[PROPOSAL #917][VOTING][CORRECTED] DoraHacks: AEZ Quadratic Funding Program

Hub Proposals Community Spend
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Changelog

  • 2024-April-05: Posted initial draft
  • 2024-April-24: Added additional paragraph further describing the QF mechanism
  • 2024-May-01: Prop has been submitted on-chain as #917. Voting period commenced

DoraHacks and Dora Factory are requesting 80,000 ATOM for 24 months of Quadratic Funding prize pool for public goods, new teams building on the Hub and ATOM Economic Zone

TLDR:

As seen in its rich history, the Cosmos Hub, which birthed and bootstrapped the most open source and decentralized developer community seen thus far in the web3 industry, has one of the most active and robust governance mechanisms and participants. In a similar vein, Public Goods funding has also always been of crucial importance to the Hub’s stakeholders.

To further this mission, Dora Factory and Atom Accelerator DAO hope to run 10 Quadratic Funding (QF) rounds over the next 24 months, with a total prize pool of 100,000 ATOMs. This will equate to a prize pool of approximately 10,000 ATOMs each round, to fund public goods and developer teams bringing value to the Atom Economic Zone. These public goods will be of utmost importance as the AEZ enters its parabolic growth phase with the upcoming ICS 2.0 (Partial Set Security).

Dora Factory has run 20+ ecosystem QF rounds in the past four years, including the first-ever AEZ round, which garnered $10k in community contributions, which were matched with $60k from the prize pool.

Dora now turns to the Cosmos Hub community treasury, to formally introduce this program to the community, and scale this initiative to a meaningful size.

Assuming that governance accepts this proposal, the Atom Accelerator DAO will support Dora Factory throughout the 10 QF rounds, including distribution, scope, and Hub alignment. To the AADAO, Quadratic Funding represents the third medium for their grant deployments - along with regular grants and venture grants - to enhance and propel the AEZ.

To that end, if governance approves this 80,000 ATOM community pool spending proposal, AADAO will commit to contributing $200,000 USD toward the prize pool.

This will ensure a $ATOM prize pool of approximately $100,000 each round.

Background:

Dora Factory has just concluded the first-ever native Cosmos Hub quadratic funding round for Atom Economic Zone builders and community members.

In this first AEZ QF round, nearly 400 unique contributions were made to eight leading Cosmos Hub public goods, totalling approx. $10,000 USD in community donations. These contribution votes were quadratically matched by a pool of 5,000 $ATOM, sponsored directly by the Dora Factory CosmosHub PGS validator and the Dora Factory Foundation.

You can find more information about this first AEZ QF round and the projects that participated here, at the official DoraHacks platform: DoraHacks

Quadratic funding, based on Quadratic Voting described in Eric Posner and Glen Weyl’s book “Radical Markets”, stands as the preeminent method for mobilizing blockchain communities to champion public goods and developer teams, ensuring an equitable distribution of funding.

Quadratic funding is a democratic mechanism that directs funding based on community participation. It prioritizes projects with broad support rather than those with deep pockets, making funding decisions more fair and inclusive. Community members will be able to vote on prospective public goods projects with their ATOM, and the more individual voters a project attracts, the more funding it gets from the prize pool, potentially empowering smaller ATOM holders to have a much larger impact. To deter whales, quadratic voting uses an exponential curve to make casting multiple votes costly: For example, a QF round cant be structured so that 1 vote costs 1 token, 2 votes costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 cost 16, and so on. This unique voting mechanism prioritizes broad community support over a few large votes, with anti-Sybil measures in-place to prevent gaming the system.

The AEZ QF Round marks a pioneering instance of Quadratic Funding tailored for the Cosmos Hub. Given the absence of smart contract support on the Cosmos Hub, Dora Factory ingeniously introduced QF to the hub natively, leveraging the capabilities of Dora Vota. Functioning as a CosmWasm and IBC-enabled appchain, Dora Vota serves as the impartial foundational voting circuit infrastructure for the entire AEZ.

Why Quadratic Funding?

The AEZ Quadratic Funding Grant is a long-term program aimed at supporting the sustainable development of public goods and appchains in the ATOM Economic Zone. We firmly believe that even small contributions can help shape the future of the vast Cosmos ecosystem, and ultimately give rise to new cornerstone applications within Cosmos.

