Giveth has just released a new version of the DApp (in closed beta) that significantly increases our Donation Application’s Milestone functionality. Other new features and improved UX updates make it even easier to transparently manage donations, and bring us now very close to what we would call version 1.0! In the What’s DAppening series we want to keep you informed about our progress on building the Future Of Giving: what the new features are, why they matter and what to look forward to.

The DApp is on a roll! Since the recent integration of DAI on our platform, we started onboarding a number of fantastic and very active projects on our DApp, such as DataFund, GraceAid, and Castro Limon. For the latter we are collaborating with Alibre to beta test a ‘last mile’ solution, allowing easy crypto-to-fiat conversion. And to top it all off: we have a major new release of the DApp!

With this release we have focused mainly on optimizing the creation of Milestones, the smallest and most used building block of our DApp, making them way more configurable, based on user feedback. We made it possible to disable Milestone reviewing, to send the reward to the Campaign itself or set a recipient after Milestone creation, added an optional funding cap, enabled multi-token Milestones, and allowed funding after Milestone completion. Let’s break it down!

Optional Milestone Reviewer

Next to transparency the accountability of its users is and remains a key aspect of the Giveth Donation Application. This means that in most cases you want funded and completed Milestones to be reviewed by an independent and objective Milestone Reviewer, to ensure that the Milestone Manager (the person who proposed the Milestone) has actually fulfilled the described tasks and delivered sufficient proof before they can withdraw funds from the system. Milestones can however also be used for regular and fixed payments, such as the regular reward of a long-term contributor, in which case proof might be less relevant and timely payments (with fewer barriers) are more important. In the case of the Giveth DAC, the accountability stayed just as important but shifted mostly to the weekly Community meetings (where we account for time spent on tasks) and the monthly Roles meetings (where we evaluate delivered work of our peers). Accountability stays key, so we only recommend disabling this option if other processes to guarantee this are in place. An example of such a Milestone can be found here.

Send the reward to the Campaign or set your Recipient later

In some cases, community members may want to create a Milestone for the Campaign that acts more like a bonus if a metric is reached. Before you could do this, but you needed to send funds to a person and have them re-donate the funds to the Campaign. Now we can cut out the middleman, the wasted coordination, and the gas fees. If you flip the switch pictured above, you can raise funds directly for your Campaign!

In other cases, you may have a task for which you want to describe the execution steps but you have not found the right person to fulfill this just yet. By enabling the creation of Milestones without a set address to send the funds to once the Milestone is completed we allow you to use the Milestones themselves to promote the actual task itself, very much like a bounty. An example of such a Milestone without a Recipient (at time of publishing) can be found here.

Optional funding cap

Want to create a Milestone but don’t know exactly just yet how much funds will be required? Or maybe you don’t care how much you receive as a donation! As of now, it’s possible to create a Milestone without defining what the final amount needed will be. Imagine that you want to already start collecting funds for the purchase of solar panels, but you have not received a final invoice just yet, or you are going to do a good deed whether you get donations or not and just want to allow the community to contribute whatever they want. Now they can! For this we cap-less Milestone we can give the same example as above, as it has no Recipient and no funding cap!

Multi-token Milestones

As we’ve mentioned before the DApp now supports DAI as well, and more will be coming! In some cases the Campaign or Community, or for that matter any Giver, who wants to donate to your Milestone should have the freedom to donate in the currencies they prefer at that moment. To support this you can decide to set your Milestone to accept donations in both DAI and ETH. In this case, the field to indicate a specific amount disappears and the fundraising cap is automatically disabled. If you want to see an example of such a cap-less, multi-token Milestone, check out this great real-life Milestone by our contributor Dani.

And so much more!

As with all of our releases a lot of other tweaking happened under the hood, for more details you can dive into the code here, and of course, you can also just discover the new features via beta.giveth.io. With this release, we made some huge steps and crossed some of the final things off of our list to make our Donation Application feature-complete. Next steps are now amongst others a complete user-experience review and subsequent overhaul, and a migration to the xDAI sidechain. Next to this, we are also hacking away on what we’d like to call Giveth 2.0, which brings the focus to the sustainability of Giving itself.

You can get a sneak peek via this report and video on our work at ETHDenver where we won the Impact Track with the Pactful Team! You can also watch Griff explain it at EthCC. Now we are ramping up to build various components that will all tie into a working whole during Odyssey in the Netherlands, the biggest AI & Blockchain Hackathon in the world, where we have been accepted with 5 (!) teams. More on that coming soon!

Does all of this get you excited? Do you want to contribute to building the Future of Giving? If you’re a developer and you want to dive right in there are a number of ways you can get involved: