Gentry Demchak

Gentry Demchak

image

CitizenDAO Impact Protocol

CitizenDAO Impact Protocol

NFT social impact marketplace concept for funding project development

  1. Joining a Hackathon
  2. The Team
  3. The Big Idea
  4. The Dao
  5. The Hackathon
  6. My Goals
  7. Pitching the Project
  8. Outcomes
  9. Retrospective
  10. Post Involvement
  11. Shoutout

Joining a Hackathon

As part of my web3 exploration journey, I decided joining a hackathon would be a good environment to get down and dirty. My objective was to learn some basic tools and fundamental concepts for interacting with a blockchain as well as explore the solution space. Since the launch of EIP-721 on Ethereum back in 2018 and an initial surge of excitement generated bycyrptoKitties, then Cryptopunks, followed by a cambrian explosion of NFT projects. I wondered: could there be more real world utility for NFTs beyond generative PFPs? Loot box items and in game content seems like a natural and obvious use case for NFTs. But what about real world impact (not to say gaming doesn't have any real world impact. The gap between our virtual experiences and real world experiences is closing fast - but that's a topic for another post).

To answer that question, I decided to join a Hackathon! I stumbled upon the EthGlobal hackathon community via a twitter post by Austin Griffith - a web3 dev I was following on Twitter - and it seemed like a good learning opportunity. The hackathon took place in a virtual format, and as the name implies: it was open to global participation and 100% online. The whole thing was orchestrated through Discord (very on-theme for crypto). I submitted an application for the 2021 Eth Online hackathon, got accepted, joined the discord, and created an intro board. Shortly after I was reached out by Brennan Hodge - then founder of a DAO called CitizenDAO. He was looking for a web3 dev to help build out a moonshot DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to "fork the UN". I was intrigued by the idea because this seemed like a good testing ground for real world NFT utility, and after a few conversations, I accepted the invite to join the team for the duration of the hackathon.

The Team

The big idea

"Fork the UN" - basically could we develop a DAO that could help to achieve the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) defined by the UN and do so better than the UN? - I know, pretty lofty goal, but big goals are attractive and inspiring - how else do you get people to join a DAO?

Problem: Big ideas that could help humanity have a hard time getting funded to become a reality. These types of ideas don't fit into the frameworks of government/foundation grants or VC/Angel investing. These ideas are either too early or too ambitious.

Solution: A new way to fund public advancement via Social Impact Bonds. SIBs are dynamic NFTs that fund projects both prospectively & retrospectively.

Social Impact Bonds: The bond TLDR: If governments & corporations want money for something, one option is to sell a bond, which is an "IOU" with a promise to pay the principle back with interest.

Bonds are one of the oldest documented financial instruments dating back to 2400 BC in Mesopotamia. Since then, we've created war bonds, treasury bonds, municipal bonds, & corporate bonds to fund our modern world. The global bond market is ~$120T as of late 2021.

"Social Impact Bonds" are a recent creation with the first launched in 2010 to finance a prisoner rehabilitation program in the UK. SIBs are a form of outcomes-based contracting where the project is to improve the social outcomes for a specific group of citizens. As of 2021, there are 194 social impact bonds active with $421M invested.

While great in theory, SIBs are designed with a poor economic incentive model. For example, investors don't get any money back if the project fails to meet the initial KPIs. It's an "all or nothing" investment that only rewards investors with a few percentage points of interest if successful. Another example is the lack of transparency & validation of the actual work being funded.

We at Citizen DAO believe Social Impact Bonds can be much better than they are.

Our bonds are ERC-1155 non-fungible tokens. Bonds are unique financial assets that fund projects in the following categories of health, housing, education, climate, finance, & governance.

Citizen DAO members will curate, refine, & decide on which projects get funding. Each bond can be minted with any amount of ETH. Yield is in CDAO, which is the governance & utiliity token of Citizen DAO.