Quadratic funding is a crucial mechanism to finding gaps in the market, and ensuring highly used public goods remain funded. Public goods typically are not venture funded, and do not have any discernible business model or way to commercialize, so decentralized community funding can often be the only path to survival. For example, some of the AEZ public goods the Cosmos Hub community could support, include: IBC Relayers, NFT Indexers, popular cosmos-sdk modules, repo management tools, open-source frameworks, etc.

Community contribution to active projects is always open. This is an everlasting community initiative for the Cosmos Hub.

Quadratic funding rounds will happen once a while. Individual community contributions can be independent of quadratic funding rounds, so you can always make contributions even if there are no upcoming quadratic funding rounds.

About Dora Vota:

Dora Vota, a Cosmos SDK, CosmWasm enabled special purpose appchain developed by the Dora team, serves as the underlying infrastructure for Cosmos native quadratic funding (QF) rounds.

Quadratic funding is the dominant way to mobilize blockchain communities to support public goods and developer teams, and to ensure this funding is distributed fairly.

QF on Dora Vota provides numerous improvements and benefits when compared to traditional ad-hoc quadratic funding smart contract deployment. With ad-hoc deployment, every voting round is initiated as a separate smart contract on a specific blockchain. For example, the QF round Archway is hosting on dorahacks.io is operated through a CosmWasm smart-contract Dora Factory developers deployed natively on Archway.

Ad-hoc smart contracts are flexible but limited in certain functionality and scalability. It works well for DoraHacks users, but it cannot work equally well to satisfy all voting demands. For example, native QF rounds are not possible for the Cosmos Hub. The hub is not smart-contract enabled, so instead, the round has to be performed on another neutral chain which is still IBC enabled.

The Dora team deeply desires to bring quadratic funding to the entire Atom Economic Zone (AEZ) community, so we’ve devised this special-purpose voting appchain, Dora Vota, to realize this vision.

Dora’s Track Record:

DoraHacks and Dora Factory have facilitated 20+ ecosystem QF rounds since 2020 and channeled $10M in community funding to more than 1,000+ teams via QF with unicorn grantees in multiple ecosystems.

In 2024, Dora team has already hosted and sponsored three major quadratic funding rounds for Cosmos builders:

  1. Dora x Archway Quadratic Funding Round: Archway Community Quadratic Funding | Grants | DoraHacks
  • 12 participating teams
  • 23,300+ individual votes
  • 21,000+ ARCH community contribution
  • 300,000 ARCH matching pool distributed
  1. AEZ QF Round 1: DoraHacks
  • 8 participating teams
  • ~400 individual votes
  • ~$10,000 USD community contribution
  • 5,000 ATOM (approx. $60,000 USD) matching pool distributed

Some additional AEZ public good success stories from this round include:

  1. Dora x Injective Quadratic Funding Round
  • 1,500 $INJ (~$70,000 USD) matching pool
  • Kicked off 18th March 2024, in partnership with the Injective Foundation
  • First 5 days of traction: 435 Voters
  • Governance proposal with more information can be found here: Common

The Dora team has been working closely in the Cosmos ecosystem, especially within the AEZ, in conjunction with ATOM Accelerator DAO (AADAO), Confio, and the Cosmoverse team. In just the past year, DoraHacks has hosted some of the largest Cosmos-specific hackathons, including AEZ Boost, the first global hackathon dedicated solely to the Cosmos Hub, HackWasm Berlin, the official in-person hackathon for AwesomWasm, and Hackmos, the largest in-person Cosmos hackathon of the year, as part of Cosmoverse 2023. Through these events, the Dora team is already well-connected with the main developer candidates who will participate in this first native Cosmos QF round.

To date, Dora Factory and DoraHacks, have led 53 grants with 849,201 votes and $31.2m poured into funding projects. These include Quadratic Funding rounds hosted with Solana, Avalanche, Polygon, Archway, Injective, OpenSea, Ton Network and Cosmos Hub.

For the Cosmos community to participate, they will need to use Dora Vota infrastructure. $DORA token will be used to pay for gas on the platform. When various ecosystems launch QF rounds on Dora Vota, their token will be used as the voting token but automatically swapped for $DORA on the backend to once again pay for gas.

