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Our ultimate strategy on building the open funding stack |
Potlock is the open funding stack.
Currently, Potlock is a composable and permissionless funding stack on NEAR. As the only and go-to public goods funding platform, we directly address a lack of plural funding sources and impact tracking within the NEAR ecosystem. Most immediately, we are going to market to build new funding mechanisms, composable contracts, front ends, and a clean user experience so even your grandma can use it. Our ultimate goal is to proliferate public goods funding by building a new class of tools and ways for people to coordinate, driven by mission alignment and regenerative incentives.
The aim of a decentralized ecosystem is to build systems that change the fundamental behavior of how we use technology to run our society that is both censorship resistant and can be “exited” to the community. The values of censorship resistance and open source allow for an environment where not only that can be used but that can be broken down into powerful components that run independently and can be innovated on by a wide array of contributors who are both mission & incentivized aligned to do so. Our ultimate goal is to build a financial and coordination stack that can not be shutdown and that provides value to public goods and the public goods ecosystem outside the core set of teams who started this journey.
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- Composable Stack: Every piece of the stack works independently of each other, can be forked and programmed according to each person's needs, and has no single point of failure. This applies to everything from the front end to middleware to indexers.
- Incentives for Growth & Devs: incentives go to those who directly contribute to the growth of the ecosystem and the development of innovation
- Values Alignment: governance is in the hands of mission-aligned operators who are focused on building positive impact
- Tokenomics: create a robust ecosystem of basket of public goods funding legos that boost whole industry and allow rapid acceleration of effective economies
- Identity & Privacy: for an ecosystem to have true governance, identity is a core element to this. To have censorship resistance, this is also true. Anonymous donations and voting without coercion is a key pillar to this. Additionally, it is important to prove that funding stack technology comes from a credible and auditable source.
- Agents: autonomous open source agents trained to source, fund, and track impact for projects, supplementing the decision making process.
- Progressive Decentralization: transition from team of contributors and on 1 chain, to independent systems that work together and decision-making is in the contributors. Encourage forks, diversity of clients, and addition of contracts.
Initially, we are governed by a council of core team members and contributions happen through various stakeholders, from DAOs, companies, non-profits, and individuals. All technology being built for the Potlock protocol is Open Source under an MIT license administered by Potluck Foundation DAO, a Marshall Island DAO / Non-Profit. We have many organization contributions to Potlock protocol that can be found here. Our mission is to create alignment, incentives, and technical buy-in from a series of core organizations to prevent a single point of failure. At the same time, the IP is all open source under Potluck Labs, Inc, a Delaware C-corp and open funding stack research organization.
We are sustained through venture funding, grants, donations, and optional fees on every part of our contracts. Soon we will be raising to reach product-market fit until a token is launched to the community to sustain development. As time progresses working with different ecosystem partners through SLAs and vested token swaps we will also diversify our treasury to exposure to ecosystem blue-chips that we work with.
Check out potlock.org/tokenomics (soon) for details
Governance Model:
- Initial Council: core team and advisors, and confederated contributor and organization modal
- Token Model based on $PTLK and $NADA for Nada.bot
- Shared & Plural Governance through token economy, a basket of public goods tokens through vested token swapping
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Official programs: Official grant programs and funds, such as government grants and the sovereign wealth fund, used this as a funding mechanism.
Agents Framework: break down each part of the funding lifecycle in specialized AI enabled agents that treasuries & the community use to cut down on overhead, while focusing on incentivization, gamifications and user experience.
Payments: Be a robust payment system that allows for allocation, accounting, and impact driving that surpasses market share p2p payments over systems like Venmo
Participatory democracy stack: a mix of government, payments to run, and tooling for network states. Build composable solutions that work for the largest networks and adapt to hyperlocalized and domain-specific use cases.
Ecosystem Development:
- A proliferation of businesses raising capital on top of funding infrastructure and committed to underlying infrastructure
- Communities dedicated to onboarding and education and robust developer ecosystems.
