Overview of 4 Hackathon Projects Developed by Students and Meaning of Quadratic Funding
Hackathons are a great way to source out hidden talent and give exposure to great products.
From the recent Solana Sandstorm hackathon hosted by LamportDAO, here is an overview of a few of them.
STOCKPILE
Stockpile formally (Morbius)is an open source community-driven crowdfunding platform for individuals, non-profits, and open-source projects to create fundraiser vaults raise funds on-chain, and earn NFTs for contributing to projects and grants.
It is funding without barriers to build decentralized crowdfunds for individuals and projects, coded in Rust and typescript, it uses a community matching pool to distribute qualified grants through quadratic funding, which then commemorates the OG projects and their contributors mirroring inputs like GitHub.
This is made possible by using crowdfunding as the bedrock for an intuitive experience that leverages systems like open grants(powered by quadratic funding)reward tiers, and modular plugins that take full advantage of Solana primitives for a fully composable experience.
USES OF STOCKPILE
- It helps projects with the necessary support required from its community
- Identifying projects with a large community base
- Enabling projects to raise funds and get grants
- bootstrapping liquidity for projects with public goods
- Curation of fundraisers that have interest in a projects
- Helps projects launch from scratch
Users can earn points by participating in fundraisers and voting for their favorite projects.
ROADMAP :
- Data compression
- Javascript/Typescript SDK
- Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure
- Quadratic Funding
- Generative Multi-Sig Beneficiaries
- Embedded Job-Postings / Bounties
- Yield Contribution
- Fully configurable “Misc” fundraiser type
Notable awards include a 3rd Place in the Reputation Track at the Solana Sandstorm 2023 event
Links
Project:https://www.stockpile.so/
Open source: https://github.com/StockpileLabs/stockpile
TMEV & BUNDLESTREAM
Built by Anushka Khaganate and harsh on the LamportDAO sandstorm hackathon;tMev is a terminal UI mempool explorer for jitolabs built by tui-rust while Bundle Stream is a mechanism to sort out bundles from normal transactions in the network.
USES oF TMEV
- It displays the latest arbitrage details sent to the Solana network by searchers in a tabular form. It also displays the price.
- It explores bundles sent by other searchers in the network.
- Filters & inspects clients' bundles
- Shows tips earned by individual bundle
- Displays current searchers sent bundles queried by their public key.
Open-source:https://github.com/anoushk1234/tmev?tab=readme-ov-file
USES oF BUNDLESTREAM
- Makes use of gRPC streams to serve the latest bundles that have landed.
- Built on Jito’s Starrider RPC
- Employs already existing RPC Infra which can be tweaked for Jito’s upcoming gRPC block stream based on geyser
- Records all bundles from recent blocks submitted by searchers
Open-source:https://github.com/anoushk1234/tmev/tree/master/searcher-api
ANONPAY
ANONPAY is a responsive frontend dashboard to make private transactions with Elusiv. It is built on top of typescript SDK enabling all current features.
Elusiv is a privacy solution in web3 using ZK technology. It is unique to most privacy solutions as it uses an off-chain “Warden Network” to create private transactions.
On ANONPAY, you will be able to deposit, withdraw, and send to different addresses, balance, and private transaction history
This is still on devnet, but it is a good thing that projects are considering building on-top privacy solutions as this protects users from harmful incidents on the on-chain such as getting MEV-ed.
Open-source:https://github.com/builderz-labs/anon-pay?tab=readme-ov-file
CUBIK
Cubik built by Irffan Asiff is a decentralized Sybil resistance funding platform that enables organizations to conduct efficient and fair quadratic funding rounds built integrating civickey and dispatch forums to launch a censorship, resistant on-chain community forum.
Funding is critical in a project to help propel the project further as Irfan put it “Environmental projects are critically important public goods that need funding ”
One thing is peculiar with Cubik, the quality of projects being onboarded onto the platform is top-notch
Examples include :
futarchy by Meta-DAO
Marinade: Optimized Solana staking
LamportDAO:Hub for Solana blockchain
Sol Incinerator
SagaDAO
Quack and many more
QUADRATIC FUNDING
Now let's discuss in-depth what quadratic funding means as it is a common word in fundraising platforms and public goods
Quadratic funding is a crowdfunding mechanism that is most times decentralized and democratic and aims to promote fair, inclusive funding for public goods.
Quadratic funding combines small individual contributions with larger matching funds from a central pool. It uses a unique mathematical formula that rewards based on the number of people who have donated, not only donation size.
Let's picture this scenario where any amount of money you donated towards a project with potential is augmented not just by the size of the money, but by the number of people who participated in the cause of this action.
To contrast a different opinion that, it is based on popularity concept, yes it is, but comes with a twerk, where every particular donation is counted as a vote, the more votes a project gets, the more points accrued
It is a mathematically optimal way to fund public goods in a democratic community. It places a greater value on the total number of unique individuals supporting a project, rather than the total funding the project receives.
Quadratic funding seeks to provide equitable funding for public goods such as:
- Open-source software
- Scientific research
- Public art initiatives
For example, if two individuals contribute $1 and $2, respectively, to the public good, the quadratic funding level for that public good is (√1+√2)2≈5.83.
In contrast to traditional fundraising, which favors large donors, quadratic funding is designed to match small donations with a larger pool of funds so that everyone has an equal say in determining which public goods to finance.
Steps in illustrating quadratic funding to democratize
- Create a matching pool of funds: Funds are set aside in a matching pool for charitable contributions.
- Encouraging community support: The community is encouraged to participate in the voting of the public assets it values.
- Distribute matching funds using a quadratic formula: The matching pool of funds is distributed using a quadratic formula that tilts the pool weight to smaller contributions. For instance, the quadratic formula would give the project 4100 $10 donations more matching funds because it has more favored benefactors than the project with 10 $100 donations.
- Disperse funds to public goods: The matching funds are allocated based on the formula for the public goods.
With quadratic funding, developers can pool resources and collaborate on projects while ensuring that open-source software initiatives and other public goods receive funding proportional to their perceived value to the community.
Smaller initiatives that may not have the support of major funding but are still important to the community can greatly benefit from this.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Quadratic Funding
Here are the advantages of quadratic funding:
- Reduces the impact of largely concentrated whales on a project
- Providing matching funds for small contributions, thereby encouraging different sets of groups to invest in the project
- Encourages transparency among participants and allows users to track the performance of their project
- Developers are encouraged to create better-decentralized apps for web3 users due to immersed support from the community
The disadvantages of quadratic funding are:
- Determining major Influence on the project can be very hard due to arbitrary or intricate issues
- Bad actors may attempt to exploit the quadratic funding scheme by botting the process
- Some projects instead of being decentralized can be heavily influenced by other projects with large communities
- Establishing a quadratic fundraising system may become costly, which will in turn need funding thereby pivoting access to larger organizations and individuals.
Why Quadratic funding on Solana
Solana being the pioneering blockchain in the network has been taking leaps in technological advances over other blockchain networks, this is the first chain to have implemented quadratic funding on its fundraising platforms with Stockpile and Cubik championing this movement.
References :
Quadratic Funding:https://www.lcx.com/quadratic-funding-explained/#:~:text=Quadratic%20funding%20is%20a%20democratic,research%2C%20and%20public%20art%20initiatives.