Dora Vota chain will be Atom Economic Zone aligned partnering with AADAO, and the core team is actively engaging in conversations with other key AEZ stakeholders, to plan for the rollout of Cosmos Hub Partial Set Security, and explore the opportunity to join itself.

DoraHacks will run QF rounds for the Cosmos ecosystem in perpetuity, taking an iterative and feedback driven approach to make sure that AEZ and Cosmos developers will be able to be funded whenever they want to build an innovative project.

There will be an X Space AMA session hosted on April 9th 9am PST, where we will dive into the importance of AEZ QF and sustainable funding for Cosmos Hub developers, so please come with your questions and thoughts! Set a reminder here: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPKqbwkPVMGb

Governance Votes

The following items summarize the voting options and their significance for this proposal:

  • YES - You agree that the Cosmos Hub community should support the expansion of the AEZ Quadratic Funding program, and contribute 80,000 ATOM to the overall developer matching pool.
  • NO - You do not agree with the expansion of the AEZ Quadratic Funding program, or do not believe the Cosmos Hub treasury should support this effort .
  • NO WITH VETO - You consider this proposal (1) to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.
  • ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.
12 Likes
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The intention is good, but it would be nice to be able to build a stack within the hub after the smart contract proposal.

2 Likes
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Think we can definitely look into deploying some CW QF infra directly on the cosmos hub as well, but regardless the spend proposal to fund the QF matching pool is still required.

Furthermore, I do think it’s worth noting that the whole point of QF rounds powered by $ATOM token on Dora Vota, is to better align public goods and early stage ideas that can power the growth of AEZ, which encompasses more than just the Cosmos Hub. We QF rounds on a credibly neutral Dora Vota appchain is uniquely set up to achieve this goal.

Permissioned nature of cw on hub will also likely make our qf rounds less flexible and reactive, so we think at this point it’s still best to operate them on Dora Vota, as we did with the very first AEZ QF round.

1 Like
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Agree with GOJWH. Little can be built on CosmosHub so why bother? Let’s wait for permissioned wasm

1 Like
5

in our opinion, a lot can be built for the AEZ today, which will ultimately benefit Cosmos Hub. Quadratic Funding will benefit all atom economic zone builders, many of whom will not be building directly on the hub

3 Likes
6

We as a community still need to define the “permissioned” part ofc, but I imagine we will probably only deploy infra-related CW on the Hub - regular contracts/dapps will live on Neutron. So the scope of what QF could fund - vis-a-vis what developers could deploy on the Hub - would be very narrow.

The QF rounds envisaged here are for anything and everything that would fall into the scope of public goods or tools/dapps that contribute to the AEZ in some way.

This is a little buried in the proposal, but here is the “trial run” that Dorahacks ran by themselves, which funded:

  • ICS721 / Interchain NFT gateway
  • A CW Interchain Account Controller
  • Packet Forward Middleware

(obviously, not full funding for those projects, but funding nonetheless)

I personally like the idea of QF - it’s us putting “skin in the game” - high-conviction votes on what should get funded (cause we are each individually contributing to the funding)

6 Likes
7

Also worth mentioning AADAO would be directly involved in the various QF rounds and will be able to provide detailed reporting to the Cosmos Hub community via transparency reports and other forms of communications. This would be treated as a regular grant that would be overseen by AADAO the same way we oversee & support all our grantees.

3 Likes
8

We endorse this program and want to provide constructive feedback. This initiative could potentially be overlooked due to its complexity, particularly for typical Cosmos users. We suggest reevaluating the proposal’s structure prior to launching it. Currently, the Cosmos community sentiment is quite low, as we’ve discussed in this post as well as this one.

Our concern is that users might scrutinize every community pool expenditure given the current climate. Thus, we advise extra care in presenting this proposal to on-chain governance. While we believe this proposal is beneficial for the community, we’re concerned that the current format might be too intricate for the average user. Even with our in-depth knowledge of blockchain technology and the Cosmos ecosystem, we found the proposition’s scope challenging to understand. We believe a general Cosmos user might find it even more challenging. We noted a lack of clarity regarding QF mechanisms and community involvement in the process. We recommend adding a dedicated paragraph to explain the process in detail, with practical examples.

