Decentralized Grants Orchestration Tool-MVP

OceanDAO Round 14
#1

Part 1 - Proposal Submission

Name of the Project

Decentralized Grant Orchestration tool

Proposal in One sentence

Build a tool that helps streamline the OceanDAO grants process and helps run the entire grant operations in a decentralized fashion

Description of the project

Based on our research talking to grants managers, governors, and grantees across multiple different protocols, we observed that :

  1. Grant processes are cumbersome with a lot of manual effort in the application process. Disparate tools/systems make this experience clunky.
  2. Lack of feedback/interaction between the grant governance body and the grantees/applicants creates discontent and confusion amongst the applicant community
  3. Limited community involvement in idea contribution, voting, feedback, and collaboration stymies the spirit of decentralization and also the contributions of the community in the success of the protocol
  4. Lack of implementation of milestones, milestone-based payments, follow-ups have resulted in the poor realization of the grant project objectives.

Questbook would like to address these problems for protocols as a whole and OceanDAO in particular by building a Decentralized Grants Orchestration tool. OceanDAO can benefit from this tool by:

  1. Automating & streamlining the grants operations
  2. Decentralizing the idea generation and activating the community to contribute
  3. Efficient Community-based decision making
  4. Building on-chain Reputation score for the builders to reduce the information asymmetry while voting

Grant Deliverables

Our grants orchestration tool is currently piloted with Polygon. We are looking to port it to OceanDAO as well.

Deliverables include:

  1. Launching the MVP by 20-Feb
  2. Onboarding OceanDAO and migrating the grants processes onto the tool MVP.

Which category best describes your project?

Improvements to OceanDAO

Are you applying for an Earmark?

New Project

What is the final product?

The beta version of the Decentralized Grants Orchestration Tool. The technology stack is completely decentralized. All the transactions happen via smart contracts on-chain. These contracts are deployed natively to all chains, for a multi-chain future.

‘Value add’ Criteria

Once implemented, the DGO tool will help streamline the entire grants application, shortlisting, and operations processes. This will lead to more active community engagement and pave way for good projects to get funded and delivered by the community (increase # of proposed, # of funded projects, and # of successfully delivered projects).

Viability

Questbook has a strong past track record of building products that impact the community. We are looking to form a long-term collaboration with Ocean Protocol & Ocean DAO. We are already working with the likes of Polygon, Harmony, Solana among others, in designing the product and these protocols have committed to disburse more than $2Mn worth of grants through the DGo tool in Q1’22.

One of the noteworthy aspects of the product is that we are building the product by taking active feedback from the various stakeholders in the grants ecosystem - executive leadership, protocol product managers, grants operation managers, governance members, grantees, and a community of developers.

Promoting Ocean mission and values

The DGO tool is decentralization tooling coupled with the power of the community. By design, the tool is intended to help Ocean enable transparency in the entire grant governance and to deepen the decentralization ethos in the Ocean grants process. By involving the community, and by encouraging the community to participate in delivering the objectives of the grant, we help Ocean achieve its mission of spreading the value amongst the larger community.

Funding requested

$3000. Please that we need more funds to build the project and integrate Ocean on the tool.

Proposal wallet address

questbook.eth

Team website

https://questbook.app. The Figma for the product can be found here:

Team Twitter

https://twitter.com/questbookapp

Project Lead contact details

Madhavan Malolan Chetlur , madhavan@questbook.app

Country of residence

The company(CreatorOS Inc) is US Delaware C-corp and most of the team including 3/4 of the founders reside in India. One of the co-founders lives on the US west coast.

Part 2: Team

About Questbook

Questbook is a YC company. Since Sep’21, we have helped nearly 16,000 developers globally transition from Web2 to Web3. On our portal https://openquest.xyz, we hosted nearly 100 high-quality project-based tutorials on Ethereum, Solana, NEAR, and Polygon and these tutorials are offered to the community for free. We have also assisted Solana and Polygon with developer learning and mentorship support during various hackathons and developer community initiatives that they undertook.

