Author: Chris Lee

A major event in the Cosmos ecosystem is the recent passing of Governance Proposal №917: a request by Dora Factory and DoraHacks for a $1 million grant fund from the Cosmos Hub community treasury. This grant will support ten rounds of Quadratic Funding community donations within the Cosmos Hub ecosystem over the next two years.

As one of the largest treasury funding applications, this proposal sparked extensive discussions within the Cosmos community and received overwhelming support. Over $1 billion worth of ATOM voted in favor, including major validators like SG-1, Chorus One, P2P, Zero Knowledge Validator, Everstake, and core Cosmos contributors such as Informal Systems, Keplr, and Cosmostation. The approval rate reached 91.6%, making Gov Proposal 917 the motion with the highest approval rating in the history of the Cosmos Hub.

Following the approval of this proposal, Dora Factory, in collaboration with DoraHacks, has officially announced the second AEZ (ATOM Economic Zone) quadratic funding program, marking the launch of the first long-term funding initiative. This quadratic funding program will span two years, starting on May 15, 2024, and ending in May 2026, during which ten rounds of community voting, donation and matching pool distributions will take place. The total matching pool comprises $200,000 and 80,000 $ATOM.

The passing of Gov Proposal 917 brings native Quadratic Funding to the Cosmos Hub for the first time.

Why did the Cosmos community almost unanimously agree to approve a $1 million grant for public goods infrastructure, Dora Factory, and the global developer incentive platform, DoraHacks?

What is public goods funding, and what role do public goods play in the Web3 ecosystem?

What is Public Goods Funding?

Public goods funding is a frequently discussed concept within the Web3 industry. Generally, public goods refer to goods or services that are available for everyone to use. Parks, libraries, and roads are public goods and are typically provided and managed by governments or other public institutions.

Traditionally, public goods have characteristics such as non-excludability (one person’s use does not prevent others from using it), non-rivalry (one person’s use does not reduce availability for others), and positive externalities (one person’s benefit also benefits others).

In crypto, public goods can include blockchain infrastructure, storage, developer tools, software middleware, and some user-facing applications such as block explorers, data dashboards, and wallets.

Due to its inherent transparency and verifiability, crypto and blockchain are ideal tools for funding public goods. Furthermore, smart contracts can significantly enhance funding efficiency and reduce costs.

However, web3 public goods also face numerous challenges.

While everyone recognises the necessity of public goods, long-term support from ordinary users, foundations, and project teams are rare. As a rapidly developing industry, crypto presents new narratives that vie for limited attention, time, and funding.

Specifically, this issue can be broken down into three main points:

· Lack of coordination among the various parties involved in public goods funding (foundations, institutions, DAOs, developers, and communities).

· A shortage of sustainable and effective funding mechanisms.

· Public goods funding is often perceived as not interesting.

Enter Dora Factory, which strives to build infrastructure that enables large-scale adoption of public goods funding.

Dora Factory: Infrastructure Born for Public Goods

Dora Factory has spearheaded public goods growth since its inception. Most recently, the Dora Factory team proposed an ambitious plan to the Cosmos Hub, requesting a grant of $1 million worth of ATOM tokens from the Cosmos community treasury. This grant will fund the matching pool of ten rounds of native quadratic funding for the Cosmos Hub over the next two years. This proposal garnered attention and received support from key Cosmos contributors, including Keplr, Cosmostation, Chorus One, and CryptoCito.

Dora Factory is a leading decentralised governance infrastructure and multi-chain public goods funding protocol stack, incubated and supported by DoraHacks, the industry’s developer and public goods funding platform. Its products include Public Good Staking infrastructure and Dora Vota, an appchain for voting and governance designed to empower the global Hacker Movement, open-source communities, and DAOs.

Multi-Chain Quadratic Funding: Aligning Communities and Ecosystem Builders

The Dora Factory team has been committed to promoting the adoption of multi-chain quadratic governance. It is the first and only team in the industry to develop and advocate for this approach. Dora Factory is a true leader in multi-chain quadratic funding, successfully deploying native quadratic funding in numerous mainstream crypto ecosystems, including BNB Chain, Solana, Polygon, Aptos, Cosmos Hub, Injective, Filecoin, and Avalanche.

Token-holder communities can support high-quality early-stage projects and public goods within various ecosystems through native-token donations, fostering better collaboration among foundations, communities, and developers. Dora Factory has facilitated over $10 million in decentralized funding to the multi-chain crypto ecosystem through its quadratic funding protocol.