- Contracts, tooling, and frameworks are fundamental to Web3 development ecosystem
Value capture back into public goods infrastructure
- UBI for public goods contributors through aligned incentives
- Ownership through value adds to the ecosystem
- Shift narrative of blockchain for supporting the world public goods
- Build all governance allocation and funding mechanisms and put them into practice in a composable fashion
- Ecosystem internal funds for spinning up new funding mechanisms and spin-out companies
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Build a system that cannot be shutdown
- Succificient decentralization between contributors who understand the code base and who can iterate it
- Distribution across stakeholders, languages and nations for incentive models
- No single point of failure: in the event of regulatory scrutiny, targeting. No single point of failure on one blockchain.
- Diversity incentivizes the system for treasury sustainability.
- Redundancy of clients and distribution. Hosted and localized clients.
GTM: Our immediate go-to-market strategy is to align funding and public goods into the NEAR Ecosystem and expand grants program from a community-driven approach. Then expanding UX to use NEAR as the underlying infrastructure for giving for non-profit and mission-aligned Web3 narratives for funding, Network States, Privacy, DeSci, and Abstraction.
Phase 0 (now): Launch, Pilot, Iterate & Seed An Ecosystem
- Build with composability in mind
- Merge social graphs
- First 5,000 verified humans
- 1000 Public Goods onboarded and robust public goods discovery system
- First $1 million donated through contracts
- 10-15 rounds
- The proliferation of multiple gateways, tools, and a rich developer ecosystem
Phase 1: Build effective, robust plural funding source to accelerate the ecosystem
- Impact Tracking & Automation
- Composability: every individual component can be broken apart, with no single points of failure, work interoperability
- New Funding Mechanisms: build new funding strategies on NEAR
- Identity composability: nada.bot launched with advanced rules and custom configs
- Meme & Token Launch Application: normalize public goods tax for those coming in the ecosystem
- First $5 million donated through contracts
- Build Initial Agents
Phase 1.5: Hooked on Impact & Outreach into Traditional Institutions
- Incentivize daily impact and make as addictive as video games to make a positive impact at scale
- Gamification and incentive alignment (points system)
- Mobile native clients
- Reach out to governments, and NGOs for pilot programs
- Traditional non-profit verification system and tax benefits
- Account Abstraction
- New Engagement Primitives
- 10,000 Daily Active Users
Phase 2: Target new ecosystems and abstract using chain abstraction
- Tokenizations & collective DAO ownership
- Merging of social graphs and Ethereum ecosystem
- Rebuild infrastructure for new generation blockchains and connect using chain abstraction
- Facilitate vested token swaps for public goods ecosystem “skin-in the game”
- Deeper integrations to other’s chain primitives & aggregation of impact
- $100 million raised through the platform
- 10 Unique Funding Distribution, Advanced Registration
- Get 3+ Companies to Raise traditional capital building in Potlock ecosystem
Phase 3: Grow The Public Goods Ecosystem
- Funding Stack Available though 1000+ gateways with at least one on every continent, hosted locally, through decentralized storage providers with 50+ unique experiences
- $10 million annual budget to go back towards Potlock ecosystem rewards
- 1500 public goods developers
- 1 Viral Impact Consumer Application that reaches mainstream adoption
- Adoption of an identity system for 100+ Web3 native communities
Phase 4: End Game / Exit
- 2 billion people are aware or directly impacted by a pioneered funding mechanism
- Transition to community or labs exit
- Government Adopts Funding Stack
- Large-scale adoption of
- $10 billion market cap of public goods ecosystem-related coins
- $1 million monthly revenue in fees generated
- 20% of funding stack platforms integrate some element of the stack
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To this date we’ve been able to
- Build our first set of clients around public goods funding
- Integrate project profiles with impact tracking and social profiles
- Allows for DAOs to sign up and receive funding
- Enable on-chain referral models to automatically payout stakeholders involved
- Create a direct donation platform with project registries
- Built permissionless quadratic funding contracts
- Build decentralized front-end framework with Alem.dev
In the first 2 years
- Potlock Legos: building a composable framework
- Additional Chains built with Chain Abstraction
- Web2 rails and onboarding with rapid progressive custody
- Gamified Mobile Clients
- Points, Tokens
- Coordination Systems
- Funding Agent Economy
It is crucial to build as the market reacts and the relatively nascent public goods ecosystem evolves. The technical roadmap is subject to change.