Team member details

  • Madhavan Malolan : CEO, Questbook

    • Building in crypto since 2016.
    • Among first 5 contributors to Plasma (ethereum scaling solution) specifications.
    • Open source contributor.
    • ex-Microsoft, Computer Science IIIT-H.
    • LinkedIn. Github

  • Abhilash Inumella : Co-founder, Leads Product

    • Building in Crypto since 2019.
    • ex-CEO of Samosa Labs (10M users, funded by Sequoia, Xiaomi).
    • Ex-Google, Ex-Facebook, Computer Science IIIT-H.
    • LinkedIn

  • Sriharsha Karamchati : Co-founder, Leads Community

    • Building communities since 2019.
    • Spends 18h a day on Discord.
    • ex-Intuit, Computer Science IIIT-H.
    • LinkedIn

  • Subhash Karri : Co-founder, Leads BD and Partnerships

    • Investing in crypto since 2017.
    • Led Mytrah Solar Energy $400M AUM co.
    • MBA from ISB, Computer Science IIIT-H.
    • LinkedIn

  • Krati Jain: Head of Engineering

    • Building in Crypto since 2021.
    • Full-stack engineer with 10+ years experience
    • Ex-Microsoft, Ex-Cred, Ex-Flipkart
    • LinkedIn

  • Gnanlakshmi TC : Head of Research and Content

    • Building in Crypto since 2015
    • Blockchain architect, advisor to many blockchain startups
    • Ex-Oracle, Ex-Wiley
    • LinkedIn

The total team size of Questbook is 25 including the product, engineering, research, business, and community teams.

Part 3: Proposal Details

The tool helps in the Improvement of the OceanDAO.

3.1 Details of the proposal:

The current grant proposal is for delivering the MVP of the DGOT tool this month.

3.6 Category “Improvements to OceanDAO”:

  • We commit to collaborating closely with OceanDAO core team. Y
  • We commit to making publicly available any improved DAO tooling. Y

3.7 If the project includes software

  • Project Mockups: The tool mockups can be found here.

  • Project Tech stack:

    • Smart Contracts are written in Solidity
    • Compatible with any EVM chain
    • Graph Protocol for indexing/retrieval of data
    • React for front end engineering
    • Ethers.js for connecting to chain

3.9 Project Deliverables - Roadmap

The product is under development and is scheduled to go-live by 15-Feb-2022.

Timelines:

  • Product Beta testing | Feb 15 2022
  • Making our product live on Polygon test-net | Feb 25 2022
  • Polygon Bridge for mOCEAN token transfer | Mar 10 2022
  • Test the product with mOCEAN tokens | Mar 18 2022
  • Open source our codebase; both front-end & back-end | Mar 20 2022
  • Make it live on Polygon mainnet | Mar 22 2022
  • Do a live stream with OCEAN community | Mar 25 2022
  • Collate feedback and prioritize next iteration | Apr 15 2022

What are the team’s future plans and intentions?
We are focusing on the MVP release for Feb’22. A few other features are in the product roadmap. Also, feature prioritization will be dependent on the feedback from the users. A few extensions that were planned include:

  • Through a cycle of grants, we will look to add value to the Ocean DAO Engineering stack while committing to the development and improvement of the DGO tool.
  • Getting more community to participate in decision making i.e grants alumni voting and evaluating milestones
  • Getting community members to also fund and invest in grant winners thus creating long term alignment between the builder and OCEAN community
2 Likes
#2

Hi @skarri, I have now registered Questbook’s Grants tool into Airtable however the project is being rejected because it does not have 500 OCEAN inside it’s account.

Please update this so your project can be Accepted for Round 14.

All the best!

#3

Are you also planning to leverage the questbook app and community eventually? Curious on how that could work. It seems you have an active community of developers.

#4

Hi @idiom-bytes, Thanks for registering us. I missed the 500 $OCEAN token pre-requisite. The wallet now has the required $Ocean in it.

Thank you!

