mobile devices, ensuring DashRoots is available everywhere. We also hired a designer to work with us to ensure DashRoots’ workflow made sense and was easy to use. We think UX is crucial and should not be an afterthought generally speaking, but especially within the crypto world where users are even more responsible for their own mistakes.
COMPARISONS TO EXISTING SYSTEMS
Main Dash Treasury
The main Dash treasury system is a crucial part of what makes Dash function as a network. Applying part of the coin emission to fund teams/projects is still something Dash does very effectively compared to competitors, and underpins why we strongly believe in the long-term sustainability of Dash.
That said, the issues mentioned above regarding cost of access remain an issue for smaller, grassroots projects and teams. DashRoots complements the main treasury system by widening the possible set of options to fund new projects, providing a means to crowd-fund directly from the Dash community.
DashBoost
Shortly after our first proposal, DashBoost was announced to help with micro proposals and we were pleased to see it funded by the network. We were encouraged that MNOs supported this sort of work, as it’s a valuable extension of the set of ways people can get projects off the ground in Dash, and similarly that principle is also core to DashRoots.
DashRoots differs from DashBoost by providing a direct crowdfunding model. Where DashBoost has funding rounds, where majority consensus is required to fund proposals, DashRoots is a system that allows people to seek funding directly from the community – perhaps even just one other person.
This has important implications in terms of the types of projects that can thrive via DashRoots. For example, if you propose a hyper-local idea using other systems, it may be more difficult to gain majority consensus. With DashRoots, one or two people, who perhaps identify with the local goal/problem, may decide to support it fully themselves.
This proposal itself is possible because just 7 people decided to make it so, supporting our DashRoots proposal to raise the 5 DASH fee.
FUTURE CHALLENGES
Looking forward to the future of DashRoots, we have a couple of obvious challenges we need to tackle to ensure the long-term sustainability of the system:
Decentralised Escrow
DashRoots uses the same model as exchanges to manage funds. DashRoots acts as an escrow for deposited and pledged funds, releasing them to the proposal owner if the proposal is successful, or returning them if not.
This choice was made for two primary reasons:
- It allowed us to deliver DashRoots faster, and begin iterating more quickly, since decentralised solutions are more complex to get right.
- It allowed us to avoid compromising on the UX of the system overall – depositing, backing a proposal, and receiving the correct amounts for successful proposals are all much easier to achieve from a UX perspective.
Getting the UX around this correct is the most challenging element. It’s important that everyone can easily participate in DashRoots. Making a pledge should not require deep knowledge of signing and not broadcasting transactions, for example. Proposal owners need to be safe in the knowledge that the total pledged funds will be available, if their proposal is successful – not worry that transactions may have turned into double-spends during the lifetime of the proposal in which they were not broadcast.
We’ve had some encouraging conversations with folks on the Core team about mechanisms to enable this workflow, and we plan to continue working in this direction to gradually introduce these features. The end goal will be to have no third-party risk within DashRoots at all, but it will be a process, one that must balance UX and decentralised functionality.
Open Source
During development of DashRoots, we have paid careful attention to the eventual goal of open sourcing the project. It is necessary to have a wider conversation about whether the network would want this, particularly when thinking about the increased risk of duplication that it would enable for competing coins.
Overall however, we believe open sourcing DashRoots would be an effective way to enable it to live beyond a single team and become an asset owned by everyone collectively, and so we are preparing for that possibility early.
Funding
While we have developed the core of DashRoots and reached this first release milestone at zero cost to the network, we have reached a point where we need support to continue its development.
At the same time, we’re very aware of the DAO’s overstretched budget in this climate, and of developing a general over-dependence on the treasury to survive.
One remedy we have employed so far is to remain as lean as possible – our team of two has developed the system on a shoestring budget, and our cross-functional skill set allows us to avoid certain costs such as expensive hosting, expensive design agencies, etc. We intend to remain as lean as possible in order to best ensure the continued survival of DashRoots.
Looking to the longer-term future, DashRoots may also be able to support itself (even partially) using other methods, such as: running proposals on DashRoots itself, other kinds of community-based donations (similar to Dash Central) and an array of other ideas. We believe open sourcing the project would help a lot with this as well, by eventually having members of the community make open source contributions to avoid growing an expensive team.
NEXT 3 MONTHS
Looking shorter-term to the next 3 months, here’s what we intend to build and deliver. The following features are crucial to the overall functionality and value of DashRoots.
We are structuring the proposal into a 3-month batch of work. This is based on our understanding of where we’re at now and where we need to be. Please see the costs section immediately following for the breakdown of financials.
Discussions
While a DashRoots proposal currently contains all the required information to understand the work proposed, the deliverables, and the timescales, it doesn’t currently provide a means of discussing and refining those things further with the proposal owner and other DashRoots users.
During this work period we’ll deliver a discussion system that will provide a threaded discussion section for each proposal, allowing people to have conversations about the content of the proposal. The discussion system will include a voting mechanism, allowing users to up-vote and down-vote comments, much like Reddit and similar systems, allowing better to content to rise to the top, and help prevent spam.
Discussion is crucial to enabling 2-way communication between the owner of the proposal and current/future backers. Through these discussions, we expect proposals will improve as issues are able to be discussed back and forth on a per-proposal basis. Discussion data will also play into future reputation scoring, something we’d like to think about in the future.
Delivery Voting / Reputation
The primary aim of DashRoots is to help grassroots projects and teams get off the ground by crowdfunding from the community, but that’s only the start of the process. Once a proposal reaches its target, the responsibility to deliver that work now sits with the proposal’s owner.
DashRoots will ensure that after the proposal’s specified work period is reached, the proposal owner will supply evidence of delivery of the proposal’s stated goals. The proposal’s backers will then be invited back to vote whether the proposal has delivered what it said it would. A proposal can be then be defined as delivered or failed, by the consensus of its backers.
During this work period we’ll complete development of the voting system so that it will be in place for all future proposals. It will also operate retrospectively for existing proposals that have occurred during the development period.
Decentralised Escrow
During this work period we’ll continue to research the best way forward to introduce decentralised pledges, with the aim of having a concrete plan to deliver this fully in the next window of work.
It’s important to find a solution that best applies the technology we have within the Dash network, and combines it with a good user experience. We intend to solicit as much feedback as possible from Core and the wider community before proceeding with a concrete implementation.
---
Note: the COSTS and TEAM sections are continued below, due to the 15000 character limits on forum posts.