This is why we would like to see a revised version of the draft before considering an on-chain proposition. Despite that, we definitely support the program.

We hope this feedback will be considered.
Govmos
pro-delegators-sign

5 Likes
9

We think that this is important for the development of AEZ, and we will support this proposal!

3 Likes
10

Thank you for the support and feedback. We’ve revised the forum post based on your comment, and included a change log and a additional paragraph further describing the QF mechanism. I will post below here as well for clarity:

“Quadratic funding is a democratic mechanism that directs funding based on community participation. It prioritizes projects with broad support rather than those with deep pockets, making funding decisions more fair and inclusive. Community members will be able to vote on prospective public goods projects with their ATOM, and the more individual voters a project attracts, the more funding it gets from the prize pool, potentially empowering smaller ATOM holders to have a much larger impact. To deter whales, quadratic voting uses an exponential curve to make casting multiple votes costly: For example, a QF round cant be structured so that 1 vote costs 1 token, 2 votes costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 cost 16, and so on. This unique voting mechanism prioritizes broad community support over a few large votes, with anti-Sybil measures in-place to prevent gaming the system.”

4 Likes
11

Thanks for this update. We hope you won’t mind us asking further questions. Regarding the general design, wouldn’t it be easier to roll this feature with a wasm contract directly on the Hub ? Now that the proposal #895 has passed with plans to grant the hub with permission-ed smart contract capabilities in the future. This kind of quadratic curve voting could be perfectly suited for these functionalities. We assume you have reasons necessitating to process these votes in a separate chain (even though you plan to launch PSS), we would be pleased to see you elaborate on this.

Nevertheless, we are really interested to see QF coming to the Hub one way or the other. One other aspect we would like to see more details about is regarding the sibyl protection mechanism you envision for the project. We have seen small accounts vote manipulations in the past, therefore we are very curious to learn more about your findings on this domain to counter such phenomenon.

4 Likes
12

Hello, all good questions!

One of the main goals of QF rounds powered by $ATOM token on Dora Vota, is to better align public goods and early stage ideas that can power the growth of AEZ. The AEZ encompasses more than just the Cosmos Hub, so we feel QF rounds on a credibly neutral Dora Vota appchain is uniquely set up to achieve this goal.

Dora Vota also creates dedicated blockspace for voting circuits such as QF, which we believe will enhance UX and streamline governance, which will further incentivize the robustness and decentralization of AEZ QF rounds.

The permissioned nature of cw on hub will also likely make our qf rounds less flexible and reactive, so we think at this point it’s still best to operate them on Dora Vota, as we did with the very first AEZ QF round.

As far as the anti-sybil mechanism go, we use a combination of methods to protect the system. These include a grace period after conclusion of the round for on-chain voter tally (it can easily be seen if many wallets were funded from a single address), and we have also developed aMACI (which stands for anonymous minimal anti-collusion infrastructure), which is a form of zk technology that can be integrated into QF rounds to further encrypt votes, preserve privacy, and introduces “proof-of-uniqueness” checks to prevent Sybil attacks.

You can read more on aMACI development here: Pioneering Decentralized Governance: A Retrospective on DoraHacks’ MACI/aMACI Study and Implementation | by DoraHacks | Mar, 2024 | Medium

4 Likes
13

I recommend deferring this proposal until consensus and governance are no longer distorted by staked pol.

Currently, every block is about 1% inaccurate, containing zero cost about power obtained by lobbying, instead of work or purchase .

Since governance proposals are decided by the exact same vote power, were this proposal to pass, The legitimacy of its passage would be in question.

Probably I do support this proposal.

I just think that we should prioritize ensuring that only stakers voices are heard in governance.

14

Definitely loved what we read out there. This greatly comfort us in supporting your team’s participation in this voting system. This is interestingly similar to some of the designs we had in mind for a “Govmos” chain we envisioned a couple of years ago. It’s fun to see that good ideas always find their way to the market. We’ll be happy to collaborate and share ideas with you regarding Dora Vota. Please reach out to us via contact@pro-delegators.com to set a meeting.

Also thank you for the clarifications. Even though we still think the community should further debate on CW versus DoraVota PSS deployment, we are now more in-line with your proposition.

5 Likes