Regulatory uncertainty regarding the flow of funds and a permissionless stack may cause problems. This is why we are building an ecosystem to decentralize every module.
Contract Upgrades & Audits: We are locking all our contracts so we cannot update them and move on to versioning. Every financial contract will be locked, and we have a budget and allocation to continue sustaining this innovation.
Chains & Infra Uncetraining: Certain chains can go down and no longer have fit. This is why we are building across different chains for not a single point of failure.
Public Goods Funding x Ecosystem Maturity Tradeoff: As ecosystem treasuries tend to mature and public goods are funded, as is the goal of these funding mechanisms, their is more opportunities, liquidity, in and ecosystem and less top down capital allocation. As this occurs the open funding stack for a particular chain needs to transition to community coordination tools.
Metrics we are optimizing for
- Funding Through the OFS
- Fees Generated
- Innovative Funding Strategies Introduced
- Project Incubated & Individuals Funded and Sustained
- Number of Donors
- Daily Active Users
- Integrations & Partnerships
- Flywheel Funding: projects that receive funding, using funding stack to continue to support funding
Moreover, we will streamline these metrics' automation through the data guild.
- Developers + Contributors: building funding primitives, contributing to the overall ecosystem.
- Founders: building whole applications on our stack
- Growth: gaining adoption, can be segmented into BD, Marketing, and
- Investors: those who support companies and projects through equity or token-based investments
- Donors: Sponsor and Funders. Individual donors or more significant sponsors supporting grant rounds.
- Capital Allocators: manage grant rounds, and allocate capital, like the enterprise clients of our software stack.
- Projects / Funded People: users of the application who are affected
- Core Team: early on supported the project and drove the vision of the project
Engagement Strategies:
- Localized teams to support and govern each process. A team to support ecosystem growth, dev rel.
- Donors incentives and robust airdrop network and well as a decentralized operations system.
- Marketing team focused on project and donor acquisition and retention
- Sales team to onboard treasuries with custom open funding stack solution to bolster overall network and to give ecosystem partner engineers in bound clients. .
- Incentives for all donors
- Investor Relations to convert clients, and venture capital to supply labs and teams building on stack with traditional capital.
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Our ultimate strategy is impact alignment. Be aligned with the economies of all systems providing public goods funding infra that goes beyond borders, chains or networks. Build a robust treasury to sustain an ecosystem where independent companies who already are in revenue or contributing to the underlying stack, or enough independent startups can raise capital for their funding stack use case.
An alternative strategy for having Potluck Labs associated with building software on this stack is to be acquired by a company like KickStarter or Indiegogo as they venture while still maintaining IP and tech by the rest of the ecosystem.
Governance transition.
- Move away from council-based governance to token-based based with checks and balances between contributors, and token holders.
- DAOs with their own treasures with 6-month funding stretched that focus on booth-specific verticals and initiatives
Reaching this end game takes a network of villages. If you want to get involved in Potlock governance, get involved in the ecosystem.
Would like to thank @plugrel for writing this, Build DAO, Potluck core team, Banyan, NEAR Foundation, NEAR Digitical Collective, Minority Programmers, and Minority Think Tank Foundation for making it happen.
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References:
- Maker DAO End Game https://endgame.makerdao.com/endgame/overview
- Gitcoin Whitepaper 2.0 and End Game
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