Commit

Video Demo: https://youtu.be/ANw8fSEMBiA

Traditional fundraising models too often leave out communities typecast as “risky” investment environments. Spinning up legal structures can cost well over $10k+ USD, and deals take weeks or months to form. Projects in these communities are seen as uncertain or not valuable to assumed customer archetypes, preventing founders from being able to take the leap to start building. Unfortunately, this creates significant knock-on effects, reducing job opportunities and further investment. What if projects could be quickly spun up and funded at near zero cost, and the uncertainty about having enough capital to see your project through could be greatly reduced?

We have built a fully decentralized pre-commit dApp that allows founders to quickly create projects to be funded. Early evangelists and community members who have capital can then browse relevant projects and pre-commit capital. When founders feel like they have enough pre-committed capital, they can pull funds from their investors and begin building their project. Founders are provided a dashboard where they can see the total amount of funds committed, when funds are about to expire, and who has committed. All these actions are stored either on-chain, in decentralized storage or indexed by subgraphs. Over time, founders and committers can build up reputation over time, which will give more confidence to provide or receive capital. We believe that dramatically reducing the cost, speed, and uncertainty of committing capital to projects is the way we can democratize access to capital by creating networks of finance that naturally regenerate and support themselves.

This project is full-stack dapp on Mumbai, Goerli, and Optimism with a frontend in Next.js, a fethers.js backend microservice to coordinate ipfs pinning upload and querying, smart contracts to track on-chain commitments, and a subgraph to index the smart contract data. We used a bunch of sponsor technologies including:

• IPFS/Filecoin via Web3Storage to store our project descriptions
• The Graph to create subgraphs that index our commitment data
• Pocket Network for our RPC connections
• ENS to easily identify wallet addresses.
• We have support for multiple wallets including Metamask, Wallet Connect, and Coinbase Wallet.
• World Coin is used to verify that the project creators are humans.
• Autonomy to allow warnings to be issued at a given interval before a commit expires. Interestingly, this data is also indexed on our graph for use by the frontend.
• Chainlink to automate whenever a commit has expired and not yet been removed
• Openzeppelin for their standard libraries

We want our project to have a tangible impact and view it as community infrastructure/a public good. We believe that commits could be a new funding model in communities such as LATAM and the Global South, where high-trust investments could reduce uncertainty in funding underserved projects. As more of these projects get funded, underserved communities will begin to flourish, creating a positive feedback loop for more local projects to get funded and create more inclusion and regenerative opportunities.