The DAO

The project was registed as a Wyoming DAO. you can actually see the record [here!](https://wyobiz.wyo.gov/Business/FilingDetails.aspx?eFNum=078086082167159029199061164134199238180118079198

The hackathon

Hackathons are crazy and a web3/crypto hackathon is even crazier! There was an absolute firehose of information - introductions, team building, project demos, technical tutorials, tools, prizes, etc. I recommend taking a look at the youtube playlist for the event (glad they organized their content!) which you can find here: and here. For me and the goals of this project, I followed a few tutorials. The most important and valuable one for a web3 noobie like myself was the scaffold-eth tutorial given by Austin Griffith which provided an overview of how to use javascript tooling to quickly bootstrap a web3 project. It utilized libraries such as web3.js, hardhat, a generative webui that shows you inputs/outputs for whatever smart contract you are developing, and tons of examples for things like making an NFT, multisig, smart contract dev, streaming eth, etc.

My goals

Win some prize money! Ship a prototype or MVP of the project. Learn some new tools and concepts. Engage with the community. Have fun!

Pitching the project

See our project pitch at the EthGlobal hackathon: https://ethglobal.com/showcase/citizen-dao-eau4x

Checkout our submission to the Chainlink hackathon on devpost: https://devpost.com/software/impact-protocol-for-social-impact-bonds

Outcomes

We shipped a prototype, pitched the idea to the judges, and won some prize money from Compound Finance, Skynet, and Chainlink! I learned ALOT about the web3 ecosystem, the problems, the projects, the people. There is still SO SO MUCH to learn, an overwhelming amount tbh and the space gets bigger everyday! Literally anyone with an internet connection and a brain can get involved. I'm excited to be on the wild crypto journey and I'm looking forward to seeing the space continue to grow and mature.

Retrospective

What went well?

  • We had interesting discussions about how to design a DAO
  • We shipped a prototype (although it was mostly presentational and not functional)
  • We won some prize money! (Compound Finance, Skynet, Chainlink)
  • We learned a lot about the web3 ecosystem and the tools that can be leveraged. We explored streaming money, NFTs, DAOs, smart contract development, decentralized hosting with skynet and arweave.
  • We had a test partner project based in guatemala that we aimed to get funding for as a pilot proof of concept.

What didn't go well?

  • The prototype could have been functional, but we didn't have the technical expertise to build it out in the amount of time we had.
  • I think the Gitcoin grant program and Mirror.xyz more or less accomplishes most of the things we set out to do. Namely - funding public goods projects. If a project wants to get funding they can use both of those platforms to raise money! We were trying to build a platform that was more currated, selecting only high quality projects or projects selected by the community, but there were alot of challenges to that as well. For example, how do you define "high quality" or "community selected"? How can we trust that the community can make high quality selections and not game the system and benefit directly from voting manipulation?
  • We weren't sure how to best bootstrap the CitizenDAO token. One of the major barrier to entry for any token is liquidity. Anyone can create a token, but unless there is ample liquidity provided in a uniswap pool for instance, it has no value. Who is going to provide the USDC side of that liquidity? its a big risk. We could have used the prize money to bootstrap liquidity, but it was probably not enough.
  • We could have spent more time exploring the existing solution space to make sure we weren't simply reinventing the wheel.

Post involvement

Just prior to landing a contracting job with GAP, the team had been working on launching a fundraise using the Mirror.xyz platform. The idea was to sell a few different founding NFT tiers to gauge interest in the project and see if the project could bootstrap liquidty for the CitizenDAO token.

For that I designed some NFT cards with Blender that unfortunately never had the chance to be used - I was just too busy at the time interviewing and subsquently onboarding at my new gig. But you can see the iterations here:

NFT card design

NFT card design

NFT card design

Shoutout

Lastly, I want to give Brennan a shoutout for being an awesome founder. He's intelligent, motivated, and very down to earth/easy to work with entreprenuer and I believe he'll be able to continue iterating or pivoting onto the next project. Definitely if you are interested in contributing to this project or anything else he's working on, I encourage you to reach out to him on twitter: https://twitter.com/BrennenHodge

← Back to home