With the passing of Gov Proposal 917, the Cosmos Hub, with the help of Dora Factory, has its native, long-term community quadratic funding program for the first time. Core development teams working on public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem, including infrastructures, developer toolings, data dashboards, and nascent appchains, can now receive long-term, stable funding and community support.

Public Good Staking: Providing Sustainable Funding for Public Goods

In late 2022, Dora Factory introduced the concept of Public Good Staking. By operating underlying infrastructure such as validators, operators, sequencers, and provers, they earn native block rewards that are continuously used to fund multi-chain developers and public goods ecosystems.

Dora Factory has promoted public good staking in over 30 ecosystems’ mainnets and testnets. With support from foundations, institutions, DAOs, and community partners, Dora Factory has achieved a TVL (Total Value Locked) of over $400 million in less than one year. This figure is poised to grow, providing up to $10 million in sustainable annual funding. Through steadily increasing TVL, continuous product iterations, and collaborations with leading developer communities like DoraHacks, Dora Factory has become the only team capable of ignoring market fluctuations to fund developers consistently and growing multi-chain ecosystems. Dora Factory also supports a series of long-term funding programs, including Dora GrantDAO, a Venture Grant platform for all crypto and frontier technology fields, as well as community grant projects such as Cosmos AEZ Grant, Aptos GrantDAO, BNB GrantDAO, and Injective GrantDAO, receiving over 1,000 project applications.

In the future, Dora Factory will collaborate with new ecosystems such as Celestia, Babylon, EigenLayer, Movement Labs, Initia, and Monad. Additionally, it will explore ways to use cryptocurrency to fund cutting-edge technology fields like space technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biomedical research. This will provide continuous support for innovations in next-generation multi-chain crypto applications and areas significantly impacting future human productivity.

Community Incentive Fund: Making Public Goods Funding More Fun

Dora Factory launched the Community Incentive Fund to make the public goods funding process more engaging and fun. Top meme and NFT projects like Celestia’s Celestine Sloth Collection, Injective Ninja, Aptos Gui Inu, and Aptos Monkeys have become partners of the Community Incentive Fund. Through retroactive airdrops and gamified donations, these projects have brought more fun to public goods funding, receiving contributions and donations from nearly 100,000 unique addresses across different communities.

Anonymous Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (aMACI): Bringing Privacy Technology to On-Chain Public Goods Governance

aMACI is another flagship product released by Dora Factory this year. It is currently the most minimal-trust privacy voting infrastructure in crypto and was first widely adopted at the 2024 ETHVietnam Hackathon.

MACI is a cryptographic technology designed to maximize the detection and elimination of collusion in voting. In 2022 and 2023, the Dora Factory team collaborated with crypto communities and projects such as ETHDenver, 0x, and OpenSea to introduce privacy voting to crypto hackathons for the first time. MACI has significantly improved privacy and reduced collusion in on-chain governance and voting. In 2024, Dora Factory launched aMACI, adding voter anonymity to eliminate collusion between the vote initiator and the operator, further enhancing privacy and lowering the usage threshold of MACI voting. This is a significant step towards future large-scale decentralized voting systems.

Dora Vota: Open Infrastructure for Public Goods Funding

Dora Vota is a multi-chain governance and voting infrastructure. Vota and interoperability protocols like IBC will provide modular voting and governance infrastructure, such as plug-and-play quadratic funding modules and grant distribution mechanisms. As the first permissionless appchain focused on scaling on-chain voting, Dora Vota will offer developers a valuable playground, unlocking more possibilities for public goods funding and decentralized community governance.

Recently, Dora Factory secured strategic financing from dao5, Whampoa Digital, and angel investors like EigenLayer co-founder Calvin Liu. This is the first strategic round of a new funding series since Dora Factory’s $17.5M raise in 2021.

As Dora’s Public Good Staking grows and Vota’s ecosystem matures, we believe Dora Factory will continue exploring new solutions to traditional funding inefficiencies, accelerating the maturity of governance and public goods funding in the multi-chain ecosystem.

References:

https://research.dorahacks.io/2022/12/02/block-incentive-ecosystem-funding/

https://www.stakingrewards.com/provider/dora-factory

https://dorafactory.org/staking/

https://x.com/DoraHacks/status/1788230551515893897

https://dorahacks.io/blog/news/cif-aptos-grant-dao-r5-qf/

https://dorahacks.io/blog/news/retrospective-inj-qf/

https://research.dorahacks.io/2024/04/11/amaci-adoption/

https://research.dorahacks.io/2023/07/31/vota/

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