1 Like
#5

Hi David,
As I mentioned in my proposal, we see the product as tooling + community. On the tooling front, we have
a) the Grants Orchestration tool
b) Openquest.xyz - a portal where all the tutorials will reside. These tutorials are free to access for the community and a lot of discussions in our community happen around this learning content as well.

Community

Questbook community exists to upskill, collaborate and build in Web3. We have a very active and collaborative community of developers who are eager to transition to Web3 and contribute to the ecosystem. We encourage and mentor the community in grant proposals. In fact, as we are beta testing with Polygon, almost 35+ ideas and $1.2Mn worth of proposals(under review) got generated by our community in the last 30 days. Once OceanDAO onboards onto DGO tool, we would encourage the community to contribute to the Ocean ecosystem as well.

Learning:
To upskill the learners, we leverage openquest.xyz content. While the initial content was developed by the Questbook internal team, we realized that to scale this effort we need to involve the community as well in it. So, we encouraged the community to build content in our specific format of ‘quests’ ie., byte-sized and learning while building projects. We will continue to put efforts to leverage the community in creating quality content while mentoring them on making the content to be effective ‘quests’.

1 Like
#6

Just out of curiousity and since you passed through YC: Why are you deciding to raise funds through the OceanDAO? Given your reputation, wouldn’t asking VCs give a higher bang/buck?

#7

Hi Tim,
Valid question. We do have access to the VC money and the money we need to build the tool is way more than what we are asking for here. Here are a few reasons as to why we are still applying for a grant:

  1. We want to work closely with the community, get honest feedback, and make ourselves more accountable to the ocean community.
  2. Money is secondary, but we want to make a difference to the Ocean community - because after all, the product once integrated is something this community is going to use on a day-to-day basis.
  3. We want to go through the process and understand every step and question that come up on the way, including ones like this :slight_smile:
1 Like
#8

OK, from a vision/mission perspective of your company though, I don’t fully get it. You’ve shipped openquest.xyz, which seems like a cool and genuinely prolific product. But it’s purpose is education, isn’t it?

So how does building a grants orchestration tool fit with the mission and vision of openquest?

1 Like
#9

Thank you for sending OCEAN to your wallet @skarri, it has now been Accepted into R14.

All the best!

#10

Hello everyone and especially @skarri

Welcome to the Ocean DAO community and I appreciate the level of discussion and candor that is there on offer to the proposals that have come through.

From a personal level of feedback, I had the opportunity of introducing Subhash & Questbook team in one of the Working groups (DAO-engineering) where they had taken the feedback of functioning autonomously to stand a better chance to operate hand-in-hand with the community & the tech-stack.

It’s also pleasing to see the early engagement we have had so far and I hope to see a lot of value insights open the community.

From a Project Guiding Working group perspective, I commend the project team in being a good fit on the following evaluation criteria

  • Usage of Ocean & Viability of the project:

The proposed usage of Ocean seems to have started in the right direction where there is a lot of opportunity to decentralize learning of Ocean technicalities to the active developer community. We hope to see more value exchanges in the coming weeks.

  • Community activeness & contribution to the ecosystem:

We welcome the activity vision put forth by the Questbook team and appreciate the community activity schedule that is there on offer in the coming timeline. We encourage the team to continue the value exchange process furthered from the team of active Web3 experience.

Based on the above reasons, I commend the project team to drive forward the potential developments through the DAO voting period.

Cheers

Prakash | Project Guiding WG | Discord

prk-sig-3
^ Want a cool Sigil like this for yourself? Join the PG-WG Discord

1 Like
#11

Hi @skarri,

I have familiarized myself with the proposal, figma designs, and general outline.

First, it’s awesome to see some of our grant process & structure being utilized for the software. Mechanisms like having teams submit their grant deliverables in order to continue accessing funds, that’s great!

Here is some general feedback that’s kind of keeping us from using this:

  • No earmarks & funding channels (from what I saw)
  • No funding tiers, mins/maxes (from what I saw)
  • No discussions/forums or integration with Discourse for DAOs to provide feedback & participants to improve their proposal (from what I saw)
  • No view of how the funding round played out (please refer to pearl)
  • Admin Options (we don’t normally veto project application, but we do need to verify grant deliverables & that projects applied for the right earmark such as core-tech initiatives)
  • Voting mechanisms & strategies (does it use snapshot? can we implement QF? eth/bsc/poly staked ocean LP? You can view our snapshot strategy here).
  • Closed source?
  • No API?

