Four new teams have been awarded grants with funding from the Aragon Project

Earlier the Nest grants program introduced the five first teams that had been awarded grants and told what they are working on. On this second update we announce the four new teams that have been granted funding by the Aragon Project.

For the Nest program, the goal has always been to find great people to work on common goods that will produce quality results that benefit either of these two ecosystems as a whole. We are dependant on the prosperity of Ethereum, and others rely on Aragon to provide them tools for success.

There's a large stack of developers out there who just want to create great things without worrying about where they can get food on their table while working on such a common good. Not every project needs an ICO, not every team needs a business model, and not every piece of software needs a team or an employer.

A project can be funded without having to go through all the time, effort and stress that creating a token sale entails. A team might just want to build a single piece of software that isn't seeking to make a profit, just to get it out there. Someone might want to passionately contribute to the community and #buidl something by themselves and still make a living while creating that piece of software.

The Nest program was created to meet circumstances like these and provide funding to those who wish to step up and construct such relevant software. Therefore, we are not interested in funding startups or monetizable solutions. In order to achieve the best possible results on selecting which projects and ideas to fund, the whole process is made transparent through the Nest Github repository and the only requirement is to be open-source. This also allows all the community members in the ecosystems to take part and comment on what proposals and requests for funding they see as valuable.

New teams awarded funding

ZK Labs | Scalable voting

Proposal: Scalable & Private Voting through Bilinear Pairings

Team: ZKLabs

Short description of the project by the team:

The work will produce off-chain signature generation with efficient on-chain verification. The scheme will scale well and the steps beyond key registration and final verification will be done off-chain.

The goal is to support on-chain ring signing that can handle a member set with size of at least multiple thousands. Primary use cases would be voting and authentication, ideally with the option of verifiable anonymity.

Currently, no ring signature implementation can scale to anything beyond 10-15 participants per ring, per block. We hope the R&D undertaken through this grant will serve as a foundation to overcome these limitations.

The end product should be a set of libraries supporting the on-chain and off-chain processes, and a proof of concept implementation for scalable on-chain voting that leverages the Aragon platform. A diagram of the interplay of the components in the final delivery can be seen here.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $145,000 in ETH

Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

Giveth | Giveth DApp

Proposal: Giveth DApp Completion facilitating Aragon DAC

Team: Giveth

Short description of the project by the team:

Giveth is re-engineering the non-profit funding system, by creating an entirely free, open-source DApp on the Ethereum and Rinkeby Blockchains. Our DApp utilizes LiquidPledging and a series of DACs, campaigns and milestones (described in product definition) to automate away bureaucracy and enable Change Makers (nonprofits, community based organizations, faith-based organizations, social services agencies, etc.) to operate with a high level of transparency and accountability. The DApp’s LiquidPledging smart contract system provides Givers the power to veto fund allocations and even withdraw funds at any point until the moment they are locked in and dedicated to a specific cause. This functionality forms the foundation of the DApp and creates a better world for parties on both sides of a transaction, the Change Makers and those that give to them.

The DApp is nearly usable by non-Giveth groups, we are testing the bridge on Ropsten and Rinkeby right now. The Aragon DAC would be one of the first DACs on the platform. The Aragon DAC would utilize LiquidPledging to fund and govern the decentralized development of the Aragon platform. As the DApp evolves and adds greater functionality the Aragon DAC will be able to have its issues addressed and continue to evolve itself.

To finish the DApp and make the Aragon DAC a reality we are requesting funds to cover the development time spent on turning LiquidPledging into an AragonApp, as well as additional funding to cover DApp development for the next 6 months. We have to finish fully integrating LiquidPledging into an AragonApp, migrate the DApp’s user interface and making necessary upgrades to finalize the the DApp.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $154,500

Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

Espresso | Datastore + Aragon Drive App

Proposal: aragonOS-compatible encrypted datastore

Team: Espresso Team

Short description of the project by the team:

Sharing and storing files is a fundamental necessity in every organization. The majority of services available today (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Onedrive...) are centralized and though they provide cheap and easy access to storage, there are also numerous consequences to this centralization: far from perfect server availability, arbitrary censorship, flawed privacy, possibility of power misuse and these are just a few examples of the drawbacks it can cause.

Of course, decentralized alternatives exist and are starting to fill the gap, but nothing is specifically designed to address the needs of DAOs. With the recent release of Aragon 0.5, creating and managing DAOs is more simple than ever but there is still a need for a service that would let people as well as apps to easily store and share files with specific permissions to other members of the organization and to the general public.

This is what we propose here: The Datastore, a set of smart contracts based on AragonOS coupled with a javascript interface that will let entities of an organization store, modify, delete and set permissions to files and other data.

To showcase the possibilities of this tool, we also propose to create Drive, an Aragon app that will use the Datastore to let members of a DAO upload files and organize them by folders.

Preview of the Drive App:





Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $144,000

Additionally up to $50,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:

DAppNode

Proposal: DAppNode

Team: DAppNode

Short description of the project by the team:

What happens when you’ve got to use a Decentralized P2P network, but securing your own nodes takes a lot of time and effort?

You see what we have now, a Decentralization bottleneck.

At no point in the last 2 years has there been more than 13,000 Bitcoin nodes online and that number got as low as 5500

MetaMask and MyEtherWallet/MyCrypto are the primary wallets used on Ethereum and most users are using these wallets’ default nodes… This is a huge centralizing force in Ethereum.

The people who do run their own node end up having to spend a lot of time, troubleshooting keeping it updated and synced without the ability to easily share their node (and efforts) with family and friends.

DAppNode is creating an infrastructure that addresses these issues and more by building a simple, easy, self-empowering system made specifically for hosting P2P clients for DApps, Cryptocurrencies, decentralized websites, IPFS, and more. Members of the WHG believe DAppNode is an essential censorship resistant tool that will empower everyone to join the decentralized world we are all working towards.

Awarded funding in the grant:

Total: $90,000

Additionally up to $30,000 bonus paid in ANT, decided upon successful completion of deliverables

Learn More:



If you have an expert level understanding of Ethereum, and have an idea for a proposal or wish to request funding for you or your team to work on one of those proposals, visit the Github repository!

Browse Nest Proposals at https://github.com/aragon/nest/issues

See Nest Requests for Funding at https://github.com/aragon/nest/pulls