We had prioritized building our own portal due to various challenges that you mentioned in the project description, and are continuing to forge ahead due to the various points I listed above.

Having said that, due to Questbook receiving funding from OceanDAO, I would love to request that we make QB available for OceanDAO participants who are running their own funding/grants program and would like a tool to make their process easier. Hopefully QB can offer their tool to OceanDAO participants for free so we can continue to nurture this community.

@skarri I’m also sending you a DM with my contact info in case you want to discuss the list I shared above. We have yet to find a solution that fits all the requirements that we have identified as being mission critical.

Congratulations on the QB roadmap and I look forward to seeing it being utilized by participants in our community!

All the best,

  • Idiom
1 Like
#12

I agree with the current assessment of @idiom-bytes in view of concurrent changes that have been discussed in DAO engineering meetings.

While the feedback might be having a later scope to the project, I believe the following active community facing projects can benefit in running a few sub-grants/micro-grants.

  • Algovera run by @richardblythman
  • Maybe @realdatawhale? They do run their own set of content curation for Tutorials & Media content. Some additional brainstorming might be needed to understand how this can work
  • Ocean Missions run by @Scotty
  • Potential Sub-DAOs/Working groups when they reach larger corpus of funding
  • Maybe @DataUnion run by @Robin if they wish to have a look.
  • I’ve noticed MGH DAO run by @xtimesyequalsk run a few external grants but I’m not sure if they intend to run their grants entirely in Ocean.
  • I’d also intend to selfishly use this for my own project with the Indian Outreach Program. So leveraging this tool will also be in my interest.

& maybe a few more projects. Apologies if I may have missed a few projects.

What next: Perhaps once the Demo is live ~ Late Feb- early march, going by your timelines, it would be prudent to run a survey sometime in March to relevant stakeholders if they would use the Tool, a little ahead of the intended Feedback date (April15) so it doesn’t add a lot of overheads to the current developmental timelines.

Nice-to-have feature: One other support that I might have liked to see is potential Invoicing support as well? Or perhaps an integration with existing solutions like Request.Network might be cool.

Regards,

Prakash Project Guiding WG | Discord
image

3 Likes
#13

Main updates on our project deliverables so far:

#14

@skarri please keep in mind that you now need to submit your proposal updates via https://seed.oceandao.org/ in order for you to re-apply to another grant.

Thank you!

#15

Project submitted deliverables:

Top updates:

#16

Admin:

Hi Questbook! Thank you for completing your deliverables! It is clear that your app launched, there were many improvements made, and that Ocean Indian Outreach integrated a micro-grant into the platform, and that it achieved some interesting results, that’s great. I had provided some feedback previously with regards to various requirements relating to OceanDAO, and am still concerned there are aspects that would keep us from being able to adopt this tooling for any major deployment. In other words, as it stands, OceanDAO cannot migrate it’s grant process for a wide range of reasons. Decentralized Grants Orchestration Tool-MVP - #11 by idiom-bytes The proposal states that it’s goal is to onboard OceanDAO grants, migrate it into the MVP, however there has been very little collaboration in order to align with mission-critical requirements and the immediate roadmap. If QB wants to focus on building a product that many DAOs can undertake, that’s fantastic. The tool can be used for a wide range of proposals and grants, and it may be that more teams like Algovera and others who are running microgrants, could perhaps use the service. I would recommend an increased engagement from QB if it indeeds try to solve issues for OceanDAO, or improve it’s definition for how it is being of value-add to OceanDAO. Adoption by more projects inside of our ecosystem would be a great success metric. On that note, I would like to thank you for submitting your proposal, completing your deliverables, helping other projects in the ecosystem deploy micro-grants, and scale their efforts. I look forward to reviewing future proposals from your project. All the best!